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What Is Content Marketing – and Can It Actually Help My Small Business?

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Content marketing — creating and sharing useful, relevant content to attract and build relationships with potential customers — sounds like something large companies with full marketing teams do. In reality, it’s one of the most cost-effective and accessible marketing strategies available to small businesses. Here’s an honest look at what it is, what it requires, and whether it’s right for you.

What Content Marketing Actually Means

Content marketing is publishing useful information that your potential customers are already looking for — blog posts, how-to guides, FAQ pages, email newsletters, videos, or social media posts that answer real questions and solve real problems.

The key word is useful. Content marketing isn’t writing about how great your business is. It’s writing about the things your customers care about, so that they find you while searching for answers, come to see you as a credible resource, and think of you first when they’re ready to hire someone or make a purchase. Think of it like a hardware store employee who helps you figure out exactly which pipe fitting you need — even if you end up coming back for more. The helpfulness is the marketing.

When done consistently, content marketing builds trust, drives organic search traffic, and positions you as the expert in your field. Unlike advertising, which stops working the moment you stop paying for it, content marketing compounds over time. A blog post you publish today can continue to generate traffic, leads, and credibility for years.

The Numbers Behind Content Marketing

This isn’t just theory. The data on content marketing’s effectiveness — especially for small businesses — is compelling.

Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, and the leads it generates are six times as likely to convert. For a small business with a limited marketing budget, that ratio is hard to ignore.

Content marketing generates an average return of $3 for every $1 invested — compared to just $1.80 for paid advertising.  And because content assets continue working after they’re published, that return grows over time rather than stopping when the budget runs out.

According to HubSpot’s most recent State of Marketing Report, small businesses are 23% more likely than average to see ROI from blog posts, and website, blog, and SEO remains the single highest ROI-generating marketing channel overall.

83% of B2B marketers say content marketing helps build brand awareness, and 77% credit it with generating demand and leads. For service-based small businesses — where trust and credibility are often the deciding factor — those numbers reflect something real: people hire experts they already trust, and content is how you build that trust before a prospect ever picks up the phone.

Content Marketing Is Perfectly Suited for Service Businesses

If you run a service-based business — a law firm, an HVAC company, an accounting practice, a web design agency — content marketing has a structural advantage that paid advertising simply can’t replicate.

When someone searches Google for “how to know if my HVAC system needs replacing” or “what does a bookkeeper actually do,” they’re already signaling that they have a problem and are looking for a solution. If your blog post answers that question genuinely and thoroughly, you’re not just getting their attention — you’re establishing authority. They arrive at your contact form having already decided you know what you’re talking about. That’s a fundamentally different selling dynamic than a cold ad impression.

Compare that to paid search or social advertising, where you’re interrupting someone’s scroll or buying placement in front of people who may or may not be ready to act. Content marketing meets people where they already are in their decision-making process.

Which Content Format Is Best?

Content marketing isn’t just blogging. Here are the formats most commonly used — and what they’re best suited for:

Blog Posts and Articles are the most accessible content marketing entry point for most small businesses. The average blog post today runs about 1,400 words, and bloggers who invest six or more hours per article are significantly more likely to report strong results. You don’t need to publish daily — consistency matters more than frequency.

Email Newsletters deliver an average ROI of $42 for every $1 spent — among the highest of any marketing channel. A monthly newsletter keeps your existing contacts warm, re-engages past clients, and drives repeat traffic to your website. It’s also one of the few channels you fully own, independent of algorithm changes on social platforms.

FAQ and Service Pages are often overlooked, a well-written FAQ page on your website does double duty: it answers objections for potential clients and drives organic search traffic for the specific questions people type into Google. For many small businesses, this is the highest-leverage content investment.

Video content delivers ROI 49% faster than text-based content — because it conveys personality, builds trust quickly, and performs well across social media platforms. Short explainer videos, client testimonials, or simple “tip of the week” clips can be produced with a smartphone and edited in free tools like CapCut or iMovie.

Social Media Posts rarely drives direct conversions on its own, but it serves a critical amplification role — extending the reach of your blog posts, building familiarity with your brand, and keeping you visible with people who aren’t ready to hire yet but will remember you when they are.

