Success is in the Content

“Content Is King.”  It’s a comforting adage for all of us copywriters who go home every night and hunch over the Selectric with dreams of Don DeLillo-hood in our eyes.  It affirms the belief that our work has real value beyond the bump it gives your business’s rankings and conversions.

It also happens to be true.

If you have a brick and mortar store, a physical location staffed by yourself, a part-time high school kid or two and a handful of other employees – sometimes including a cat or dog – it’s easy to connect with your customers and instruct them about your products, services and your personality.  Online, the only employee that you have (besides your Webmaster, your Paid Search manager, and so on and so on and so on) is the copy on your Web site.  It welcomes, persuades, and educates; its links point your customers to where they want to go in a much more targeted way than your navigation bar or search window will; and gives your online store personality.  You may not be like me, but when I go to my favorite barber, or my favorite restaurant, or even to my comic shop each Wednesday, one of the things that keeps me there and entices me to come back is conversation and personality; you can’t duplicate those factors online, but you can come very close with good content.

That begs the question, “What makes good content good?”  It’s the question in the SEO industry right now, ever since SEOmoz’s Jane Copland asked it in September.  It’s also, incidentally, a question that’s nearly impossible to give a uniform answer to.

From a purely technical perspective, good content has whatever the consensus is in terms of keyword density (the number of times a keyword is mentioned on the page) and a goodly number of well-targeted links.  For the search engines, that’s not bad, but for your customers, it’s likely to be simply adequate or worse.

For people – and the focus of your store has got to be people, not spiders – good content means something totally different.  It has to be readable.  Proper grammar and spelling are a must here.  Don’t use too much jargon that your customer can’t be expected to know.  Remember that most newspapers write below the median reading level of the community; it’s a good idea to try and do the same.  Not because your customer is stupid, but because engaging with your content shouldn’t require them to click away and open up a dictionary.com window.  Once you have readable down pat, you can focus on making it entertaining.  There’s no magic recipe to making entertainment, but destroying property and showing adorable baby animals seem to work really well online (that’s mostly a joke).

The key is knowing who your audience is.  What is your target demographic?  What browser do your customers prefer using?  What on-site content are they already looking at?  Aggregate information about who’s shopping at your store and about who you want to shop at your store.  Use all of that data to make a good mental snapshot of who your customer is and think about the best way to communicate with them without pandering to them.  To see if it’s successful, continue to monitor your site stats and look at who your visitors are and where they browse – compare those numbers month after month.  If those numbers go up or even hold steady, odds are you’re creating content that has value for those people.

Of course, it’s never as easy as they make it sound, is it?  That’s why you have us!