We have a morbid fascination with stories involving lost opportunities. Who hasn’t heard of someone who picked up a valuable item for almost nothing at a garage sale? Or the heir who discovers that his deceased relative never threw away his old baseball cards. What about barn cars that turn out to be worth thousands of dollars? The point is that people often don’t realize they have treasures right under their nose. It’s the same with businesses Many a website owner has no idea how valuable their web content really is.
3 Feet from Gold
True story…
A certain man named Darby headed west during the days of the gold-rush. He was convinced that he could find gold and become rich. Once he arrived, he staked his claim and started digging and guess what? He found gold.
He was so excited that he bought new equipment and brought in some help. Things were good until all of a sudden the vein of gold petered out. Desperately, the men drilled on hoping to find another vein.
After some time, discouragement set in and they sold the equipment and the rights to the mine to a local junkman for a few hundred dollars and headed back east.
The junk man was smart and brought in an engineer. He had him calculate the best place to dig. Sure enough, a new vein of gold was found… three feet from where Darby had quit digging.
Darby never realized that he was sitting on a goldmine of considerable worth. With just a bit more work, that gold could have been his.
How does this relate to web content?
A couple of years ago, Google started ranking sites with more content higher in the SERP. The push, at the time, was to give the user a better experience and increase the relevance of the search results. The outcome of that push was the idea that “Content is King!” The more content a business put on their website, the better their website performed.
Many businesses started blogs. White papers became popular, and content creation became a very profitable business. However, many of those same websites became bogged down with “thin” content. Quantity instead of quality drove production.
And Google wants quality content.
Is there undiscovered gold in your web content?
If Google hasn’t seen value in your content, then it could be that you just need to do a bit of sifting and refining to make it “golden” so you can rise in the SERP and drive more traffic to your site.
Tips for Refining Your Content
These tips will help you improve your content’s searchability. It’s possible that with just a small amount of work, you could be sitting on a goldmine of information.
#1 – Define Your Keywords
Each piece of content should be written with keywords in mind. Google uses the keyword phrase to categorize your material and establish relevance during a search. Think of keywords like the labels on a file folder. If you don’t use the right labels and put them in the right place, you’ll never find the folder you need.
#2 – Choose the Correct Keywords
Let’s continue with the file folder analogy. If you need last year’s tax returns, you are not going to look for a folder labeled “documents that the government makes me file.” The same principle applies to your content. Pick keywords that people are searching for. The easiest way to find those is to use Google’s Keyword Planner. Web content should contain a recognized search string and related terms.
To find related terms, you can go to the bottom of the search results for any search string and see a list of related searches.
#3 – Evaluate the Competition
Once you’ve identified a keyword, run a search on it. If Google returns hundreds of millions of results, then you know that the competition is HIGH. It will be very hard to get that piece of content to rank using that particular keyword. If the number of results is too low, then you can be pretty sure that nobody is searching for that term. Look for search results that number in the hundreds of thousands and you know that you have a well-searched, low competition keyword.
#4 – Install Yoast
If you have a WordPress site, then you really need to install the Yoast plugin. Yoast is the leader when it comes to on-page SEO. It will guide you so that your content is fully optimized and Google-ready.
#5 – Hire a Content Specialist
Remember the junkman? What did he do in order to find that gold?
He hired an expert.
Sometimes, it just pays to hire someone who knows what to look for. A content specialist can help you find the gold amongst the dross. Look for a writer that understands SEO and how content marketing works.
Good content can be one of the biggest assets you have in an online strategy. Are you sitting on an undiscovered goldmine?
If you need help building a website with web content that performs, contact us. Not only can we build you a beautiful, mobile-friendly site, we provide a Free Mock-Up of your new site in just 7 days, with no risk or obligation.
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