Content Marketing Is A Marathon, Not A Sprint

Businesses that see the best results with content marketing share a few traits:

Consistency over intensity. 50% of bloggers who publish two to six times weekly report strong results — but for small businesses, even monthly publishing can generate meaningful results when maintained over time. The businesses that fail usually quit too early, not too late.

Patience with timelines. Most content strategies take six to twelve months before organic traffic and lead generation become significant. Think of it like planting a tree: the best time to start was a year ago, and the second-best time is now.

Writing for people, not algorithms. Google’s ranking systems have grown sophisticated enough to reward content that genuinely helps people. Keyword-stuffed, thin content no longer works — and can actually harm your rankings. The goal is to write the most genuinely useful answer to the question your customer is asking.

Topic selection grounded in research. Not every topic your audience might care about is one they’re actually searching for. Keyword research — even simple keyword research using free tools — helps you find the intersection of “things your customers care about” and “things they’re actively searching for.” That intersection is where content marketing pays off most reliably.

How To Measure Whether It’s Working

One of the most common frustrations with content marketing is not knowing if it’s working. The metrics to watch aren’t complicated, but they do require having the right tools in place:

Organic search traffic: Are more people finding your site through Google over time? Google Search Console (free) shows you exactly which search queries are bringing people to your pages.

Time on page and scroll depth: Are visitors actually reading your content, or leaving immediately? Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tracks this. If people are spending two or three minutes on a page, your content is doing its job.

Lead form submissions and calls: Ultimately, content should drive business. Tracking which pages visitors viewed before submitting a contact form shows you which content is directly contributing to leads.

Keyword rankings: Are the specific terms you’re targeting moving up in search results over time? Free tools like Google Search Console and Ubersuggest can track this.

💡 Connect4 Tip: If you don’t have Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console properly set up on your website, you’re flying blind — you have no way of knowing which content is performing or where your traffic is coming from. We can get both tools configured and connected correctly as part of our GA4 Setup service, so your content efforts are measurable from day one.

Start Content Marketing Small and Smart

You don’t need a content calendar, a content team, or a six-month editorial strategy to get started. You need one good post.

Step 1: Pick your format. A simple blog on your website is the most accessible starting point and the one with the most direct SEO benefit.

Step 2: Answer the most common question you get. Think about the question prospects ask most often before hiring you. That’s your first post. Write a genuine, helpful answer — 600 to 1,000 words — in your own voice, aimed at someone who knows nothing about the topic but cares about it.

Step 3: Publish and share it. Post it on your website, share it on your social channels, and mention it in your next email to your contact list.

Step 4: Do it again next month. After 12 months of one post per month, you’ll have 12 pieces of evergreen content working for you around the clock — answering questions, building trust, and driving traffic while you focus on running your business.

Connect4 Tip: What’s the question you get asked most often by potential clients? That’s your first blog post. Write a genuine, helpful answer — 400 to 600 words — in plain language. Publish it. You’ve started content marketing.

When To Hire Someone To Help With Content Marketing

Nearly 80% of small business owners report writing content themselves — which works, especially in the early stages. But there’s a real cost to doing it yourself: time. Without AI assistance, the average marketer spends two to three hours writing a single long-form article. For a busy business owner, that’s a significant investment to sustain month after month.

There are two points where bringing in professional help typically makes sense:

When consistency breaks down. The most common failure mode in content marketing isn’t bad content — it’s inconsistency. If posting once a month keeps slipping, a content partner who manages the calendar and production for you can be the difference between a strategy that compounds and one that stalls.

When you want to accelerate results. A content strategist can identify the highest-value topics to target, conduct proper keyword research, optimize your existing posts for search, and build a publishing plan designed around actual search demand rather than guesswork.

