What Makes Good Website Content?

In 1996, Bill Gates penned an essay for Microsoft entitled “Content is King.” In the piece, Gates makes several prescient points about the future of content as an internet money-maker and how big and small businesses will use it in the coming years to grow their brands and boost sales. Twenty-seven years later, the piece feels almost prophetic in its accuracy and ability to (mostly) predict the future of online content.

These days, content truly is king. It’s both a buzzword and an undeniable force in our lives. Content is all around us all of the time. Whether it be written content, video content, social media content, podcasts, infographics, or something else, we consume more content than we ever have before, which makes sense since there has never been more information available at our fingertips than at this exact point in history.

Content is a broad term and one that seems nebulous and imposing. But in actuality, it’s pretty simple. This blog post will focus on content exclusive to your website while helping you figure out how to design the perfect website.

In 1996, Bill Gates understood that website content would be a force to be reckoned with in the future. Friends and retailers, the future is now! But the question is: Is your content good enough? And better yet, what makes content good at all? Read on to find out!

Good content is SEO-optimized

Ensuring that you have high-quality, authoritative content on your website is essential for SEO. Well-written SEO-optimized content will drive people to your site and, in turn, improve your overall SEO ranking concerning the words and phrases that matter most.

Keyword research and optimizing specific pages for a specific keyword is an excellent place to start when optimizing content for SEO. Tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush can help you see where you currently rank for specific keywords while also seeing where there are opportunities to grow in the future.

Having chosen the keyword or phrases you want, you can begin crafting copy centered around that topic, ensuring the keyword is used throughout the page. It would also help if you ensured that the keyword is included in the URL, in the page title, on the page headings, in image alt-text and titles, and repeated multiple times in the page content. But be wary of using the keyword too much in a way that could be considered spammy, as that will hurt its overall ranking in the eyes of Google.

 SEO-optimized writing needs to be well-written and coherent. It should be written to be easily consumed by your website visitors. That’s the cornerstone of an effective marketing strategy. 

Good content is readable and to the point

As previously mentioned, for your content to rank well from an SEO perspective, it must be optimized and well-written. That means the content should be formatted logically, well-structured, and free of spelling and grammatical errors. Avoid long blocks of text and opt for bullet points, short blurbs, and headers that provide crucial information or messaging. This is especially important with more people reading and shopping from their phones. 

Attention spans are short! So these days, good content is well-written and to the point. This matters both from an SEO perspective and a general “we want customers to read the writing on our site” perspective. Both are equally important.

According to Shopify, by 2025, retail m-commerce sales should more than double to reach $728.28 billion and account for 44.2% of retail e-commerce sales in the US. All the more reason to ensure your content is short, sweet, and readable from a mobile device. The future of marketing is mobile, so it’s essential to ensure you’re ready for the future because your competition certainly is. 

Good content is more than just words

Content can be videos, podcasts, infographics, social media posts, ebooks, case studies, webinars, live streams, and various other outlets and methods.

The more you can differentiate your content and provide something new, exciting, and unique, the more likely customers will be to engage with your content and your website overall. Now this doesn’t mean eliminating all writing from your site or taking away writing resources, but instead, supplement your writing with audio, video, and exciting graphics to aid the customer experience and make your brand even easier to engage with. 

Good content has personality and purpose

With the advent of AI, artificial intelligence, and the various bots you can communicate, interact with, and ask to do research and writing tasks for you, we are in an exciting space for the marketing field. In the coming years, some will utilize AI fully for their content, writing, and creative needs. But currently, at this time, this is not something we recommend. Google can tell if certain pieces of copy are generated by an AI tool and will catalog it as such, which could, in turn, hurt your SEO.

While AI-driven research is an excellent jumping-off point for you and your content writers, replacing the personality-driven writing and strategic decision-making of the writers on your staff with that of an algorithm that doesn’t know you or your brand is not advised. Proceed with caution.

At this point, AI writing does not offer the personality needed to differentiate brands. It operates on a one size fits all approach when crafting text and copy. And while it might be grammatically sound and SEO-optimized, it is written by a learning engine that doesn’t know much about your brand, story, and overall goals.

There is also some ambiguity about who owns the content these AI tools write.

Mobile Marketing knows content

Mobile Marketing has consistently delivered fantastic customer experiences and driven results for clients ranging from big brands to national and local retailers. We offer everything from review management to complete website builds, content strategy, and more! We’re a future-focused marketing agency with an eye toward the cutting edge, and we’re here to help create memorable digital experiences that bring your business to the next level.

Will your company be next? Let us provide you with a comprehensive content and SEO strategy and assign you a dedicated content marketer to complete the job. 

Interested in learning more about content marketing, who we are, and what we stand for? We offer free digital assessments for prospective customers to help indicate future areas of improvement. We love what we do and want to help your company be the best version of itself. Let’s get on the phone and talk about what the team at Mobile Marketing can do to drive business and build your brand.