Modern trends favour sleek and simplistic designs and lately we have had an influx of clients requesting websites that are minimalistic and “clean”. In most cases they lean towards including less written text and prefer images and banners to do the talking. While we really do agree that less is more, removing content from a website to keep it simple and clean-cut could do harm to the purpose of your online presence, that is, it could hurt your search engine rankings.

While you want to please your audiences eye, you also want them to find you online, and then you want to inform them appropriately. This means that you still need to include a good amount of quality and SEO-rich content into your website design. In order for your site to show up in the search results, search engines have to know what your website is about, and in this regard, your written web content plays a very big role.

It’s not just about SEO however. You want those who arrive at your site to stay on your site. You want them to arrive at the information they are looking for and you want to aim to please.

With this in mind, we have compiled a few main reasons as to why you need to ensure that a good amount of quality content is included in your website.

Content provides the information that your viewers are searching for. While a sleek design is pleasing to the eye and makes a good impression, it’s not helpful if it is not accompanied by quality and applicable content. Whether you have an online store or are simply showcasing your services, you need written content that, first of all, assures your readers that they have arrived at the right place and secondly, encourages them to read further and become a potential customer or client.

One way to ensure that your viewers have a pleasant user-experience while adding to the SEO value of your website is to include internal links (hyperlinks) into your content. An internal link is text within the content that is hyperlinked to another relevant page on your website and they encourage your readers to browse through your pages.

Search engines, like Google, like to see internal links throughout a website and it helps them to index your pages accordingly. The easier you make it for search engines to index your site, the better your chance of it being indexed well (think first or second page placement).

To be found in search engines, your website needs to include keywords or key-phrases. This means that you will need to included content which incorporates the relevant search terms that you want to be found for. The more terms and keywords you have, the better your chances are to be found online among the masses.

Content is an excellent way to invite your audiences to a call to action. On your website you can (and should) encourage your readers to take an action that pertains to the reason or purpose of your site. Examples of calls to actions are: Contact Us, Request A Quote, Add Item To Cart, Download Forms, Leave A Review – and so on. Adding calls to action throughout your site may help to increase conversions.

Content is king, and we do not say this light-heartedly. Not only can content improve your search engine rankings, bring quality visitors to your website and increase user experience, it also has the potential to turn browsers into customers and clients. So, while we are all for less is more, we do encourage our clients to not skimp on content!