Services Connect4 Consulting Provides:

  • Content Strategy Development: Identifying your best target topics based on keyword research, competitor gaps, and your specific business goals — so every post has a purpose.
  • Blog Post Writing and Optimization: Fully written, SEO-optimized blog posts in your brand voice, complete with meta descriptions, focus keyphrases, and internal linking.
  • GA4 Setup and Search Console Configuration: Making sure the right tracking is in place so your content efforts are measurable from the start.
  • Content Audits: Reviewing your existing website content to identify what’s underperforming, what can be updated, and what opportunities you’re currently missing.
  • Email Newsletter Strategy: Turning your blog content into a monthly newsletter that keeps your audience engaged and drives repeat visits to your site.
  • Website Care Plans: Ongoing support that includes regular content reviews and performance monitoring — so your site keeps working as hard as you do.

The Bottom Line

Content marketing isn’t a shortcut. It’s a compounding investment — one that, done consistently over time, builds something paid advertising never can: a library of assets that work for your business around the clock, a reputation as the go-to expert in your field, and an organic presence that doesn’t disappear the moment you stop spending.

97% of businesses report generating positive results from content marketing. The ones that don’t see results almost always share the same story: they started, stopped too early, or never had a clear strategy to begin with.

The bar to entry is lower than most small business owners think. The return — in traffic, trust, and leads — is higher than most expect.

Why Your Website Needs to Load in Under 3 Seconds (And What to Do If It Doesn’t)

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We live in an era of instant gratification — and your website visitors are no exception. Research from Google consistently shows that a one-second delay in mobile page load times can reduce conversions by up to 20%. And the stakes are getting higher: as page load time increases from just 1 to 10 seconds, the probability of a visitor bouncing increases by as much as 123%. The good news? Most slow websites have fixable problems, and fixing them doesn’t always require a complete rebuild — it requires the right expertise applied in the right order.

Why Website Load Speed Matters More Than You Think

Think of your website like a physical storefront. If a customer walks up to your door and it takes 5 seconds for it to open, many of them will turn around and walk away before they’ve ever seen what’s inside. That’s exactly what’s happening online every day to businesses with slow websites — and most of them don’t even know it.

Website speed affects three things simultaneously: user experience, search engine rankings, and conversions.

User Experience 53% of people will leave a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load on their mobile device, and 54% say that as the load time for a brand’s mobile site increases, so does their frustration. First impressions are formed in milliseconds, and a slow site signals carelessness — the opposite of the trust you’re trying to build.

Search Engine Rankings Google uses page speed as a direct ranking factor for both desktop and mobile search through its Core Web Vitals system. Slow websites tend to rank 3.7 percentage points lower on average than fast sites, and the average page load time for a page appearing on the first page of Google search results is just 1.65 seconds. If your site is slow, you’re essentially paying a tax in the form of lost organic visibility.

Conversions and Revenue The data here is striking. Conversion rates are 3x higher for e-commerce sites that load in 1 second compared to those that take 5 seconds, and for every additional second of page load time, conversion rates drop by an average of 2.11%. Even more concerning: nearly half of all customers report they would never revisit a website with poor loading times — meaning slow speed doesn’t just cost you one visit; it can cost you a customer for life.

A fast site, by contrast, builds immediate trust. It signals that you take your business — and your customers’ time — seriously.

Understanding Core Web Vitals: Google’s Speed Report Card

In 2020, Google introduced Core Web Vitals — a standardized set of performance metrics used to measure real-world user experience. Think of them as Google’s official grading rubric for your website’s speed and responsiveness. There are three primary metrics:

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long does it take for the main content of a page to load? A “good” LCP is under 2.5 seconds.
  • Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How quickly does the page respond when a user clicks or taps? A “good” INP is under 200 milliseconds. (Note: INP replaced the older First Input Delay metric in 2024.)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Does the page jump around visually while loading, causing users to accidentally click the wrong thing? Lower is better.

In 2022, only 39% of websites met Core Web Vitals standards. By 2024, that number had risen to 50.5% — meaning roughly half of all websites still fail Google’s own benchmarks. Where does yours stand?

💡 Connect4 Tip: Not sure how your site scores on Core Web Vitals? Our team can run a full performance audit and walk you through exactly what the numbers mean for your business — and your Google rankings. Ask us about our Website Care Plans, which include regular performance monitoring so you never fall behind.

