Recently I was sitting in a potential client meeting where their Digital Marketing Manager was discussing a lead generation campaign they were running. They were running ads to drive traffic to this page. While they had created a good landing page, they were not doing anything to increase organic traffic on this page. Since this was a new domain altogether, bought only for this, there were little chances that site/page was going to rank ever in google rankings. Reason? Simple – there was no content on the page. In such a case apart from ads how do you expect people to land up on this page? And if you don’t have a huge pocket, how would you sustain this campaign in the long run?
I asked this manager how does he plan to sustain this campaign and what would be the source to build traffic and perform better in rankings? He replied with, “We will build SEO content”. I asked what is that? So his reply was, “Small bits of content basically for the search engines to see site is fresh etc”.
Or in other words, ‘trying to fool search engines’.
This conversation made me unhappy because of two reasons. One was that there is *nothing* relevant known as SEO Content. Secondly, this was coming from a person who was more experienced than me. Lets ignore the second reason and concentrate on the first.
- Whom do you want to come to your website? Real people or Bots?
- What should they do when they land on your website? Read and spend time or Crawl through and leave within seconds?
- Is a technology giant like Google a fool? Wouldn’t they recognize what you are trying to do?
Always remember, just as you don’t want to visit worthless websites, your potential customer also doesn’t want to do that. Now if you are going to throw garbage at him, he is going to return the favour. Try to create content that you feel like reading and sharing. Good SEO is a lot about creating great content. Content that human beings want to read. Content that creates *value* for your customer/reader/potential-customer. If you consistently keep creating content with that in mind, I am sure in the long run you wouldn’t be spending loads on ads. In fact I recommend you spend half of that in creating good content and thus save that money and eventually create value for your customer too!
