SEO One of the questions I frequently get asked on SEO is “What kind of content can I create for my site that is both useful to readers and impactful on SEO?”  So I figured I’d lay out a couple easy examples of content that you can add to your site to meet these two needs.

One of the myths of content is that it needs to be “blog or news” content.  But really any new content on a page will be viewed as new by search engines and therefore have a positive impact on SEO.  While blog (frankly I had that term) content gives you great way to create specific and unique destinations on your site and provide links to increase the power of existing pages, there are many other ways to do some of these same things on existing pages.  The focus of this post is on new content that can have a more lasting impact on your current pages.

  1. Driving direction for multiple locations – sometimes websites that try to support multiple locations have a hard time making their location specific pages stand out because of a lack of otherwise unique content.  When the search engine sees the same post headlines and product/service links on two pages there may not be a whole lot unique about any given page to help it stand out.  But writing out the directions from a number of nearby jump-off points provides a volume of unique content to help location pages stand out.  So write out the instructions.  Don’t just link to Google Maps.
  2. Employee Bios – Employee bios are a great way to create new content for your site.  Your employees are some of your best advocates.  In certain industries like insurance or financial management, people are often one of the more searched for terms and as they get to be known in the community are great ways to have more searches your business shows up in.  If you have products or services that employees specialize in, think about including the bios of appropriate employees on these pages in a rail or some other similar location.
  3. Testimonials – giving customers a way to leave reviews and testimonials is a great way to create new content on a page (content you don’t even have to create).  Of course you need a plan to actively manage and respond to these.  With a little training and thought, the responses can be a great way to build up relevant keyword based content.  You can’t always control the wording the reviewer uses, but employees can be trained to have a response plan: instead of “Thanks, were glad you had a great experience” have them write “Thanks, it was a pleasure helping you save money on your auto insurance.”  Think about putting testimonials on product pages, service pages, even location pages if you can easily manage them all.
  4. Photos – photos are an often overlooked form of content.  Slideshows don’t necessarily require a much greater footprint on the page.  So you can get more photos in for your readers.  Photos of people.  Photos of your location.  Product/service photos.  Just make sure to include quality captions and/or ALT tags so that search engines can “see” the pretty pictures too.

Not only will these 4 items help any page stand out better.  But they are extremely useful for local SEO and for helping individual location pages within a site stand-out as unique when much of the other page content may be the same.