How to Test Your Website Speed

Before you can fix anything, you need to know where you stand. Here are the best free tools to get a clear picture:

Google PageSpeed Insights: Free and takes about 30 seconds. Scores your site from 0–100 and provides a prioritized list of specific fixes. It also reports your Core Web Vitals directly.

GTmetrix: Provides a more detailed waterfall breakdown, showing you exactly which files are loading and how long each one takes. Great for identifying problem plugins or scripts.

Google Search Console: If you have Search Console set up for your site, Google provides a Core Web Vitals report showing which specific pages are underperforming — broken down by mobile and desktop.

What do the scores mean?

  • 90–100: Fast. You’re in great shape.
  • 50–89: Needs improvement. You’re losing some visitors and rankings.
  • 0–49: Poor. This is costing you real business.

💡 Connect4 Tip: Google PageSpeed Insights is free and takes 30 seconds to run. Type your URL in at pagespeed.web.dev and see where you stand. If your score is below 50, it’s time to take action — and we’re here to help.

The Most Common Causes of a Slow Website

Understanding why a site is slow is like a doctor diagnosing before prescribing. Here are the most common culprits:

1. Large, Uncompressed Images

This is the single biggest offender for most small business websites. A photo taken on a modern smartphone can easily be 5–10MB. When you upload that directly to your website, every visitor’s browser has to download the full file before they see your page. The fix — compressing images to a web-appropriate format — often cuts load times in half on its own. It’s estimated that about a quarter of web pages could save 250KB or more just by optimizing their images and text — without losing any visible quality.

2. Too Many Plugins or Third-Party Scripts

WordPress plugins are powerful, but each one adds code that your visitors’ browsers must load. Nearly 4% of total page load time is tied to third-party apps, and that number climbs quickly as plugins stack up. Live chat widgets, social media embeds, review platforms, analytics tags, advertising scripts — every one of them adds a small delay. Every additional third-party script on a website can slow it down by about 34 milliseconds on average. That may sound small, but 10 scripts equals more than a third of a second — just from extras your visitors never consciously notice.

3. Poor Web Hosting

Your web host is the foundation your website is built on. Budget shared hosting plans put your site on a server alongside hundreds or thousands of other websites, all competing for the same limited resources. Think of it like a highway at rush hour: when everyone tries to use the same road at the same time, traffic slows to a crawl. Upgrading to managed hosting or a faster server environment can dramatically improve baseline performance — sometimes without any other changes.

4. No Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN is a network of servers distributed around the world. When a visitor loads your website, a CDN serves your content from the server geographically closest to them, rather than from a single server in one location. For a business in Washington DC, a visitor in Seattle or London experiences meaningfully faster load times when a CDN is in place.

5. Bloated or Outdated Themes

Many popular WordPress themes are visually beautiful but technically heavy, loading dozens of scripts and stylesheets even when they aren’t being used on a given page. Outdated themes may also lack modern performance optimizations that have become standard practice in recent years.

6. No Caching

Without caching, every time a visitor loads your page, the server has to rebuild it from scratch — pulling data from the database, processing code, and assembling the final page. A caching plugin stores a pre-built version of each page so it can be delivered instantly, dramatically reducing server load and response time.

Practical Fixes You Can Start With

Here are the fixes any business owner can tackle without a developer:

Compress images before uploading. Tools like TinyPNG.com (free) or Squoosh.app make this quick and easy. Before uploading any photo to your website, run it through one of these tools first. Aim for images under 200KB.

Use next-gen image formats. Modern formats like WebP and AVIF offer the same visual quality as JPEG or PNG at significantly smaller file sizes. Many image compression tools can convert to these formats automatically.

Install a caching plugin. If your site runs on WordPress, plugins like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache can be set up in under an hour and make an immediate, measurable difference.

Enable lazy loading. This tells your site to only load images as visitors scroll down to them, rather than loading the entire page at once. It’s often a single setting in your image plugin or WordPress dashboard.

Audit your plugins. Review every plugin installed on your site. If you’re not actively using it, deactivate and delete it. Dormant plugins still add overhead.

