Content Development – What’s Your Goal?

When’s the last time you looked at your website and asked yourself: “What message am I trying to convey? What is the first impression I want to create? Who’s my target audience?”

Anyone in the marketing business understands the importance of a focused, target-specific, and clear message. When an advertising agency designs a marketing campaign for its clients, they spend hours coming up with the core message of the campaign, because they know that this message will form the basis for every commercial, every billboard, and every slogan.

Website design is no different. Every aspect of a good site – a site that translates into new business for you – must be designed with a specific goal in mind. In other words, for a site to be truly effective, both in terms of conversion efficiency and in terms of SEO-friendliness, it must be unique to your needs and your audience.

Uniqueness in marketing…seems painfully obvious, doesn’t it?

Yet this “painfully obvious” fact seems to be ignored by many websites, especially when it comes to written content. Stock content is probably one of the worst things you can put on a site; not only does it detract from SEO value, but it also creates a bad impression on site visitors.

Even “semi-stock” content needs to go. I understand the allure of this kind of canned content; when a search engine optimization firm handles dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of websites, it’s very tempting to re-use snippets of content, especially for repetitive sections (such as the “Call us if you need our services…etc. etc.). A subtler, but just as insidious problem is the tendency to fall into a “message rut” across pieces of content or even between sites. The theme of each site should be unique; one personal injury attorney may emphasize ‘justice,’ while another might emphasize ‘compassion’ – using the same type of content for both sites is inefficient and ineffective.

Want to learn more about targeted content development? Call TSEG at (512) 394-7234.