search intent - Express Writers

8 Signs Your Website Badly Needs a Content Update

February 15, 2024 by Adam Oakley

Since your website doubles as an untiring brand ambassador, your content must always be fresh, engaging, and relevant. Peppering your pages with attention-grabbing and compelling content entices readers to browse your offerings and engage with your brand. Your brand may suffer if your online presence stagnates and no longer resonates with your target audience. It may lead to low engagement and conversion, eroding your bottom line. At Express Writers, our crack shot can breathe new life into your website by making the existing content more compelling, persuasive, and well-aligned with your marketing goals. Dig in as we share our top 8 signs your website is due for a content update. Outdated Information Do you add the year to your blog post titles? If so, have you updated them to read the year 2024? Now is the best time to spruce up your content, including updating the year, before the holidays kick off in earnest. Blog posts with an updated year in the title command more attention Including the current year in your headings helps build the reader’s trust. It reassures them the content is current and up to date. Retaining outdated information on the website can mislead visitors and harm your credibility. Outdated information may also erode readers’ trust and dampen your brand authority. It also means a failed opportunity to portray current capabilities, offerings, and thought leadership. That may create the impression that you’re out of touch with the latest trends and innovations, dissuading prospects from engaging with your brand. Dropping Traffic and Engagement Does a cursory look at your analytics paint a dull picture? Dropping organic traffic and engagement may indicate that your website no longer resonates with your audience. Audience interests and preferences change over time. You must adapt your content strategy to evolve along with the changing landscape. Visitors are unlikely to engage with your website if the content doesn’t align with their interests. When information becomes stale, it loses its appeal. You’re likely to disappoint visitors searching for fresh, valuable information. They may quickly decamp to the competition, saddling you with a massive drop in organic traffic and engagement. A content update shows that you’re attuned to your audience’s needs and helps you demonstrate thought leadership. It keeps your content fresh and engaging while encouraging repeat visits. Poor Search Engine Rankings While Google has been on a roll this year, there could be more to your poor search ranking than wild algorithm updates. See, Google is on a mission to connect web users with the most helpful, most relevant content. Did you know the top three sites on Google search results get over 54% of the search traffic? Your website will likely get no visitors if it’s not the first page of the search results. Google uses various metrics, including tracking user engagement metrics, to accomplish this feat. If your content doesn’t resonate with the target audience, Google picks up on it. Consequently, your website may experience a dramatic drop from the top of the search engine results. A content update may help your website demonstrate topical authority, match user intent, and capture the reader’s attention. If you do a meticulous job, you can regain your lost rankings and even outrank your most fierce competitors. Peppering your website with quality content also helps you build a healthy and natural backlink profile. High Bounce Rates If you notice a high bounce rate on your website, chances are your content doesn’t capture the reader’s interest. Bounce rate is a metric that captures the number of visitors leaving your website after viewing only one page. Visitors will likely click away if the content doesn’t address their needs or fill their search query. Poorly written, difficult to read, and visually unappealing content is a sure turn-off. When web visitors consistently click on your website only to quickly return to the search results, it hurts your search ranking. Google interprets such behavior as user dissatisfaction due to poor content, so your site isn’t worthy of a top spot in the search results. Updating your content can help you reduce spiking bounce rates and entice visitors to linger on your website. It’s a proven way to enhance user experience, increase dwell time, and build subject matter expertise. Low Click-Through Rates When your content ranks high on the SERPs but the click-through rate is abysmal, you may need to refine your content. It indicates that you’re targeting and ranking for the right keywords, but your content doesn’t resonate with your target audience. Featured snippets drive click-through rates. Visitors can see your content on the search results but fail to click through to your website. Your content isn’t compelling enough to capture their interest and attention or lacks crucial elements. It’s possible that your titles and meta descriptions aren’t compelling, descriptive, or relevant. Visitors won’t click on your content if these elements aren’t enticing or accurately reflect the page’s content. Your click-through rate may also suffer if your pages lack or have poorly optimized snippets. Featured and rich snippets help your site stand out in the SERPs and attract clicks. A content update can help you optimize these elements to help you capture more clicks and drive more visitors to your web pages. You’re not Converting Leads Are you driving thousands of visitors to your offers, but conversion is dismal at best? A low conversion rate may indicate a disconnect between your content and audience needs. Ideally, your content should drive visitors to fill out a form, join your mailing list, or purchase a product. Website conversion rates in different verticals. While the average website conversion rate is 2% to 5%, the rates vary wildly between industries. The best e-commerce sites convert 6.25% of their visitors, while top-tier financial websites have conversion rates of almost 25%. Typically, you should gauge your site’s performance against your industry’s rates. A content update can help boost your conversion rates if they fall below the industry standards. Your conversion rates may suffer if you don’t have … Read more

