Some content marketing can cut the mustard, so to speak, and help draw in more sales. However, poorly written content could be deemed spam by Google’s algorithms and damage your business’s organic SEO efforts.

Content marketing is a bit like petrol for your car; not all petrol is the same, but some are much higher octane and bring about better performance for that vehicle. This is the same with content marketing; some well-written work can help to improve your website’s U.X. Google E-EAT will be deemed as good quality, and if shoppers spend a long time reading it (the dwell time), it can massively help improve your business’s search engine optimisation.

Written by: Ryan Walsh

Date: 24/09/2024

Content marketing is like gravy to a Sunday dinner—it’s essential. However, the work must be very well written to earn those powerful backlinks, have a good Google E-EAT score, and have an extended dwell time.

So, in summary, here’s a breakdown of how to quickly assess whether your content marketing is helping to improve your business SEO:

– Is the dwell time high?
– Is the bounce rate low?
– Are there many good quality do-follow and no-follow backlinks?

Which SEO tools would you recommend using to see if content marketing is helping to improve our SEO?
Google Analytics for bounce rates, time on site and how shoppers are finding your website

Some SEO tools will tell you things, such as how many backlinks your website has. However, to work out how well your business’s content marketing is improving its SEO, you must look at metrics such as bounce rates, time on site, and how shoppers find your company website.

For this, we recommend using Google Analytics; it’s completely free, yet because of a tool that Alphabet offers, Google, you know that all of the SEO data is entirely reliable. So, we would recommend checking the following:

 

Dwell time
If you like a shop, let’s say a shop in one of the old arcades in Cardiff, you’re going to spend a long time browsing the items and maybe talking to the staff, and you may like that shop a lot.

So, you’ll most likely spend a long time in that shop.

This is the same for a company’s website; if you are interested in their products or services, you’ll likely spend much longer on that website. SEO consultants refer to this as dwell time, which is how long a shopper spends on the website. You will want shoppers to spend as long as possible on your website because they’re more likely to want to buy an item when they read about the various products you sell.

You don’t want shoppers to leave more or less straight away, so you will wish for the dwell time to be as high as possible. Google Algorithms will know that a shopper is spending a long time browsing your website, browsing many different products, and perhaps the average shopper spends well over 10 minutes on your website. Google Rank Brain, that’s Google’s A. Most shoppers spend a long time on your company website, which is fantastic for your SEO.

 

Make sure that the written work is valuable.

Ever since the Google Helpful content update plus Google E-EAT, it’s more important than ever that content marketing is well written. It must be useful to shoppers. This way, it’s likely to have a high dwell time. When Google Rank Brain picks up that the bounce rate is low and the dwell time is high, the piece of work will start ranking higher in Google SERPS.

 

Earn quality backlinks

What can happen is, when your business publishes say a really well written blog post, and a lot of people find the advice you have published helpful your business can start to gain backlinks. By gaining a mixture of do-follow and no-follow backlinks, what this can do, is start to improve your business organic search engine optimisation, so that your business starts to rank higher on Google.

 

Are you retaining shoppers via mobile and also on desktop?

It’s sometimes possible for many shoppers to come via organic SEO or desktop, such as on their Apple laptops. The engagement might be high among shoppers on desktops; for example, the bounce rate might be super low.

However, the bounce rate might be super high when you compare this to mobile phone engagement. This could be because the mobile version is not well designed; for example, the main menu on a smartphone is not simple to use; the menu makes it hard for shoppers to get to a product they want. For example, the list of products might be too long on the main menu, causing the shopper to scroll through too many product categories.

This is why the mobile and desktop designs must be perfect if you want the bounce rate to be as low as possible on both desktop and mobile.
How are shoppers getting to your website?

Sure, you can use Google Search Console to quickly get an idea of the number of clicks your website gets from Google Search Engine Results pages, which gives you an excellent idea of how many organic visitors you get.

Yet, it would be best if you also wanted to know how many visitors are coming via Google AdWords, social media, and directly to your company website. For this, you often have to use Google Analytics, yet Google offers both tools for free, so our SEO agency would highly recommend using both.

Use Google Analytics to see how shoppers are finding your business

Let’s say you run a business in Cardiff that sells a product across the U.K. You might know that many of your visitors find your business via Instagram and Facebook. It might be that 80% of the shoppers come via your company’s social media accounts.

Yet for some other businesses, such as a local solicitor’s practice, 80% of visitors might come via organic search engine optimisation.

We recommend using Google Analytics to determine how shoppers are finding your business and your company online.

 

Are finding your business via:

Organic search
Organic social
Referral traffic?
Paid search
Paid social

New Users vs returning customers

Many businesses use Google Analytics to determine the number of monthly visitors who are return customers versus brand-new customers. This information might even shape the company’s offers and promotions; for example, after one item, they offer 10% off the next item the customer purchases.

When you know that your business is getting a lot of returning visitors, you might want to offer those customers an offer. Perhaps you use Mail Chimp to provide these customers with an offer on their next purchase with you. Many businesses, especially online retailers, use Google Analytics to determine how many visitors are returning customers.

 

Where does your business rank on Google?

So, any business should have a list of SEO words and phrases that they want their business to rank on the first page of Google.co.uk. Then, you could use SEO tools such as Google Search Console or another high-quality SEO tool such as Moz Pro to track how well your business’s search engine optimisation is improving every week or, let’s say, month.

Now, let’s say you’re a plumbing business and want to appear higher for “emergency plumbers.” You notice that in your Google Search Console business, you are not appearing in the first ten pages on Google for this term.

So, you might work with your digital marketing agency to improve your SEO in this area. You might write more guides and evergreen content marketing to help improve your company’s SEO so that you rank higher on Google for “emergency plumbers.”

 

Make sure that all your content marketing can be read

404-page errors

It could be that a link has broken on your e-commerce or brochure website. This causes a bad UX, which stands for user experience.
Now, causing a bad UX can mean the bounce rate jumps sharply. So, you do need to fix any 404-page errors, as this causes a bad UX. At the same time, they can also damage your SEO because Googlebot can’t crawl and index the page. After all, the link has become broken. So, if you do have any broken links on your company website, make sure you talk to an SEO expert so that they can fix these issues.

How we can help

Google E-EAT

We recommend that all blog posts and content marketing added to your company website be written with Google E-EAT in mind.
Google E-EAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. All the text you add to your company website must be well-written and written by an expert.

If the written work is deemed spam, it can negatively impact your business’s SEO. Plus, if a lot of low-quality content marketing, such as duplicated text, is added to your company website, this could cause the business to incur an algorithmic penalty.
A Google algorithmic penalty can mean your business is quickly removed from Google. So, you should only purchase

 

How we can help your business

Monthly SEO work

We work with various businesses, but most are based in Wales. We offer fixed-priced SEO packages, which allow us to spend time every month improving your business’s organic SEO.

One way we help our clients get onto page one of Google.co.uk is by writing high-quality content marketing every month. We fully understand Google E-EAT; therefore, we write high-quality, white-hat content marketing.

We have experience working with a wide range of different businesses here in Wales. If your company wants to get onto page one of Google.co.uk, we have the SEO team to help you achieve this. We can build quality links and write high-quality content marketing to help your company obtain more sales.

We have over ten years of experience working with Welsh businesses. So why not call us today for a free quote?

How do you determine whether your content marketing is helping improve your SEO?

We have written an article to help businesses understand whether their content marketing is helping to improve their organic SEO or not.