Author Archives: Amrit Hallan

About Amrit Hallan

Amrit Hallan is a professional content writer who helps businesses improve their conversion rate through credible and compelling content writing. His main strength lies in writing search engine optimized content without compromizing quality and meaningfulness.

What makes your web content successful?

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Content marketing no longer remains at the fringes. There was a time when people thought content marketing merely meant stocking up your website (or, later on, blog) with lots of keyword-centric content to cover all possible keywords. Terms like “SEO content” and “search engine friendly content” were highly sort after. There was a complete, dedicated branch of SEO content writers who specifically created content for search engines (I am using the past tense just for the sake of writing, such writers still do brisk business).

Do such tactics work? In many cases, yes. Google and other search engines still show lots of preference for keyword-centric content. Actually, there is nothing fundamentally wrong in creating keyword-centric content. After all, what are keywords? They are the terms and expressions you use when you talk about your business. They are also terms and expressions your present and prospective customers and clients use when they talk about your products or services, or when they are trying to search for your products and services on search engines and social media websites like Twitter and Facebook.

The problem is, most SEO experts and website owners focus on just creating keyword-centric content. This may get you lots of traffic, but very little business. When you are doing business online, traffic isn’t everything, although it is a big part of your online marketing effort. More than traffic, what you need is a good conversion rate. When you have good conversion rate, your web content can be called successful.

Well-written web content achieves the following for your online business:

  • Get qualified search engine traffic for the right keywords and search terms
  • Provide timely information that assists your customers and clients complete the buying cycle
  • Constantly engage your visitors so that they develop a sense of familiarity with you or your brand

These are the basic traits that make your web content successful.

Why SEO companies are putting more stress on content writing?

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Of late I have observed an interesting development. Reputed SEO forums, blogs and websites talk of content marketing and content writing more, rather than simply covering the technical and newsie aspects of SEO.

For instance, this article on Search Engine Land talks about some untapped content marketing assets for B2B SEO. This is just a small example I came across this morning but the trend is persistent and during the previous few weeks I have come across many content marketing and content writing-related articles and blog posts on primarily SEO forums and blogs. Why is it so?

The reason can be historical as well as contemporary. Historically content has always ruled the roost although many would like to disagree. Everything on the Internet is content. Everything search engines like Google crawl, index and rank is content. Whenever you are trying to improve your rankings you are trying to improve the ranking of your content pages. So overtly or covertly it is your content that is evaluated and ranked by the search engines. It is your content that is shared and talked about on social networking and social media websites. So far this has been an unstated truth.

Of late Google has been quite aggressive and it is heavily penalizing websites and blogs that use “illegitimate” ways to improve their search engine rankings. Many of these tactics and methods blacklisted by Google have been a staple of SEO companies. Back links and keywords-centric content – once the most acceptable ways of improving your search engine rankings – if done wrongly can plummet your rankings irredeemably. Many small businesses have had to create new websites from scratch. Engaging an SEO company has become a danger rather than a prudent marketing decision. I’m not saying all SEO companies are like this, but most are.

So what is the safest bet? User-focused content writing.

The Google guidelines say create content as if search engines never existed. Create content, write content for your users. Make your content writing as user-friendly as possible. Focus on the keywords not because you want to improve your search engine rankings, but because you want to convey the right message. For instance, my website and my blog is about content writing and content marketing. You can safely say that these are my keywords. There are two ways I can use my keywords.

Conventional way, the “SEO way” is to create lots of content using these two keywords in various combinations. It actually used to work. I’m not saying whether it was right or wrong, it is just unacceptable to Google. So use the right language, use your keywords but only contextually, wherever they are really needed.

This also goes for content pages and blog posts. Don’t just create content to cover keywords. Create content to serve your audience. Whenever you are creating a new page or a new blog post ask yourself, is it really needed? Does it add value to my website on my blog? Will my visitors really find it useful? Am I just creating it because I need another combination of my keywords?

If the answer to the last question is yes, don’t publish it. It can be counter-productive. You can actually lose your search engine rankings if you do that.

Since most of the conventional SEO has become a double-edged sword and since quality content still reigns supreme most of the reputed search engine optimization companies are focusing more on content writing and content marketing rather than simply selling risky SEO services.

How quality content writing can help you reduce your PPC campaign cost

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According to this article in New York Times more and more small businesses are scaling down their PPC campaign budgets and investing more in creating content that naturally improves their search engine rankings. You can do this too.

Cost of pay per click programs like AdWords are bound to rise as most of the commerce is shifting onto the Internet. From basic services to the most advanced purchases people are turning to the Internet to not just buy but also research in order to make informed purchase decisions.

PPC campaigns can be great if you have the budget. You can target the exact keywords you want traffic for and provided you have created a nice landing page, even the conversion rate can be awesome. Provided you have the budget you can start getting targeted traffic for the most competitive keywords within the next 30 minutes of launching a new website or a new product or service. The key is, “cost”.

Average PPC cost ranges between $ 1-20 depending upon your business. Of course there are many less competitive keywords that might cost you less than a dollar but you have to keep in mind that this is recurring cost and less competitive keywords cost more and convert less.

Content writing can help you reduce your PPC campaign costs.

