Do visitors to your website want to see informative and useful, yet at the same time interesting, compelling copy and content? You bet they do.

Your website or landing page is the digital equivalent, and even more, of the physical store or office you had just a few years ago, or pre-pandemic. You want it to invite, communicate, assist users, and – at the end of the day – generate business. That’s the core of e-commerce.

Your message should arouse interest, be engaging and user-friendly. Statistics have consistently shown that website visitors, inundated with competing choices, have a very short attention span, often as short as 3-5 seconds, especially on mobile devices which are often used on the fly. So, you need to catch and keep their attention fast – or else they might move to your competitor. Ouch!

Great (so far). But how do they get to even find your website? That’s the other side of the coin.

There are many ways to do that: SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay per Click), social media, blogs, e-commerce platforms such as Amazon or eBay, email marketing, and more.

Because SEO is so central, let’s look at one of its defining criteria: great content.

SEO is the science (and art) of getting your website rank high on search result pages. The higher you rank, the more visible and “findable” you will be, and thus the more traffic you will get.

It’s a key, maybe the most solid, strategy to get traffic; we’ll discuss in future articles how the system actually works, and can work for you. For now, in one short sentence: search engines rank your website based on how relevant its key components are in relation to what the searcher looks for. The concept is simple to understand – yet not at all simple to implement.

Just a few years ago, Google used to rank websites on its search result pages (SERPs in geek lingo) mainly based on URLs, page titles, metatags and headlines – all parts of the HTML code. Content, while not overlooked, was not on the forefront and in any case easy to manipulate to satisfy search engines.

This has changed dramatically. Some of the old guidelines are still in (albeit reduced) play, but today – along with other current criteria, such as user experience, site authority, technical details, and more – Content is King not just for users but for Google, too. Why?

Today search engines can understand and evaluate content much better, using Artificial Intelligence to eliminate subpar copy and gauge “search intent”. Now they insist on quality content that generates user interest. Has Google fallen in love with great writing and wants to breed a web community of would-be Shakespeares? Of course not. They are driven by ice cold pay-per-click business considerations.

It’s simple: the more interesting, relevant, “readable” the content (and the better the overall user experience), the longer visitors will stay on a website. And the longer they stay there, the more likely they are to click on the dozens of ads shown – clicks for which search engines charge their advertisers.

FYI: Google’s 2021 revenue from pay-per-click ads was around $200 billion. That’s billion with a “b”. Any wonder it rewards great web content and good user experience with high rankings, while relegating inferior sites to the cellar? (Note: user experience [“UX”] is a science in itself – check for upcoming articles).

Align your visitors’ needs mentioned above with the search engines’ benchmarks, and you have a winner!

You can get higher rankings, more traffic, better “site authority”, generating even higher rankings. If SEO is implemented well, it’ll develop into a nice virtuous cycle. Of course, SEO has many other criteria too, but none that also affect visitors as much as content.

This is why great content matters to all parties concerned: to your visitors, the search engines, and thus obviously to you, the website owner, too.

Happy e-commerce!

Meir

Upcoming articles:
Is your website user-friendly?
A friend called Branding
V’Ahavta your website (almost) Ka’Mocha
E-commerce strategies
SEO or PPC?

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Meir Schwarcz is an e-commerce and web marketing specialist; SEO, PPC and branding expert; web designer and content creator. Explore his ideas and services on https://wdd.artstep.ca

You can email Meir with questions at webmarketing999@hotmail.com or info@peppycopy.com  Important: enter “Web Question” in the subject box.