When it comes to your website, no matter which way you paint it, content is the life blood of digital marketing success.

Content, is a lot more than just words on a page, it defines your businesses social media fans, followers you choose to associate with, how visitors engage with your website and finally which keywords search engines determine your website is relevant for.

As a small business you probably find it very easy to talk about your business.  Topics such as what you do, who you are, what customers you serve and so on are easy to talk about.

Often the issue small businesses do face, however, is finding the time to write their content down and even writing about their business for the World Wide Web.

Don’t panic!  Your website will seem a lot more authentic if it is written by you and not so perfect.

What’s more important is that your website appears authentic and your customers find the answers to the questions they are looking for.

With that in mind we’ve compiled a few ideas to get you started creating content.

What top topics are your users looking for?

Both Google and Bing provide a very simple method for researching, it’s call your address bar.  Simply type in there the key phrases you’re interested in and prior to hitting the “return” key you will be presented with a whole host of other key terms.

Generally speaking these terms are the most popular words or phrases related to what you typed in, so make a note of these to begin getting your content creativity juices flowing.

Be trendy

Google Trends is more than just a tool used to see what’s trending in the market place.  It can be used to see what kinds of volumes certain key phrases are getting via Google or Bing.

You are able to wittle this data down to county or even your local city.

Google will also suggest even more key phrases related next to the geographical overlay, so don’t ignore these.

What questions do you get asked?

Every Thursday we normally write a how to guide, we find our motivation comes from the questions we get asked on a weekly or even daily basis.

The reason being is because if our customers have issues surrounding a certain area offline, the chances are they have them online as well.

So don’t be afraid to use an entire page dedicated to answering a question you have been asked by one of your customers as this will help maximise your ranking potential for each question on the search engines.

What’s unique about your service area

Communicating what makes you different is vital.

However,  never underestimate the value of localising your business to your country, county or town.

In fact both Google and Bing are more likely to rank your page higher the more local the page is.

In fact from an SEO stand point it is considered to be best practice to create a page dedicated to each town, county or region that you serve.

If you serve an entire country, consider purchasing a domain name for the specific country. For instance dot FR if you serve customers in France.

Case studies

What are you working on right now?  Or what have you been working on?

Tell people about these projects and be as explicit as you can about the services performed, how, what, when and why your products helped customers achieve their goals.

Case studies, portfolios of work are what make your website different to that of the competition so stay away from using “canned” marketing speak  and focus on telling the full truthful story.

This will help future customers make a decision on whether to buy from you as oppose to one of your competitors.

Use of video and transcripts

In 2016 video has exploded! Airborne drones make it possible for us to record video from the air and smartphones make it easier for us all to become videographers of some form.  However there is a right and wrong way to produce a video.

We would recommend that when using video for your content that you record it via video camera and you include a transcript of all that is being said.

Video is great to use when carrying out interviews with suppliers, celebrities or people with higher social media standing than that of your own business banding.