How Online Content Differs From Offline Content
We've recently completed a web site for a Gold Coast helicopter business that does banner towing, charters and sightseeing trips amongst other things.
The client asked us to keep the site content consistent with the brochure - it's a common enough request.But if we used the same content from the brochure on the web site the site would almost certainly fail. You see, the web is different.
Web page content has its own needs.
Need # 1: Web site has to be found by people looking for the service it provides
Okay, the business has a great banner towing division. These massive banners that get dragged across the sky.
The heading on the brochure is, unsurprisingly, 'Banner Towing'.
On the web site I changed the heading to 'Banner Towing - Gold Coast'.
Searching For "gold coast banner towing"
This is because I know there will be people searching for "banner towing gold coast" or "gold coast banner towing" on the search engines. And our client wants to get found when that term is typed in.
And me using that as the heading - and in title tags, meta descriptions, sub-heading, body copy and more -means that the ABC Heli site is more likely to display as a result for a relevant search.
And that equals more visitors, which in turn will means more sales.
Web Content Needs To Be Targeted
Whilst the brochure was a useful piece of information to have, web content needs to be unique and targeted to what people are searching for.
By the time the keyword research is done, copy edited, titles tags and meta descriptions added, you can safely add an additional 1/2 hour per page even when you do have the content already written (except for the keyword targeting).
So the next time your designer is a little slow with editing content, you know why. He's just doing a good job - and that takes time!
Cheers
Brendon
Labels: web marketing
[ comments ]
As you know I follow the GPS industry very closely and it's a world-wide technology ... oh yeah, that's what the "G" in GPS stands for, Global ;-)).
Anyway, when searching for information or when reading news items gleaned by Google Alerts it some times takes way too long to find out even what continent an industry firm is on. All sorts of media web sites, such as newspapers and TV stations are horrible about this also ... you usually can figure out what country they are in but many times they don't even list their state or province. For many businesses, location ... and location-based search ... is very much neglected.
You don't want to be in Sydney, NSW and have to compete with listings from Sydney, NE, USA. Or perhaps Newark? There are at least three Newarks of consequence in the US, not to mention the original one in the UK. be sure to make use of the "Power Of Place".
There was lengthy discussion about why I couldn't just copy and paste the content from the brochure.
Keyword targeting is vital to competing in the organic search engines, or the pay per click engines as well.
I'll add a few "Queensland's" in there.
Cheers
Brendon