Have you been thinking; “we should get into content marketing, everyone’s doing it, Coca-Cola, BMW, Red Bull – they’re all doing it, we should be doing it too”?

Then this post is for you.

The success of a website is proportionate to the quality of the content it holds, the 'Secret Sauce'. It’s the essence of good content marketing and it’s been around for over 100 years. Back in 1900, Michelin Tyres released a 400-page guide geared at ‘helping’ drivers maintain their cars. It coved basic maintenance, accommodations and other travel tips. After 35,000 copies were distributed for free, the company began selling the books for a profit. Content marketing believes that if your customers are successful, you will be successful.

So why is content so important to SEO? Well first and foremost, Google loves good content. Rolled out in May 2014, Google’s latest algorithm, Panda was designed to boost sites with great-quality content, while pushing down sites with thin or low-quality content in the search results. Sales sites like eBay lost a massive 33% of its organic traffic literally overnight when Panda 4.0 was released.

Having a great website design, great content and a great offer means very little if your site is not easily accessible to your audience. Your website may look good on your computer and maybe even your phone, but have you tested it on a variety of different devices? Or, have you made your website design responsive, which means that it will resize based on the dimensions of the screen being used? These are all great questions to consider in website design and development before you publish, but it’s always worth going back and checking different browsers and devices continually whilst your website is live.

The secret to keeping visitors on your website is having your information easily found, having an attractive website design and making it a easy as possible to navigate through.

We have just 59 seconds on a website before we lose our visitors. You need to show people where they can find relevant information quickly.

Let’s start with the facts. According to Kissmetrics, 47 percent of visitors expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds and 40 percent of visitors will leave the website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds. Then once loaded, according to HubSpot’s research you’ve got only 15 seconds to capture their attention before they leave for good.

When it comes to an effective website - first impressions matter. In just a few seconds people will decide if they want to engage with you or not so you really don’t have much time to impress. So what are they really looking for?

So you’d like to be number one in Google? It’s the goal of pretty much every website on the internet – to be the top listing for a particular search term. Now you can always ‘pay’ to be there with Google’s lucrative AdWords product, but ideally you want to reach the first page organically and that’s where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes in.