The primary purpose of your website content is to answer the questions that clients and potential clients have when they visit your website. These are questions such as, who are you as a business and what do you offer, which may be answered on your about page or service pages, respectively. It’s your opportunity to sell your brand and your products or services to increase enquiries and sales. This is all quite obvious, but it isn’t the only purpose of website content.

The other purpose of website content

The secondary purpose of your website content is to improve your ranking on search engine result pages. Content can be optimised – known as SEO optimisation - to be more likely to appear on search results, which means more people see your website pages and are therefore more likely to visit your website. Because this is so important to online business success, some businesses consider this aspect of the content just as important as relaying key information to visitors.

How do you SEO optimise your website content?

There is a wide range of techniques that can be utilised to optimise website content for search engines. The best practice is to diversify your SEO optimisation. Here are some of the things you should be doing:

• Create well-written content that is truly valuable for the website visitor 
• Add blogs and guides that link back to a relevant product or service page 
• Frequently update your website with new blogs and guides, and update other pages to keep them fresh 
• Insert SEO key phrases off the back of SEO key phrase research (SEO key phrases are the most common words and phrases your target market has been searching online) 
• Avoid using AI to generate content as this can be detected and punished on search engine result pages 
• Include internal linking that ensures the website visitor can navigate to the pages they need 
• Include external linking to authoritative sources when relevant and beneficial for the user journey 
• Create a network of content

Creating a network of content is one of the most contemporary and beneficial SEO content techniques today. It’s something that not enough businesses are doing, so we want to give this some more attention.

What is a network of content?

A network of content is the content on your website where:

1. Pages are linked together through internal linking
2. There is a hierarchical structure to the content
3. There is purpose behind each link and structure

Having a network of content rather than individual website pages that don’t interact with other pages is preferred by search engines. It can also keep website visitors on your website for longer and encourage them to repeatedly come back. Both of these are great for your SEO performance. Having a clear web of content also makes it easier to plan for new content to be added to the site.

A network of content is likely to involve key website pages such as your product or service pages, and your blogs or guides. This is best understood with an example…

An example of a network of content

Let’s imagine you offer mortgage advice services and you wish to create a network of content on your website. To do this, you would start with a service page e.g. mortgages for first time buyers. The page would contain general information on first time buyer mortgages and the service you provide to first time buyers.

Service pages can link to other service pages e.g. a page for first time buyer mortgages may also link to pages talking about protection as related but separate services, but they can also link to other pages that are on the same subject but are more specific. For example, a service page on mortgages for first time buyers could link to an in-depth guide explaining the process for first time buyers or a blog talking about how to choose a conveyancer or how the Help to Buy scheme works. These guides and blogs will also link back to the main service page and can link to each other too.

All of a sudden, you have a clear network of content with a hierarchical structure and purposeful links between pages.

Recap: The primary purpose of your website content is to provide value to the website visitor and answer their immediate questions quickly and clearly. But your website content also needs to appease search engines to get more leads, which means utilising many SEO techniques. Creating a network of content is one of the best modern SEO methods, which involves a hierarchical structure of content with carefully-considered links.

WEBPRO Knows

Fewer than 1% of people will click a website on Google’s second page. You need to be on the first page to be noticed.