💡 Connect4 Tip: Even well-intentioned DIY fixes can sometimes introduce new issues. If you’ve tried the basics and your score hasn’t moved — or you’re not sure where to start — our Website Care Plan includes a hands-on performance audit and implementation of technical fixes, so you don’t have to figure it out alone.

When DIY Isn’t Enough: The Business Case for Professional Speed Optimization

Some speed issues are surface-level and fixable in an afternoon. Others are rooted in how the site is built — theme architecture, server configuration, database optimization, code minification, and render-blocking resources. These require a technical eye and the right tools.

Real-world examples show the business impact of professional optimization: Vodafone saw an 8% increase in sales after improving their LCP score by 31%. Swappie cut load time by 23% and increased mobile revenue by 42%. Renault achieved a 13% rise in conversions from a single one-second LCP improvement. These aren’t outliers — they’re what happens when speed optimization is treated as a business investment rather than a technical checkbox.

Services Connect4 Consulting Can Provide:

  • Performance Audit: A full technical review of your site’s current speed, what’s causing the slowdown, and a prioritized action plan — with plain-English explanations.
  • Image Optimization: Batch compression, conversion to modern formats, and implementation of lazy loading across your existing content.
  • Hosting Consultation & Migration: Evaluating whether your current host is holding you back, and managing a migration to a faster environment if needed.
  • CDN Setup: Implementing and configuring a CDN (such as Cloudflare) so your site loads quickly for visitors wherever they are.
  • Plugin Audit & Cleanup: Reviewing every plugin for performance impact and replacing heavy scripts with lightweight alternatives where possible.
  • Core Web Vitals Remediation: Targeted technical fixes for LCP, INP, and CLS issues that are directly affecting your Google rankings.
  • Website Care Plans: Ongoing monitoring, monthly speed checks, and proactive fixes so your site never silently falls behind — especially after WordPress updates or new plugin installations.

The Bottom Line

Online businesses lose nearly $2.6 billion in revenue annually due to slow-loading websites. For a small business, the math is just as real — it just plays out in missed inquiries, abandoned contact forms, and visitors who clicked away before they ever saw what makes you different.

A fast website isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure. And like any infrastructure, it benefits from professional maintenance.

Connect4 Tip: Not sure where your site stands? Start with a free check at pagespeed.web.dev. If your score is below 70 — especially on mobile — reach out to us. We’ll walk you through what the numbers mean and how to fix them.

The 9 Most Common Small Business SEO Mistakes – And How To Fix Them

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SEO Best Practices for Small Businesses in 2025

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Imagine your small business website as a garden in the vast digital landscape. Just like a well-tended garden attracts visitors, a website that is optimized for SEO draws potential customers through search engines.

Planting Quality Content Seeds

Think of your content as seeds. High-quality, informative content are premium seeds that grow into robust, attractive plants that catch people’s attention. Like a gardener who knows their plants inside out, showcase your expertise to make your content truly bloom. Content continues to reign supreme in SEO. Create high-quality, informative content that thoroughly addresses user queries. Long-form content that provides comprehensive coverage of a topic tends to rank higher in search results. Remember to showcase your expertise and authority on the subject to align with Google’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) principle.

Strategic Keyword Placement: Your Garden’s Signposts

Keywords are like strategically placed garden signs. They should:

  • Guide visitors naturally
  • Be placed thoughtfully in titles, descriptions, headers
  • Appear seamlessly, not forced

While keyword stuffing is long gone, strategic keyword placement remains crucial. Incorporate your target keywords naturally in:

  • Title tags
  • Meta descriptions
  • Headers and subheaders (H1, H2, H3)
  • The first 100-150 words of your content
  • URL structure
  • Image alt text

Technical SEO: Your Garden’s Infrastructure

Just as a garden needs a solid foundation, your website requires:

  • Mobile-friendly design (like ensuring paths are accessible)
  • Fast loading speeds (smooth, clear pathways)
  • Clear site structure (well-organized garden layout)

Backlinks: Cross-Pollination of Digital Reputation

Backlinks are like recommendations from respected neighboring gardeners. High-quality links from reputable sources in your industry boost your garden’s credibility.

