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From an SEO perspective, there are plenty of benefits of having good-quality, regularly-updated content on your website. It gives you the chance to target a larger pool of keywords, increase the likelihood of people linking to your website and attract web crawlers looking for relevant information, amongst other things.
However, the content on your company’s website has the potential to do a lot more than simply boost your search engine rankings. It can make or break sales, or be the difference between visitors recommending you to their friends or telling them to flat out avoid you.
In short, content is extremely important for brand image, i.e. how your company is portrayed to consumers.
Boosting Brand Image with Good Content
Just take a second to think about your own website.
Sure, your navigation looks wonderful. Yes, customers can happily zip around the site with no problems at all and fill their basket with ease. Can they contact you if they have to? Can they ever!
But your blog section is empty, the last time the news area of the website was updated was the 15th April 2008 and your landing page copy is littered with typos and grammatical errors.
Sound familiar?
I notice this disregard for content remarkably often when I’m on the internet, and can’t help but think of a (slightly, I admit) exaggerated analogy.
When I picture people landing on these websites I always think it’s the equivalent of a customer wandering into, say, a consumer electronics store with the hope of buying a new TV but being greeted on the shop floor by a drunken salesperson.
They’re scruffy, their hair’s all over the place, they’re stumbling around and talking absolute gibberish. They do not sell a TV. The customer leaves and doesn’t go back.
OK, so maybe that’s a bit over the top. But think about how your perceived lack of desire to update your news section could be construed by consumers. The company is lazy. And what about those typos? No attention to detail. Unprofessional. Not bothered.
What Kind of Content Should You Use?
So, what kinds of fresh content should you consider regularly adding to your website, and what can it do for your brand image?
- News – Adding news to your site is really easy to do and helps your firm look authoritative and knowledgeable in a particular field, particularly if you focus on industry news. This could also include company announcements, business wins or press releases.
- Blogs – These are great for engaging with customers. You could let them know what your employees are currently working on, opinions on industry developments, company values, and so on. What’s more, it gives you the chance to write in your own voice, which can go a long way to showing people what the brand is all about. innocent’s blog is a good example of this executed well.
- Case studies – These show off your experience and expertise in a particular area. The perfect place to highlight why you should be trusted with a customer’s money and the level of service they can expect.
- White papers & research – Such reports and research again show you are an authority in a particular field, not to mention innovative.
- Video – What better way to show you are at the cutting edge of technology and well-and-truly in the 21st century than with good-quality video content.
But remember, this is only going to be beneficial if you take time to check over your content and ensure it doesn't contain rafts of misspellings and grammatical mistakes!
All hail King Content!
