Why your business needs more written content
Your business needs more content writing
You know what? Written content isn’t going anywhere no matter how avant-garde video and infographics become.
I provide professional content writing services.
Every day I get queries and phone calls from business owners and entrepreneurs who want content for their businesses.
From my website they can easily make out that I provide written content: I don’t provide graphic design services or video production services.
I provide content writing services.
Nonetheless, they have this strange attitude: fine, they have no option but to contact someone for their writing needs, otherwise, they don’t believe writing is worth paying for.
That’s why many would-be clients balk at my rates.
No, I don’t mean that my rates are outrageous – my rates are just enough to make my content writing services affordable to a wide spectrum of business owners while allowing me to make a decent living.
Would I like to charge more? Of course. That’s a different story and right now I’m not going into that.
The point that I’m trying to make is, publishing written content is inescapable, whether you like it or not, and not just any sort of written content.
You need quality content writing.
Constantly, you need to provide something really valuable.
This is because, if you are not providing valuable content, then there are scores of other businesses providing more or less the same products and services as you, providing valuable written content.
Hence, it’s your loss if you don’t. Your choice.
Why does written content matter in the age of video and graphics?
When we need to prove that something matters, we either resort to some research and statistics, or we give our own reasoning.
Statistics are good, and psychologically, they are reassuring, and they also tell us what the rest of the world is doing about a particular trend or tendency.
This Entrepreneur article refers to Zazzle Media’s 3rd annual State of Content Marketing Survey that shows that there has been a 78% increase in the content marketing spend since 2018 (this is May 2019).
This is no surprise, because, a greater number of businesses are discovering the benefits of content marketing.
The interesting finding was, 98% content marketers surveyed said that written content is their main output to achieve content marketing success.
Written content in the form of webpages and blog posts is going to be the main priority for 77% of the market is throughout 2019.
Why written content is important?
Search engine algorithms use text as main source while evaluating your content for ranking
With much more advanced artificial intelligence it is becoming easier to tell what is there in a video or a photograph, but programmatically, when it comes to analysing content, text, or written content, still rules the roost.
Most of the search engine algorithms are more comfortable analysing your written content and then ranking your content accordingly.
You can focus more on video and graphics and then bet on the possibility that in near future search engines will be able to analyse videos and graphics and then rank your content based on the information given in those video and graphics, or you can put your money and effort into publishing lots of written content that is already preferred by the search engines.
Your choice.
Voice search converts voice to text and then text to voice to help you find information
Here is my web page on copywriting for voice search.
You must be aware that in recent years there has been a big shift from PC/laptop to mobile phones.
Even to search information people use their mobile phones and often, people who are not used to typing all the time, speak into their phones.
Voice-controlled devices like Amazon Eco and Google Home have further boosted the use of voice commands and using voice to find information on search engines.
Technology to convert voice to text and then text to voice is quite old now. Every basic mobile phone allows you to convert your voice to text and vice versa.
Hence, on the web, and also, on my own blog, you will find lots of information on how to optimize your content writing and copywriting for voice search.
For voice search to work, when you issue a command, for example, telling Google to find you something, whatever you have said is turned to text, and then the text string is used to find the information on the search engine, and when the information is found in the form of text, the information is turned to voice and communicated to you.
The backbone of the entire operation is, the ability of the technology to process text.
If you don’t have text, there is nothing to process.
Many people find reading more convenient compared to watching videos
In the times of abundant bandwidth and highly efficient screens, watching HD videos and graphics might be fascinating, but reading written content is convenient, and more satisfying.
Reading is more personal and less invasive. You don’t need extra tools to read.
Someone wants to check out your website to know what all services you provide: he or she will prefer to read about your services rather than watching a video or a collection of graphics.
Though, I’m not saying videos and graphics are not important – they are – but they have a limit.
We have been reading since childhood. The habit is embedded. Everybody prefers to read.
Written text is more accessible
Written content makes your content accessible across multiple devices.
All the screen readers can read text.
All screen sizes can accommodate text accordingly.
You can copy/paste text in any basic text editor to read it or edit it.
It is the lightest form of content.
Does any form of content writing help you?
Depends on what you want to achieve.
If you want to publish lots of junk content, who am I to tell you not to do so? Go ahead.
For better search engine rankings and for a good conversion rate, your content writing needs to be purposeful, relevant and of good quality.
Search engine rankings these days are all about efficiently providing information people are looking for.
You see, search engines like Google don’t produce and publish their own content. They have outsourced the service to the masses.
But, if they don’t provide good information to people’s queries, they lose users.
Hence, let’s focus on Google for a while, the search engine is not going to rank your content well simply because you have “strategically” used keywords and hyperlinks.
It ranks your content high only if you provide information people can really use.
To help Google achieve that, a group of 300 odd maths PhDs is constantly working on the algorithm.
If you think you can beat these maths PhDs with some SEO tactics without ever intending to publish high-quality content, well, as I said, who am I to tell you not to do so?