As business owners, the importance of marketing is drummed into us. Because whether we do it face to face, online or with a shop front, it matters. If nobody knows about a business, nobody will use it and the business will fail. Unfortunately, on-site content is often overlooked as a marketing platform. To the extent that many people build their content strategy elsewhere.
We’re taking a look at why on-site content matters. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t use social media or external content tools. But we do want to delve into the pitfalls of relying on content platforms that you don’t own.
1. Business Identity
Can you define your business identity? It may be your branding, your website or your social media presence. It may simply be you as an individual or your style of work. However you define it, business identity is important.
If your identity is built wholly around a content platform that you don’t own, there is a very real risk of losing that identity.
For example, perhaps you were very active on Twitter. Building up followers, contacts and even friends. Then, along came Elon Musk and the Twitter exodus happened. People left the platform in their droves, accounts were deleted and communities destroyed. Unfortunately, if your whole business identity is built around your presence on any social media platform, this always presents a risk.
By all means, be active on social media. Pick your favourite platform and concentrate your efforts on there. But you really do need to keep plodding along with other areas of your business as well, so you don’t lose everything due to circumstances outside of your control.
2. Ownership of on-site content
Have you ever created a piece of social media content that has gone viral? If so, it probably wasn’t long before you were seeing it appearing on other accounts. And that’s the problem. Once your hard work is out there on social media, people will repost it, change it and share it as their own.
Can this happen with website content as well? Absolutely. But the implications are slightly different. When you publish original content on a website in the UK, it is automatically protected by copyright. Therefore, if you need to do so, you will be able to legally assert your rights as the owner of that content.
Likewise, you are free to remove anything posted on your own site. Should it become out of date or no longer relevant, you can take it down. In fact, regularly cleaning up your site can improve performance and reduce your carbon footprint.
Any changes to the website will be carried out by you, so you won’t be impacted by the whims of the owners of a different platform.
3. Longevity
Many of us use social media marketing effectively to promote a business. It’s a great way to connect with potential customers and let people know about the product or services you offer. That said, social media promotion is very short term. You might produce an image or video that is seen by thousands of people. But it won’t be long before it’s yesterday’s news and everyone has moved on to something else.
Web content is different. Once you publish something on your site, it can be found via search engines for as long as you leave it there. Better still, should you choose to update the content in future, it may experience a resurgence for a minimal amount of work.
An additional bonus is that the people who find your website via search engines are likely to be looking for exactly the content you have created, or the product or service you offer. This makes them more likely to become customers than someone who stumbled across your content on social media.
4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Have you been encouraged to create newsletters, magazines or blog posts using platforms like Canva or Issuu? When you do so, it’s possible to embed your creation onto your website.
The problem with this method is that you completely miss out on SEO.
Why? Because search bots can’t read the text in these embedded newsletters. This is easy to see when you use a search plugin. It will come up with an error message to say that there’s no text in your post at all. This is due to the fact that the embedded content appears as an image instead of text.
5. Website Traffic driven by on-site content
Whenever you create content, the ultimate aim has to be to drive customers to your website. If you are not creating that content on your website, there will always be an additional step before your customers reach you.
Don’t forget, good content can be repurposed across multiple platforms. In particular, if you create a great blog post but want more people to see it immediately, post it on LinkedIn. It’s a good idea to just post part of it on there and link to the rest of the post in the comments.
6. Link Building
When you create content on your website, link building comes naturally. You’ve probably heard that you need external links to help with SEO. However, internal links matter too. Here are a few ways in which content created on your website helps with link building:
- If you write something useful and informative, people will naturally link to it – therefore increasing your external links
- You can insert internal links which are also great for SEO
- By inserting internal links into your posts, you can drive traffic to other areas of your website – and this could lead to sales!
7. Proving Expertise
By producing useful, long-form articles on your site, you can prove your expertise in your area of work. Not just to potential customers, but to those you already work with. Nothing retains customers like a regular reminder that you are the expert!