Why content is essential for e-commerce sites
David Rosam on Jan 30 2006 at 5:10 pm | Filed under: Search Engine Optimization
Have you noticed how many sites in the same marketplace look the same? For example, travel sites tend to have a photograph and a featured low price or set of offers, and not much else on their home page.
The company then wonders why its site is underperforming for organic (natural) search engine listings. The reason why is simple, of course. With little content for the spiders to pick up on, the search engine doesn’t have anything to analyze. And when the search engine doesn’t know much about a site, it doesn’t list the site very highly against its competitors. Oblivion!
If you’re happy to keep pouring funds into Pay Per Click - you are absolutely sure that your campaign is paying back, aren’t you? - then that’s fine. But if you’d like to see your marketing budget stick around a while, rather than disappear off in a hail of momentary clicks, it makes sense to look at content and related organic measures - post-Jagger update, Google is lapping up content faster than a thirsty cat.
But don’t leave organic measures on the back burner, waiting for the right time. There are some real opportunities out there to steal the march on your competition. One of our clients - not in the travel business - is now at the top of Google for some of their most important key phrases, having just emerged from the sandbox. Several pages of carefully optimized copy, where most of their competitors have pictures and prices have catapulted them there.
Yet one of the less obvious benefits for our client is that they’re getting themselves established with useful content early on in their marketplace. As Google seems to be liking established sites more and more, getting in there quickly is definitely a Good Thing.
If you let your competitors establish themselves with effective organic measures, it’ll only cost you more in the long run to overhaul them.
