Content Is “the King” But Visitors Are Not Reading?

Since I’ve been in the industry I hear the following sentence over and over: Content is “The King”.

While this, from many points of view is true, marketers and webmasters are facing now the challenge of visitors not wanting or having the time to read the sites' content.

Let’s take this as a case study. E-commerce sites are facing the need of good and quality content in order to be properly indexed and ranked by Google. Webmasters are dealing with this especially since the two last Google’s updates. Seems like the SEO world has become a “contents’ writers world” and shouldn't be that way for many reasons.

First and foremost, let’s put things straight… it is important to understand that “quantity is not quality”. As worn-out as this phrase may sound, it’s completely right. I've worked with many affiliates who were more interested in having their 15% txt/html ratio on their sites rather than pursuing short but quality articles.

So you have your 1000+ words article and your bounce rate keeps rising? Try to keep it real! Go to any e-commerce or service providers’ sites, you will see tons and tons of amazing quality text which in most cases is super relevant for the customers but yet, customers aren't reading it.

The solution to this issue is easier than it seems. Here are some tips:
• Keep your articles/reviews/descriptions as short as possible
• Use bullets instead of long paragraphs
• Use a “Read More” button if needed
• Name only the highlights for your product
• Keep the font above 12pt

Always keep in mind that site optimization aims to get more visitors but yet you need to convert them into customers. Sometimes the best SEO practices won’t get you more customers. Write what your customers need to read in order to buy and forget a little bit about the txt/html % ratio.

My two cents. Hope it helps

 

Good advice, thanks for sharing. Seo is not only getting backlinks metatags etc, there is also such thing that the people hae to do on their websites.

 

this is a great post, wish I've read this some years ago
just one addition: the content amount depends on the niche of course. some areas are meant to have more content than others, but since you are talking about e-commerce and service providers I completely agree with you.
we need to put SEO aside and create relevant sites. this may bring less visitors but definitely more customers!

 

Thanks for the feedback. It would be interesting if others share their experience as "buyers" regarding this since sometimes marketers tend to look at things differently

 

i think, those people who are referring to content is KING are SEO's, well yes how can it be a KING if visitors are not reading.. so useless, but on the other hand, SEOs and Marketers are using content to rank their site in SE>

 

Well it is true that "content is the king" rule follows for almost all the search engines. Search Engines like unique content and does not like duplicate content. If you continue to update unique content search engines give you weight-age and rank the website higher. However this rule does not tell that the content one is updating also attract visitors. One should write unique content for search engines but for visitors one has to write content which is attractive for visitors. These two are different things and need different attention. For SEO people content is the king but for marketers it is not only content but content that readers are interested in is the rule.

 

I've heard somewhere that articles less then 300 words are not considered good by google.

is it true ?

 

Never heard about it and by experience I can tell that shorter, relevant and quality articles are indexed perfectly well while improving the SEO altogether

 

agreed! but it's like a circle, you get more visitors but they don't buy or get less visitors but actual customers... i guess it depends on the product (expensive, cheap, targeted to majorities or minorities)