When a potential customer visits your website, they are seeking out information about your business. To convert these prospects into sales, the information on your site needs to build trust in your company and answer their questions about your products or services. Does your website have the content that visitors want to read?

To assist you in developing the kind of compelling information that will boost sales, here are four questions to ask yourself when creating content for your small business website.

1. Are You Original?
While it is a necessary skill for business, talking about ourselves can be challenging, especially when it comes to written content. But you need to get past your modesty and provide compelling and original content that depicts your business in the best light possible.

You should always avoid copying and pasting from others’ written works, not only because of plagiarism and questionable ethics but to ensure it doesn’t hurt your search engine optimization (SEO). Visitors and search engines like to see businesses write about themselves in an honest, easy to understand and unique voice. Try to steer clear from using clichés and re-hashing overused concepts.

2. Does it Provide Value?
When a potential customer comes across your website, they want to find out specific information and get a feel for what your company is all about. Small business website content should make it simple for visitors to find answers to their questions.

When writing for your website or blog, make sure you provide value—offer useful information without wasting readers’ time with fluff and filler. If you ramble on and on, the reader will lose interest and leave. Does the content provide practical advice and pertinent knowledge about your products and services? Can the customer take away valuable facts or tips from the content? Can the content assist you in the selling process?

3. Is it Organized and to the Point?
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes with this one. As a consumer searching the internet for information about a business, you want to find what you are looking for with no fuss and no hassle. People don’t just want information—they want information fast.

When creating your content, keep it organized and concise. There’s nothing worse than having to click through a disorganized mess of a website just to find basic information about the products and services that are available. At a minimum, you should create organized sections that contain an “about” page, product or service details, and a contact page with all the pertinent information including your business location, hours, phone number, email address, and social media links.

4. Are You Maintaining It?
Although you may have a great sense of accomplishment when you finally launch an optimized website, your work isn’t finished. A website is never a set-it-and-forget-it marketing too—it should always be viewed as a work in progress.

Your website is a crucial part of your overall online marketing strategy to attract and retain customers. Don’t let it collect dust! For SEO purposes, you want to update important pages of your website with fresh information to show search engines (not to mention customers) that you’re an active business.
Digital marketing is constantly evolving. Make sure your website and content strategy evolve with it, so your business does not look outdated.

by Jennifer Kyrnin
Updated March 18, 2017
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​There is a saying in the web design industry that "Content is King." Any web designer working in the industry has undoubtedly heard this phrase, along with the simply truth that web content is the reason why people come to the web pages you develop. It is also the reason why those people would share that site (and the content it contains) with others via social media, links on other websites, or even just good old fashioned word of mouth.
When it comes to a website's success, content really is king.
Despite the importance of quality website content, many web designers and web developers forget this in their rush to create the prettiest page or the most interesting architecture or the best interaction. When it comes right down to it, however, customers are not interested in whether your design has a 3-pixel or a 5-pixel border. They don't care that you've built it in Wordpress, ExpressionEngine, or on some other platform. Yes, they can appreciate a good user interface, but not because it looks great, but moreso because they expect the interactivity to work and not get in the way.
What your customers are coming to your web page for is the content. If your designs, site architectures, and interactivity are all wonderfully executed, but if the site does not offer usual, quality content, your visitors will leave the site and look for another that does offer the content they are seeking.
At the end of the day content is still king, and designers who forget that won't remain in business long.
WHAT IS WEB CONTENT?There are, essentially, two types of Web content:

• Text
• Media
  
  

TEXT AS WEB CONTENTText is easy, it's the written content that's on the page, both inside images and in text blocks.
The best textual web content is that text that has been written for the Web, rather than simply copy-and-pasted from a print source. Textual web content will also have good internal links to help readers get more information and be able to dig deeper into that content should they so desire. Finally, web text will be written for a global audience as even local pages can be read by anyone around the world.
Website text content can be something as commonplace and straightforward as your company's "About Us" text or history. It could be information on your hours or operation or location and directions. Text content can also be pages that are regularly added to and updated, like a blog or press release pages, or information about upcoming events that you are promoting.  These can all be text content, and each of them can also include Media Web Content as well.
MEDIA WEB CONTENTThe other type of Web content is media. To put it simply, media or "multimedia" as it was often called in the past is any content that isn't text. It includes:

• Animation
• Images
• Sound
• Video

The best animations for websites are done in moderation. The exception to this rule would be if your website is to showcase a web cartoon or animated movies, but in those cases you would likely be delivering the content as a video as opposed to an actual web animation.
Images are the most common way to add multimedia to websites. You can use photos or even art you've created yourself using a graphics editor of some kind. 
Images on web pages should be optimized, so that they download fast. They are a great way to add interest to your pages, and many designers use them to decorate every article they write.
Sound is embedded in a web page so that readers hear it when they enter the site or when they click a link to turn it on. Keep in mind that sound on Web pages can be controversial, especially if you turn it on automatically and don't provide a way to turn it off easily.In truth, adding sound to a website is more of a relic of past web design practices and not something you see done much today.
Video is incredibly popular on web pages. But it can be challenging to add a video so that it works reliably across different browsers.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to upload the video to a service like YouTube or Vimeo and to then use the "embed" code from those sites to add it to your page. This will create an iFrame on your site with that video content embedded. It is the easiest and more reliable way to add video onto a webpage.
Original article by Jennifer Krynin. Edited by Jeremy Girard on 3/15/17

by Carie Ferg, Manta Contributor, September 2017
​Unless you’re an expert on search engine optimization (SEO), it’s easy to get lost in the lingo and technical complexities. But if you don’t pay attention to search because it’s too confusing, you could be leaving important dollars on the table that could help drive your small business’ success.
When thinking about getting search engine traffic to your website, it’s important to understand the difference between the two search categories: paid and organic. According to Julie Howell, director of SEO at Postali, paid search and organic search operate completely independent of each other.
While paid search such as Google AdWords is a paid advertising opportunity, “Organic search results are determined by a propriety algorithm that you cannot pay your way into,” said Howell. “Running a paid search campaign will have no effect on your organic rankings, positive or negative.”
But just because the two search categories don’t directly impact each other doesn’t mean that you should dismiss either one. SEO is a slower marketing channel; it can take months to see your ranking climb. In the meantime, you could see instant results for your paid search campaigns.
it’s also important to provide users with both options to cast a wide net for potential customers. “Some users prefer to only click on organic results, while others will click on an ad. You want to try to appeal to both,” said Howell.
Having a presence in both organic SEO and paid search channels increases the overall exposure of your small business, thus increasing clicks and conversions. “Think of a search engine results page (SERP) as multi-faceted real estate,” Howell said. “Paid search is a bigger investment but has the ability to drive faster results.”
Reposted courtesy www.manta.com