Featured Snippets: Your Garden’s Showcase Spot

Aim to have your content featured like a prize-winning plant in a garden show. Create clear, direct answers to common questions in your industry.

Emerging Trends: Adapting Your Garden

Stay flexible like a gardener monitoring seasonal changes:

  • AI’s growing influence
  • Enhanced focus on experience and expertise
  • Voice and visual search capabilities

Remember, SEO is an ongoing cultivation. Regularly tend to your digital garden, monitor its growth, and be ready to adapt to the changing digital ecosystem.

Simple SEO Fix: Robots.txt File

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The robots.txt file is a small text file that is placed on your website server that tells web crawlers like Googlebot or Bingbot if they should access a file or not. Improper usage of the robots.txt file can hurt your SEO ranking because the robots.txt file controls how search engine spiders see and interact with the pages on your website.

Do I have a robots.txt file?

You can check this from any browser. The robots.txt file is always located in the same place on every website, so it’s very easy to determine whether a site has one or not. Just add “/robots.txt” to the end of a domain name as shown below.

www.connect4consulting.com/robots.txt

If you have a file there, it is your robots.txt file. You will either find a file with words in it, a blank file, or no file at all.

Is your robots.txt file blocking important files?

When your developer creates your website, he or she will add code to the robots.txt file to make sure that it’s not indexed. This code is User-agent: * Disallow: /”.  If your robots.txt file says this, you won’t appear in Google’s organic search results.

What to do next:

  • If you see “Disallow: /”, talk to your developer immediately. There could be a good reason it’s set up that way, or it may be an oversight. If there’s content after the “Disallow: /”, then the robots.txt file could be set up correctly, but it warrants a discussion with your developer.
  • If you have a complex robots.txt file, like many ecommerce websites, you should review it line-by-line with your developer to make sure it’s correct.

Use Internal Linking To Boost Your Site’s SEO

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Here is a step-by-step guide that you can use to boost your SEO using internal linking.

What is internal linking?

In case you need a quick overview of internal linking, here it is.

An internal link connects one page of your website to another page on your website.

Sounds pretty simple, right? Every website that has more than one page is connected in this way. It’s a simple issue of website design and website architecture.

Websites have an overall design and architecture that keeps them structured in a logical way, like this common model.

Most websites have a central home page, and branch out into multiple menus and subpages.

One common SEO technique among earlier websites was to organize content into silos, in an attempt to improve keyword presence for a particular keyword category. The silo organizational model was popular until recently. Many SEOs still follow the silo model, because it makes logical sense.

Internal linking can be much simpler! I’ll show you how to perform a simple internal linking method that I’ve created. First, though, it’s helpful to know why internal linking helps.

 

Why is internal linking important?

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Why is internal linking important?

Internal linking is one of the most valuable search engine optimization (SEO) tools.

Why? Because it works.

Google’s algorithm has come a long way since the early days of SEO when it was possible to game the system. Now it is nearly impossible to game the system.

However as advanced as the algorithm is, there are still simple things that you can do that will give you an immediate boost in SEO.

Internal linking is one of them. It’s not a trick or a gimmick, and it’s certainly not hard to do.

Here are some of the benefits of internal linking:

  • internal linking improves the indexation of your website – if your website has strong internal linking, it’s easier for Google’s web crawler to find new content that you publish and link to. If your content is woven together with multiple internal links, Google’s web crawler can get to your new content faster and therefore index your site faster.
  • internal linking increases the backlink earning potential of deep content pages – if you look at where most of your website’s backlinks are coming from, you will see that most come from your home page. What you want to do is create more back links from pages deeper within your site. If you create a strong internal linking structure, you can boost the link earning potential of the internal pages by creating clear click paths throughout your website.
  • internal linking spreads the strength of the site to internal pages – when your website receives a link to the homepage, some of the value of that link is passed on to your internal pages.
  • internal linking with anchor text adds content value to an electronic signal – an internal link is a simple piece of HTML code that links one web page to another. When you create an internal link with anchor text as opposed to an image or navigational text, the value of the internal link increases. Anchor text improves the value of the link by adding keywords an content to the linking process. Just make sure that your anchor text is related to the link.
  • internal linking provides value for your website user – internal linking is an SEO technique but this is perhaps the most important point. Internal linking makes it easier for your website visitor to explore your content.

