You could have a website that looks like a million dollars, but that will mean diddlysquat if search engines and (subsequently) potential leads can’t find it.

Equally, you could write something Shakesperean on your homepage and in the inner pages. Yet, if it doesn’t relate to the services or products you offer or that people aren’t looking for, then that copy won’t make your website discoverable.

With so much competition online, it’s vital that your website is SEO-friendly and properly optimised with Keywords that help your prospective customers find you.

Yeah, yeah, we hear you groan. Keywords, eh? That old chestnut.

Ah, but you’re thinking of the bad old days when SEO agencies with questionable principles would charge companies huge amounts of money to stuff keywords and key phrases into garbled pages of generally meaningless copy.

But those days are gone. Google is far more sophisticated and stringent with its standards these days. In fact, Google and other search engines will even punish websites and brands that indulge in those spurious practices these days.

The reason SEO copywriters are so highly sought after today is that are skilled at crafting balanced, keyword-rich website content that is both readable and highly relevant to the searches that your potential customers are performing when trying to find something on Google or another search engine.

There’s far more to optimising a website for SEO than just copy, like backlinks by asking partners to link to your site, setting up business listings on Google My Business submitting an XML sitemap to name just a few others.

But taking a strategic approach to keywords and having an experienced copywriter weave those keywords into valuable content is a great place to start.

Remember a second ago when we said that Google will punish websites and brands that try to stuff SEO keywords into written content? Why would Google do that?

Because it wants to stay on top of the world by making it easier and easier for users to find exactly what they’re looking for when they use Google as their search engine of choice. And, if users get frustrated by the results that Google is returning, then they will look for a product or service elsewhere*.

You may be familiar with the term ‘user experience’ (or its acronym, UX)?

Nobody outside of Google actually has the magic algorithm in their hands. But what we do know is that Google will reward and give higher ranking to websites that offer great UX.

In simple terms, websites offering good UX are those that:

• combine relevancy (keywords reflecting what the user is looking for)
• readability (great copy that’s simple to read and understand)
• are easy to navigate and use
• are slick and load easily

Which brings us nicely onto mobile…

* Don’t be fooled into thinking that Google has everything its own way when it comes to search: online shoppers are far more likely to search for products on Amazon (and some other eCommerce platforms) than they are Google right now

Smartphones are everywhere. They dominate our lives.

We hardly need to tell you what people rely on them for, from monitoring fitness to online banking and from remotely controlling their heating to keeping up with their favourite celebrities.

Mobile internet usage has finally overtaken desktop internet usage, and the majority of eCommerce traffic comes from smartphone users.

Why are we telling you this?

Because – and we can’t stress this enough – you need to make sure that your company takes a ‘mobile-first’ approach to their website development and content strategy!

If you build a website and create content designed for desktop, then you are going to create a lot of barriers to purchase or navigation for mobile users.

For instance, pages and images will take forever to load on smartphones if they haven’t been optimised for mobile.

And, as mobile internet usage is skyrocketing, you will be creating poor user experiences for people that might have potentially become your customers if you create your website and content with desktop users primarily in mind.

Would-be customers in 2020 and beyond just won’t have the patience to stick around for poor mobile user experiences – they’ll just go and find another website (probably your competitor’s) instead.

Mobile-first. It’s the only way to go if you want to create and convert leads.

What is it that you want a user to do when they visit your website or specific web page?

If you don’t know, they won’t know either. Thereby greatly diminishing your chances of converting that lead into a customer.

A call to action (CTA) isn’t just a big button on a page saying ‘Buy here now’ or ‘Contact us’. Your CTA needs to form part of a whole – a web page and user experience that shows the lead why they should contact your team or buy a product.

Your copy, images and other media (a video or infographic, for example) should all flow into a smart CTA that actually persuades or inspires the user to click on that button.

Are you just chucking quickly thought-out and random content up on your website, or do you have a clear, coherent digital content marketing strategy that will persuade your target audiences to engage with your business?

In simple terms, today’s businesses need to treat their websites like a magazine.

Work out who your audiences are and what they like (and don’t like). How do they behave online? Explore and agree on these customer behaviours, and then create a content calendar based around them.

Does your social media strategy align with your website content strategy? And, for that matter, does your overall marketing and sales strategy properly connect with your content and social media calendars.

And don’t be tempted to let just anyone create your content. It will result in poor website or SEO performance and reflect poorly on your overall brand. Today’s consumers and B2B prospects are increasingly demanding great content that engages and even entertains them – create great content on a consistent basis and you may turn that prospective lead into a loyal customer with high lifetime value.