How to Optimize for Search Intent and Make Sure the Right Readers Find You

January 1, 2021July 7, 2020 by Adam Oakley

Did you know there are nearly 6 billion – a whopping 5.8 billion Google searches – every day? That’s 70,000 searches per second, or two trillion per year. (This number doubled over the lockdown, originally at 3.5B at the beginning of 2020.) We rely on Google for the answers to almost every question we have, whether it’s a word searched out of mere curiosity or in consultation before making a big life decision. Google gets it. With several core updates occurring each year, plus hundreds of tiny ones, it’s constantly tweaking its algorithms to provide more authoritative, relevant, helpful content to readers. Over the past several years, Google’s updates have sought to refine the way its algorithms understand what we mean when we type queries into its search box. In 2020, optimizing your content for search intent is the best way to stay relevant and at the top of the SERPs. Here’s what that means, plus my best pro-tip on how to optimize for search intent. Let’s go! Did you know? Our content writing team adheres to Google’s search intent algorithm rules, and we even conduct SEO and content strategy research to find the perfect keywords to write your content around. Go Content Shopping. [bctt tweet=”In 2020, optimizing your content for search intent is the best way to stay relevant and at the top of the SERPs. Here’s what that means, plus @JuliaEMcCoy’s best pro-tips on how to do it, now on the Write Blog.” username=”ExpWriters”] How to Optimize for User Intent and SEO Once upon a time, it used to be super easy to figure out what keywords you needed to shove into a webpage to get it to the top of Google. And to nobody’s surprise, that’s exactly what people did. Remember the era of spam content that flooded every search query, sending you leapfrogging down the results list to find something readable? Yeah, Google wasn’t impressed, either. The changes they made to the search algorithms forever redefined the way we write and publish content. To get in Google’s good graces and rank highly, your content must now be expert-level, authoritative, and trustworthy. Google’s evaluator guidelines call this E-A-Ting, and they expect content creators to serve up something good! However, E-A-Ting is only part of the story. If we look at Google’s mission statement, the first thing mentioned isn’t stunning, well-researched content from high-quality domains, but something else entirely. Google, first and foremost, wants to: Users want to E-A-T only what’s relevant to them. Source: Google. Well, that’s interesting. Let’s break down what that means. What Is Relevance According to Google? If you’ve ever written and published an amazing article full of high-quality citations and unique, witty tips only to watch it coast along smoothly at position number 6 for the chosen keyword, you know the frustration that Google’s algorithms can inspire. Seriously, you did everything right. So, what gives? ‍♂️ Here’s where you went wrong. Google wants to make sure that users get served only the most expertly written, authoritative, trustworthy content but the search engine isn’t optimizing its algorithms for quality. It’s optimizing them for user experience. That means it only wants what users are actually looking for to rank in the top results for a query. We refer to that as search intent, or “what the user meant when they typed that question into the search bar.” As it turns out, user intent in SEO is huge. For example, if we search for a guide to eating kimchi, we get results that look like this: If we’re looking for a guide to eating kimchi, we probably want to know how to eat it, not necessarily recipes for preparing or cooking with it. Source: Google. It seems to follow a pattern, doesn’t it? ️ If we scroll through the results, however, we start to see articles on other topics that technically rank for the keyword: How to pair different types of kimchi with various dishes The benefits of eating kimchi at different times of the day A schedule for eating kimchi to cure your digestive problems How to identify kimchi that’s spoiled These are all ostensibly “guides to eating kimchi” yet they appear on the second, third, even fourth pages of Google. Why? They don’t contain the information that people are looking for when they query Google with those keywords. Google can tell via metrics when a page isn’t relevant to a user’s query. Specifically, they pay attention to whether people seem to be clicking on a link, scanning its contents, then hitting the back button and clicking on the next link. Backlinko refers to that as “pogo-sticking” and if Google catches that happening a lot, it’ll drop the page’s SERP. What can we take away from all of this? [bctt tweet=”It’s possible to have expertly written, authoritative, and trustworthy content that’s irrelevant to the person searching the keywords for which you optimized. In 2020, that’s almost as bad as junk content.” username=”ExpWriters”] 4 Types of Search Intent In general, people search on Google for four different reasons. There’s a lot already written on search intent around the web, so I’ll summarize. The most basic type of Google search involves queries for more information about a topic. According to research by Penn State, about 80 percent of all Google searches fall under this category. Informational searches become commercial searches when people have enough information on the solution they’re seeking, and now wish to compare solutions that already exist. It’s the difference between “what is kimchi” and “best kimchi brands.” Once someone’s ready to buy something, they’ll use transactional searches. That “best kimchi brands” search will become “buy Amazing Kimchi Brand online.” People do navigational searches when they want to find something on a specific site. So… “Express Writers login” would reflect a navigational search intent, as would “return policy site:AmazingKimchiBrand.com.” A solid content strategy addresses all four types of search intentions in your content and your web pages. We’ll look more closely at how to … Read more