Whenever I would travel with my parents as a kid, one of the things we always did after checking into our hotel room was to check to see what brand of faucets were installed in the bathroom. If they were Delta faucets, the hotel got a thumbs-up from us. And because old habits die hard, I still do this today, much to my husband’s amusement.
The presence of Delta faucets in a hotel room speaks volumes to me about where I’m bunking for the night, and if you’ll bear with me, I’ll explain how it relates to the content on your website.
The Web is a Big Place
When the World Wide Web began over 20 years ago, it was admittedly a pretty small venture, and something of an experiment. In 1991, there was one website. One. If you wanted to know something, there was one place to look, and if the information didn’t exist there, you were out of luck. By 1995, when Amazon.com launched, there were over 2,700 websites – meaning you had more places to search for information. Fast forward to today, and there are nearly one billion websites…so how does anyone find your business online?
Scrapping Poor Quality
Maybe you don’t give a whole lot of thought to the faucets in your home, but when one starts to leak, believe me, you’ll pay attention. My dad spent a 40-year career in a manufacturing facility that made faucet parts for Delta, among other things. As a supervisor, it was his job to make sure the parts produced by his company met Delta’s specifications, and if not, those parts were scrapped – sent back to be remade.
What’s this got to do with content, you ask? It’s the concept of quality. Just like Delta expects certain standards, people who come to your website expect the content you present to them to be knowledgeable and thorough. But what does quality content look like? In the vein of “you’ll know it when you see it,” quality content has:
- clear objectives
- well-formed ideas
- proper grammar and spelling
- usefulness to the reader
If you don’t provide these things in your content, your reader will scrap his visit to your site and move on to your competitor.
Rewarding Great Quality
Volumes have been written about how to rank for Google, mostly because parts of Google’s algorithm are something of a mystery that seems to change significantly with each update. As the powers-that-be at Google continually tweak the formula to provide users with a good search experience, one principle has continued to rise in importance: great content.
Great content can help your site to provide value to your customers, provided it’s:
- easy to understand
- filled with reliable information
- shareable
It probably goes without saying that you want to put your best foot forward when it comes to your business website. That’s where your content comes into the picture. Original content that’s well written and consistently posted is a beacon to Google, representing a site that’s worthy of a little search-engine love.