Content is king!
Well that’s what they say in the world of online marketing and publishing.
There are two great reasons why content is so important in today’s online world:
- It attracts visitors to your website via search engines (eg. Google)
- It gives visitors a reason to stay on your website, and ultimately become a client
How does good content achieve this?
Content for search engine optimisation
If you’ve been in business for more than a week, you will have heard of search engine optimisation, or SEO.
SEO is simply the art of getting your website and its pages as high as possible in the Google (or other search engine) results.
The higher you are in the results, the more likely you are to be clicked on. And the more you are clicked on, the better chance you have of securing new clients.
There is only one thing that Google loves more than original and relevant content, and that is original and relevant content that is fresh!
If your website doesn’t contain much relevant content, the content you’ve used is not original, or the content has not been updated for a while, then you’re really letting yourself down and missing out on potential clients.
By having original and relevant content on your website Google will recognise that you are an authority on the subject, and will know to put your website higher up in the search results.
If your content is also kept fresh and is continually updated, they will give your website even more authority and therefore rank it even higher in the results.
But be warned, because Google is smarter than you might think. If you believe that you can take generic articles from other sources and just change a few words around, or that you can just stuff your content full of terms like ‘cheapest life insurance’ and ‘best income protection’ – you better think again!
Google knows when you’ve tried to use non-original content (even if you change a few words around) and it also knows when you are “keyword stuffing” your content just so you can rank well for certain terms.
If Google catches you, you may well find yourself heading south in the search results very quickly.
Content for your visitors
It’s all good and well to write content that is designed to please Google and the search engines, but what’s the point if your website visitors are turned off by this style of writing?
If you have the term ‘cheapest life insurance’ forced into every paragraph of your content, the visitor is quickly going to sniff a rat and may disregard your website as spam or some other unprofessional website.
You need your content to make your website visitors feel comfortable with you. You want the content to instil a feeling of trust into the reader, and to have them feel that you must be an authority on the subject.
If your website can make your potential client feel comfortable, have some level of trust, and think of you as an authority, then 80% of the job is done before you’ve even spoken to them!
Getting the mix right
It’s important to get a good balance in your content to keep Google happy as well as your website visitors and prospective clients. There is definitely an art to this style of writing, and when it comes to financial services it is not easy to find a writer who can pull it off.
Thanks to my decade in the financial services industry and time as a financial adviser, combined with my love of writing and experience in website development, I have been able to develop a writing style that will please both the search engines as well as your clients.
I have written content for dozens of financial websites in Australia, many of which rank in the top three results for very competitive search terms. Of course my content isn’t the only reason they rank so highly, but it certainly helps.
If you would like some professionally written content for your financial services website, please give Shane a call on contact someone else as I no longer provide content for others. 🙂
You may be very surprised by how inexpensive good content can be…