The end of the tax year is a great time to review and update your web content to make sure it’s relevant, engaging and bang up to date.

For many businesses, the whole web development journey is often a time-consuming, frustrating, not to mention expensive exercise.

So before phoning the techies down at the web developers, pause and ask yourself a couple of simple questions:

What’s your website for and what content are you going to put on it?

Answer these questions honestly and the whole process of designing and maintaining your website, maintaining an engaging social media feed and working out whether your digital marketing is delivering a Return on Investment will get a whole lot easier.

Why?

Because it’s all about the content. Get your content right and then work out which ways you can use that content to engage your audience. Putting the content first will also make your website redesign or refresh much easier for yourself and your developers (read more about this here).

If your new website is primarily designed to be a shop window for your goods and services and a way to talk to new and existing customers, the content is the most important aspect of the site.

Without really good content, no-one will even find, let alone spend any time on your website.

Without good content, your social media updates will be ignored.

Without good content, it doesn’t matter how much you spend on paid (PPC) digital advertising, no-one will respond to your adverts.

At the dawn of the Internet age, Microsoft Founder Bill Gates hailed ‘content as king’ . Build an interesting website, fill it with compelling content and you’d get traffic. Now, more than ever, those predictions are true.

In the intervening two decades, all sorts of techies, SEO gurus, UX ninjas, skimmers, scrapers and scammers came up with a string of short cuts designed to fool search engines’ algorithms and drive traffic to commercial websites.

More recently, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have succeeded in siphoning billions of pounds worth of advertising revenue in exchange for directing eyeballs to customers’ websites – only for the vast majority of these eyeballs to swiftly drift off somewhere else.

These days, Google (other search engines are available) is becoming so smart that it’s almost impossible to game, cheat or hack its increasingly sophisticated search algorithm.

So why bother? Why pay thousands of pounds to SEO quick-fix merchants only to find their hacks stop working after a few months?

Don’t get me wrong: organic SEO is one of the building blocks of an effective website and a fundamental component of any digital marketing strategy.

But to be effective, SEO has to be sustainable and to be sustainable the content within which SEO should be embedded needs to meet the following criteria:

• Original
• Credible
• Cross-referenced (linked to other credible sources)
• Up-to-date
• Dynamic (regularly updated)
• Organised (coherently structured with a clear hierarchy)
• Targeted (Relevant to its audience)

Creating and then curating this level of quality content requires an ongoing commitment. Writing a few articles, uploading them to your website and then heaving a sigh of relief and getting on with the day job won’t cut it.

Bear in mind that before making a significant purchase, new customers are likely to do 85 per cent of their research online before they even pick up the phone. If your web content doesn’t answer their questions – even if you have paid to appear at the top of the search engine listings – they will go elsewhere without you even realising you’ve lost a sales opportunity.

Paying to put poor quality, irrelevant or inaccurate content in front of customers who don’t want it is actually likely to be counter-productive. Increasingly savvy digital consumers are much more likely to regard this sort of approach – especially via social media, text or push notification – as clumsy and intrusive.

And the technology now exists for them to block all your future approaches to them with a couple of clicks on their smartphone.

Turn this scenario on its head, however, and the importance of quality content becomes clear.

When you invest in a piece of well-written content that is carefully designed to appeal to your target audience, the organic reach of that content will automatically be higher.

Do this on a regular basis and by linking all these pieces of high quality content together, the total body of content on your website becomes more credible and traffic will grow without any need to put PPC money behind it.

However, once you have seen an uplift in traffic and identified the articles that are performing well without any help from PPC, if you do choose to amplify their reach through PPC campaigns, the engagement and click through rates will be significantly higher than if you simply threw money at getting mediocre or poorly written articles noticed.

So the takeout is simple: invest in quality content BEFORE spending money on PPC or other forms of online advertising. Monitor the organic reach of your content FIRST: this is the most accurate barometer of whether it’s subsequently worth investing in a PPC campaign.

* Salar Media Services provides affordable content solutions to small businesses. There’s more information on what we do here. Or get in touch for an informal chat here.