Not ranking for your brand name? Easy SEO Fix

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Search Engine Optimization can get highly technical and complex quickly, but there are also easy SEO fixes. So before anyone convinces you to tackle an SEO list a mile long, ask the simple question:

Am I ranking for my brand name?

If the answer is no, then this needs to be the very first item you optimize on your website. After all, how will anyone find you if you they can’t even search for your business name?

What to do? Type site:yoursite.com into your google search engine and you’ll immediately see how many pages on your site are being indexed by Google.

Connect4 Consulting is ranking for 1,350 results. Looks like all of our blog posts are working well for our brand name ranking.

What to ask:

  • Is that amount the number of results we are expecting to rank?
  • Are there pages in the index that we don’t want ranked?
  • Are there pages that should be appearing that aren’t ranked or indexed?

What to do next:

  • Do another search and and check different groups of pages on your site and see if they are ranking as well.
  • Check and see if subdomains are indexing.
  • Check old versions of your site and see if they are ranking instead of, or in addition to, your new version.
  • Look out for spam – a good indicator if your site was hacked – you could have spam that is on your site and also indexed by Google.
  • Figure out what’s causing all of the indexing problems and then optimize your site for better SEO results.

 

 

 

SEO Copywriting Mistakes You Should Avoid

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Want to rank high in your particular field? SEO copywriting is critical. The copy – the text and words and ideas that make up your website – is the most important driver of website rankings.  If you create lots of unique, high quality content and don’t make the following mistakes, then your site will rank higher for your desired keywords. SEO copywriting is not just about creating blog posts. Make sure you don’t make the following copywriting mistakes:

  1. Not starting with keyword research – SEO copywriting always starts with keyword research. Think about the terms you want to be found for. Yoast has a great detailed free guide on keyword research.
  2. Bad, unoriginal content – content is king. High quality content will probably help you rank faster than any other SEO approach. However, never write content purely for SEO purposes. Remember your ultimate goal – it’s not just to rank high in search results. For most small businesses, the ultimate goal is to convert website visitors into paying clients. Good, readable content that answers prospective client questions will help your SEO as well as helping you increase your client base.
  3.  Keyword stuffing – do not mention your focus keyword in every sentence. It makes the text awful to read and you will risk a Google penalty for over-optimizing your text.
  4. Focusing on only one focus keyword – don’t focus too much on only one keyword. Try to rank for multiple kewords, key phrases and synonyms.
  5. Unreadable texts – copy should always be easy to read. People should be able to understand what it is you’re trying to tell them.

Conclusion on SEO Copywriting Mistakes

SEO copywriting mistakes are made when people don’t focus enough on the quality of the information they are providing. Website text should be informative and should have an original idea. Text should be easy to read. Text should be optimized for search engines without compromising readability.

Connect4 Consulting specializes in SEO copywriting. Contact us for more information.

What Are Backlinks and Why Are They Important for SEO?

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A backlink or inbound link is a link coming from another site to your website.

The person receiving the link is the one who refers to the link as a backlink. In other words, if someone links to your site, you have a backlink from that person. Backlinks are very different from outbound links (links from your site to another website) and internal links (links from one internal page of your website to another internal page of your website).

Backlinks are important for SEO (search engine optimization) because they:

    • They drive traffic to your website.

If someone posts a backlink on their website to your website, one of their readers might click on it and you will benefit from that referral traffic.

    • They can help you rank higher in search results.

Backlinks tell search engines that your website is an authority on a certain subject. So the more backlinks you have from high quality, high traffic, high authority websites, the better your website will rank in search engine results.

A good inbound link comes from an authoritative website, and uses natural anchor text. Anchor text is simply the text copy that’s hyperlinked, like this. (The anchor text there is “like this.”) Natural anchor text means you’re not just hyperlinking keywords left and right. Google understands the context of a link, so more generic “learn more” and “click here” anchor text can be just as valuable as keyword-optimized anchor text.