As a UX/UI Designer and someone who also gets to have a part in the front-end development of websites I get to peer into the dark cavern that is how websites are built. I also keep a close eye on our analytics and the analytics of our clients. I stand up and dance a little bit when I see something taking off, and I shake my head and barrel down for more and better work when I see something not working out.
Enable clients to add new content easily whether it be a product, symptom or customer story
As a primarily WordPress shop, at the very core of many of our builds is the opportunity to build in different ‘Custom Post Types’ or formats for sharing content; it could be a product, a symptom, a treatment, a book profile, a landing page, or a story of a successful interaction with a customer. Each and every one of these presents an opportunity; to set the business we are making the website for up for with a way to quickly add these items and to make them compelling.
Each niche piece of content allows your net of content to expand to serve your customers
As part of a content strategy, every single one of these ‘Custom Post Types’ can be part of a ‘net of content’ that is available out there on the web to be found on search engines. The core principle here is simple: presenting niche pieces of content that are not always blog posts, can help you expand the breadth of subject matter on your website in a way that can serve the people that care about your products and services.
But what kinds of content actually matter for my SEO and attracting REAL CUSTOMERS?
So we’re aware that a bigger net of content with niche interests that will serve our customers helps our site be more visible on Google, and gets us closer to our ideal of serving customers. But what pieces of content matter for us?
What scenario’s will an ideal customer be in when when looking for our company?
We should ask ourselves first of all what scenario’s will an ideal customer be in when when looking for our company? If you’re a law firm, perhaps at the point of critical mass your customer has just gotten into a car accident. They might have some questions regarding their liability. Every single question they have regarding liability could be a unique piece of content.
For us that means the first heading of the post is the exact thing they’d Google. You could have answers to such questions as “Am I Liable If Someone Causes an Accident in My Car?” To be SEO friendly we’d want that to be the H1 tag of the piece of content, and then their could be an index page with all the questions that an ideal customer would be asking in a scenario where’d they’d need your services. We shouldn’t scrimp on the amount of valuable content we add to that page, and we advise our clients to add at least 500 words to these types of pages or posts.
Other tips for niche content / custom post types:
- Add imagery for each. This doesn’t have to be amazing, but it has to relate to the subject matter. Do you love going to a web page with no pictures?
- These generally should be written in a friendly, approachable way and use very little jargon. Pretend as if your talking to an ideal customer.
- Answer subsequent questions, or add content that would appeal to them after they read the main piece they came for. In the case of our hypothetical law firm; they might talk through related questions to ‘Am I liable’, ‘Options for dealing with..’ and potentially provide a list of other resources the individual might need. In short, be as useful as possible. What would you want if you were in their shoes?
- Utilize related content on your site. Give them 3 visual options for things to check out next after they’ve read the article they came for. In addition to being useful for visitors, these types of ‘related’ resources will increase time on site which is a key metric search engines use to determine if they served up the best possible result to searchers.
Hits from Google don’t always mean they’re hits from ripe prospects.
Don’t just shoot off the gun willy-nilly. There are plenty of things you could get hits for on Google, that won’t translate into business for you. Just because there is an opportunity on Google, doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile for you to persue. If you go in with a bit of creativity and are thinking about serving customers when they are in scenario’s that they would need or want your product or services you’ll be on the right track. This goes for blog posts too, but just know that if you’re limiting yourself to just blog posts you could be missing opportunities.