What do you have in your mind when you are creating content for your website or for your client? Today a client wrote me that he had created more than 100 articles on his website for SEO. To be frank even I have created lots of pages to draw targeted traffic from search engines. It doesn’t mean I have created those pages to misguide the search engines and human visitors — I’m trying to kill two birds (actually I would hate to kill birds) with one stone. I am creating useful and informative content for my visitors and I am giving a valid reason to search engines to send traffic to my website.
This can sometimes be counter-productive. Having lots of information can send all the wrong people to your website. For instance my target market is America and Europe, despite the fact that I operate from India. No, I am not biased against my countrymen and women, it’s just that there is hardly a demand for the service I provide because most people here in India think there is no need to pay a writer, and especially a writer who writes for websites and most of the stuff on the Internet is free.
On the other hand, in the western countries they fully recognize the importance of an experienced and well-trained writer and hence have no qualms about paying him or her.
Having lots of informative and educative content on the website can be counter-productive if your website is not as famous as, let us say, 37signals.com. Since I have many articles and pages dedicated to the art of writing content and doing copywriting jobs, more than 70% of my traffic constitutes of people from India who want to become online content writers either because they have got nothing better to do or they think it is a very easy way to make lots of money (poor, misguided souls). All the time I am telling them it is not as easy as it seems because lots of networking, promotion and maintenance is involved in the process of getting routine work from the Internet.
Fortunately, as many people comment, my pitching is so convincing that the remaining 30% traffic gives me ample business to earn a decent living. Of course I’m trying to change this; I’m trying to bring more people who would like to do business with me rather than simply trying to piggy-back on my hard work of 5 years.
It shows that randomly creating content works sometimes but most of the time it doesn’t. You got to have a clearly defined content marketing and SEO strategy. Toprankblog has a comprehensive and informative compilation of content marketing and SEO interviews with top ranking professionals. The moot point present in all the opinions is strategizing your content marketing strategy always pays in both long and short term.
Personally, right now, more than strategy I’m focusing upon quality and consistency. What is your content strategy?
Of course it is essential to create defined content. I agree that quality over quantity ever time especially when writing for the web. I still think people ignore the power and importance that content has and to write for the web still has be of quality if your want to market.