Last week, I advised a client - paying thousands of dollars to get their site optimized for the search engines - to submit me enough raw content that I can write a bare minimum of 250 words per page (ideally, at least 400).
The response (sadly, not atypical): “Oh, we don’t have that much content. We can get you, maybe 100 words for some of our pages, they’ll have to be even shorter.”
My response: “Say what?” (well, I did think it).
If you cannot find 250 words to say about your product/service on a web page… how well do you really know that product/service? How are you selling it? I doubt your sales pitch - verbally - is less than 250 words.
So, some ideas to bump up that web content, when you hit a wall:
- Business benefits of the product/service: List ‘em in bullets, as done here (good way visually for web readers to digest info)
- Examples of clients and/or applications of the product/service, again in bullet list, or not.
- References to other topics within your website. Internal linking (from one page to another within your same site) is a key component of good SEO anyway.
- Photos/images - these can be optimized for SEO, too, and adding a caption and/or reference in the body text to the photo(s) will help bump up content.
- List of partner companies you’ve worked with to make or distribute the product/service.
Oh, and by the way - this post is 250 words. Exactly.
2 comments ↓
Yes, of course all organizations can come up with content for their sites. It’s just that they can’t (be bothered) to write it all down.
One way to get around that problem is to turn verbal communication (where they have plenty to say) into written communication by recording - on tape - their sales presentation or just a general chat about their business.
Once they get going, they won’t stop talking - and they’ll have enough fodder for hundreds of pages on their website (and their customer newsletters, come to that).
(The only barrier then is for the poor schmuck who has to transcribe and edit the conversations. But I guess that’s your job, Heather
Funny you should say that; I had tremendous luck sitting across from the desk of one busy small biz owner and typing on my Macbook while he chatted - for 8 hours (!) and then wrote that up, mixing in the keyword research I did for his business subject. He was thrilled since “all his biz info is my head” as he told me. Sure it cost him a bit more than if he sent me emails, pdfs, etc. to grab copy from, but it nailed exactly what he wanted to say… with the added benefit of getting his “voice” right, so important in great web writing.
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