Quite often in our line of work we come across clients who don’t understand the value of SEO content in boosting natural rankings. They are downright shocked when we tell them that to rank for competitive terms in their area/industry they will need at least 50 pages of relevant content written to target specific key phrases. Granted, much of the shock comes from the hefty up front price tag that can come with this big of a project, but we still think they are actually surprised that content makes that big of a difference when it comes to quantity.
We always find it works best to explain it this way: if you’ve done everything else right to SEO your site (by scouring BigSERP.Com for lots of helpful tips!) the more uniquely branded content you have on your site, the more likely you will show up for key phrases. Think about it… imagine you’re back in the 1980’s, when you had to (sigh) look up everything in encyclopedias. Remember how much stuff they would cram into those plastic/leather bound volumes? Imagine you’re looking for a lot of quality information on widgets. Sadly, you probably wouldn’t find any reference to widgets in the 80’s, but let’s just pretend there are two encyclopedia sets. The first encyclopedia set has letters A-Z all neatly arranged. So you look at the ‘W’ volume, and can imagine that inside of it there is a neatly written section on widgets. Now imagine, looking at the other encyclopedia set, and notice that every single book in the set is written about widgets! When you’re given this choice, which encyclopedia set are you most likely to use in the 1980’s?
If you haven’t taken off that hideous headband and stashed away your calculator watch, please do so now. That 80’s flashback should demonstrate to you why it is key to have as much uniquely branded relevant content on your site as possible. Because no one, including the search engines, is going to first look for ‘buy widgets’ at the site that only contains reference to ‘buy widgets’ when there’s another site that has targeted pages for ‘buy widgets’, ‘widgets for sale’, ‘wholesale widgets’, etc.