It’s not 42. Trust me.
Read all the way to the end. Trust me.
Never have I ever run into a website with too much content.
Almost always, websites lack the right kind of content.
Or they outright lack content as a whole.
But a website bursting at the seams with words for days?
Never.
I’m talking about regular business websites, not the likes of newspapers and magazines.
If you happen to run a website for a magazine and you’re not brimming with content, you need to get writing!
Your website needs content like you need air.
I once did SEO for a business that sold aluminium mailboxes.
They didn’t once mention mailboxes on their site.
Not even letterboxes. Or postboxes.
Seriously. I am not making this up.
This is an example of a website lacking content and the right kind of content.
And naturally, the site was not ranking.
And you know what else it wasn’t doing?
Making money.
You can’t expect to rank well without content, plain and simple.
But content “just because” is wasteful.
For online stores, you need descriptions for your products and categories.
For service based businesses, you need a dedicated page for each service.
Doing so lets you write some highly relevant content for that page.
Ultra relevance = no chance a search engine is going to get it twisted.
It will have no reason to doubt what that page is about.
And that means better rankings and more qualified traffic.
Why? because humans aren’t gonna get it twisted either.
A few years back, I had the enviable task of writing content for 100+ results pages.
This was for 6 out of the 7 sites within the Property Finder stable.
The goal was to write unique, hyper relevant, interesting content for results pages.
And it was painful.
Only because it became tedious, real fast.
Imagine writing about the same area, 4 times. And trying to make it fun, interesting and unique.
Apartments for rent in XYZ.
Apartments for sale in XYZ.
Villas for rent in XYZ.
Villas for sale in XYZ.
How did I stay sane and get results?
Lots of coffee. Good music via noise cancelling headphones.
And just getting straight to work.
As long as I wasn’t using rental words on the sales page (and vice versa), I was golden.
Same with using apartments on a villa page.
Keyword Relevancy. That’s all that mattered.
And I never focused on the number of times a target keyword was mentioned.
Because there is no special formula to work with.
Sorry but THERE IS NO MAGIC NUMBER.
I tell people this all the time: don’t fixate on a specific number of times you have to use a target keyword in your content.
Just write as if you’re talking to someone face to face.
You wouldn’t be using the same keywords over and over in your every day speech, so why would you do this online?
I know web content is different to human speech.
But humans read web pages too (not just search engines).
And if it seems like spam to humans, it’s gonna be seen as spam to robots.
So this is why the content on Property Finder’s websites needed to be useful too.
Even though they were at the bottom of the page and mostly served SEO purposes, the content had to rock.
For the few who ever scrolled that far down, we had to make it worth their while.
The key was to use keyword variations whilst keeping the content interesting and more human.
It took forever and a day but I got it done eventually. What a mission.
This was just one way I helped get Property Finder grow its visibility in search engines.
And when your website is more visible in the organic results, you rely less on paid traffic.
Who doesn’t like to save money?
So moral of the story:
– write with purpose (not just because)
– brevity is beautiful (we don’t need War & Peace)
And remember to use your keywords like you would use salt:
Enough to be noticed but not overpowering.