How?

You can improve your search engine rankings organically rather than through a PPC campaign. Once you have obtained good rankings and your links begin to appear on the first page of search engine results, whether you get 1 click or 1000 clicks the only money you have spent is on the content writing job.

Of course you cannot get good rankings just by creating a couple of pages. You need to optimize your content and make it search engine friendly, you have to cover all the topics and subtopics, and have to publish regularly in order to make search engines crawl your website and index new content. The greatest benefit of improving your search engine rankings through quality content writing is that you don’t have to pay for every click no matter how many visitors you get.

Optimized content writing also improves your conversion rate tremendously. There are technical as well as psychological reasons. When you’re getting traffic via PPC campaigns you don’t pay much attention to the quality of content. You may spend some time on particular landing pages that draw traffic from your PPC programs, but other than that you are not much bothered about user-friendly language and optimized content. This keeps both search engines as well as visitors primarily unsatisfied.

When you start creating content for better search engine rankings you automatically end up creating high-quality content. This is because, due to the recent ranking algorithm changes, search engines like Google insist that the more human-friendly your content is, the better rankings you get. So it becomes a self-serving circle. You create content to reduce your PPC costs, to increase your natural search engine rankings, and in order to do that, you need to create content that serves your visitors better. And when you serve your visitors well, your conversion rate automatically improves.

According to the article mentioned above, quality content writing also reduces your PPC bidding. If you are improving your natural search engine rankings, the money that you need to pay for every click is also reduced.

As more and more competitors join the fray the PPC campaign costs are going to rise. They have already become prohibitive for many businesses. Content writing on the other hand gives you an advantage that your competitors may not have because not everybody can create quality content. So don’t stop your PPC campaign if you don’t want to, but along with that start investing in an experienced content writer who can start creating high-value content for your website, business blog and social networking profiles.

How to make your content unique, engaging and high-quality

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With more and more Google updates penalizing websites for the way they publish content and aggregate incoming links, it has become necessary to carry out a thorough website content assessment to make sure that your website doesn’t lose its rankings.

Your website content, as the latest Google guidelines state, must be prepared with your user in mind and not the search engines. Actually, it makes more sense. When you’re creating content for search engines, knowingly or unknowingly, you end up trying to manipulate your content. On the other hand if you just focus on your users, if you create your website content totally for your users, you focus more on quality and communication.

Why in the first place you create website content?

If you are creating content for your business website you want people to do business with you. Why would they do business with you? If, through your content, you can persuade them, you can make them believe in what you are saying and you can instil a sense of trust in them, they will do business with you. For that you have to provide them with as much information as possible. The information must be clear, to the point and devoid of misrepresentation. Every bit of important information should be available within 2-3 clicks.

You create content on your website to tell them about the benefits of your product or service. You use different pages to talk about your company, your skills, your offerings, and the people who work in your organization. You also talk about all the activities you participate in as an organization as well as as an individual. The entire idea of creating content for your website is to provide engaging, useful information so that your visitors can make an educated decision.

Ensuring high-quality and unique content

Every business is unique. You cannot possibly be an exact copy of another business. Even though there are 100s of search engines out there, you can easily distinguish between Google and Bing. Similarly, there are multiple social networking platforms but still you can easily differentiate between Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

In the same vein, although there might be many business similar to what you are doing, your offering in some way or another will be unique. This gives you an opportunity to create unique content. It is totally centered around your online presence. It will be catering to your audience.

And now we come to high quality. Here is a nice blog post on how to ensure error-free high quality website content. The basic tenets are universal. Before publishing content just check the following:

  • You ensure that all the information is accurate
  • If you are using factual information back it up with either the original source or multiple sources quoting the same piece of information
  • Make sure there are no spelling mistakes and grammatical errors
  • The structure of your content is in such a manner that your visitors can easily follow it
  • Question yourself whether you actually need the content you are preparing to make sure you are not simply preparing your content in order to attract search engines
  • Provide a human-friendly site map that people can easily access from your main page
  • Make your content as relevant to your business as possible
  • Make it as useful to your visitors as possible

Are you over optimizing your content?

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Over optimizing your content can cost you search engine rankings. While all the time you’re talking about optimizing your content for search engine, what exactly do we mean by over-optimization?

We already know that we have to create our content around our important keywords. Up till here it is well and good. The problem arises when we get too obsessed with our keywords and instead of focusing on quality we start focusing on quantity.

Even if you remain conscious of the quality factor, sometimes you can produce too much of similar content. To be frank I tend to do that. Sometimes I simply go on creating pages and blog posts on similar topics. Not being in SEO person I didn’t even realize that my content was having a negative impact on my rankings until it was a bit late. I realized that, and fortunately, I could recover by removing and reorienting my content. Being a professional content writer was certainly helpful.

Here is a nice blog post on how to recover from over optimization.

The writer rightly puts emphasis on quality and purposefulness rather than simply flooding your website with lots of keyword-centric content.

But then what about covering all your primary and secondary keyword combinations? Again, this is no longer acceptable to Google. Have all the primary pages, use the right language that sounds natural to your human visitors and then, on a regular basis, publish content that is relevant, timely and useful.