Original content: what’s all the fuss about?

By 2nd August 2016 Blog, Digital

The words “we need original content” are thrown around a great number of times during meetings, but what does it actually mean for your business? And why do the buzz words “original content” create such excitement, and often a little nervousness, amongst your colleagues?

The fact is, creating content for content’s sake is likely to have a negative effect on your business. Why? Because if you work hard to drive online traffic to your website but the site’s still a work in progress, or the blog they land on isn’t interesting, the site visitor is unlikely to return, and repeat visits is what you really want.

Some companies spend money every month on PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising with no emphasis on the quality of their content. The problem is, although it might be tempting to assume that 50,000 site visits shows success, it’s not so impressive if 49,000 people never return, because what this actually means is you’re leaking money.

To put is simply, good original content offers the following values to your website:

Freshness
Updates
Substance
SEO

Freshness
Within moments of landing on a website, your viewer can tell an awful lot about how the site is run. Unless the content is fresh and engaging – talking about current topics or solving problems that are relevant to them – they’re not going to stay too long.

Updates
Research from Nielsen Norman Group suggests that the average time for a page visit is less than a minute, with an overwhelming number of people taking just 10-20 seconds to decide it’s time to leave. Within this time, they would have read less than a quarter of the text on the landing page. It’s a brutal statistic, but it shows how important it is to update your pages regularly if you want to engage viewers and, more importantly, keep them coming back.

Substance
As we’ve established, seeing a web page is one thing, but reading it is quite another. So ask yourself if the content on your page is likely to make the viewer want to either act on the call to action (you do have one, right?) or share what they’ve read with other people? Only very well written, well presented content will have this effect.

SEO
Search Engine Optimisation is, in simple terms, a way of connecting relevant content to the people that are searching for it. Although Google often changes its SEO rules, you need to include text that matches what your audience is looking for to bring them to your website organically, meaning you do so without paying for it.

The chances are, all of this makes complete sense to you, but actually implementing these principles on a daily basis takes a great deal of time and energy. That’s why “original content” is so difficult to create on a consistent basis – it’s never ending and fiercely subjective.

Manage to pull it off though – either by outsourcing the work or creating it in-house – and you can gain significant benefits to your business.

If you’re a Shopping Centre Manager, you’re able to tick all the boxes mentioned above with our Offers and Style products, which stream a live feed of current articles to drive customers in store to your retailers. All you need to do is pay a monthly fee, then let us create a bit of FUSS on your behalf.

Feel free to contact us today, or if you’d prefer to discuss your options over the phone, call 03333 220022 and we’ll gladly assist you.

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