It can’t be said enough … comprehensive, original content is necessary for the success of a website. Without it, you will not be able to attract search engines or customers.
Long gone are the days when adding 30 key terms to the Meta tags was pretty much what you did to win page rank in Google. Search engines now look at the total sum of the written content on your site; the page titles, sub-titles, paragraphs, image names and captions that appear on the page, and they are looking for that content to be relevant to what you sell.
The challenge for many small businesses is that they do not have budgets that allow for hiring web copywriters, photographers or graphic designers to continually produce content for the website. Luckily for your customers, you already have that meaningful information. Start looking for the content in your own company!
Here are some tips to start the ball rolling on your content generation strategy:
Content Generation Source Ideas
1. Talk to Employees
The people in your company who sell and support your products and services are an important source of your website content! Your employees know your customers and their problems. Use that to your advantage to produce useful content. Capture insightful comments, conversations, and opinions about your products or relevant events in the news. Staff can supply fountains of content; ask them to get involved. You can have a weekly meeting where all departments meet together. Use that time to gather ideas for new and evergreen content.
2. Engage with Customers
Ask your preferred clients to write three … just three … sentences about their customer experience with you. Encourage them to share their thoughts on how, when, and why they use your products and services. You can use their responses to produce some new content, but they can also serve as referencable reviews in the future. Content generation doesn’t always have to be about producing new articles. It can include reviews, product information, new website sections, and so on.
As you interact with your customers, you will continue to build their brand loyalty in your small business as well. Regular interactions with your customers can strengthen your professional relationship, give you ideas for content generation, and allow you to deal with any specific problems or successes they may have.
3. Talk to Suppliers
Similarly, ask your vendors and suppliers what they think of your latest product release, its unique value, and the time it took to ship because you’re interested in improving the relationship with them. But while you are capturing that important information, also listen for the words they use to describe what you do for them. They will use key words and phrases that potential customers will likely use while searching for your business.
4. Borrow and Expand
If you sell products manufactured by other companies, your sales rep with that company may be a source of content to you. Ask your sales rep if there are product descriptions, photos, videos, illustrations or other digital materials that you can use. Take the initiative and ask first!
One note of caution, you DO NOT want your entire web site to consist of content you have received from the manufacture. You will likely have identical content to all other distributors who did the same thing and you will end up competing with them to rank the highest on results pages. But, when interspersed with original content generation you create yourself, supplier info can bring a lot of value to your site.
5. Save Digital Copies
If you use an ad agency or freelancer to create marketing materials (like ads or infographics), make sure you get digital versions of all the content for your website, preferably as source files. Once you have those files, you can include them on individual webpages or create new articles around their individual information.
If you are publishing an infographic, you should make sure to include content on the page as well so search engines have something to crawl and index.
In Conclusion
Once you get into the habit of looking for content as you go about your day, you’re going to stumble across other tricks that are specific to you and your business. Share them with us here in the comments! We’re always interested in hearing what you have to say.