One of the most common arguments put to us about unique website content goes something like this:
Let’s say a window repair business in London wants their website to rank… What great content do they have to fill their site with? The only unique content is their address, phone and the owner’s name.
But there is a way to develop unique content for your business – it just takes creativity. The content on the website doesn’t have to relate specifically to your business; in fact, if it relates to the industry it’s more likely to have greater traffic potential. The best kind of content is informative – content that answers a question. For example, a quick search on www.quora.com revealed this query:
http://www.quora.com/How-can-you-clean-sash-windows-from-the-inside
There are a couple of really good answers there that can be used as the basis of an article about keeping sash windows clean. Once a brief article has been put together (optimized for the right phrases such as ‘clean sash windows’ etc), people who are interested in cleaning their windows will find the page and therefore the window cleaning business.
A quick look through the Wikimedia Commons database turned up this fantastic copyright-free photo – powerful images add interest and ‘sharability’ to an article and they’re easy to come by (but make sure they’re copyright-free or purchased via an image library for licensed use):
The counter argument for creating a useful article for a company website goes something like this:
Why would a business give away information that could do them out of a job?
The point of good, useful content is to attract attention and answer a question or need. If someone find this page and they have a related website or blog, they may decide to link to it, thus increasing the site’s chances of ranking better on Google. And if someone is wanting to know how to clean sash windows they might decide that they want a professional to do it after all.
And then of course there’s the Monty Python case study. YouTube used to be littered with pirate, poor quality Monty Python videos. The MP team were annoyed because they weren’t making any money out of it so they created their own channel and put all the sketches on it in high quality – for free. As a result their sales in Amazon went up something like 5000% (of that’s even a value…). This is known as the ‘Freemium’ model. Give something away for free to build trust, then you have a more willing audience prepared to convert.
Article by Nick Beresford-Davies, Director of Tinstar Design Ltd
