If content is king, shouldn’t we all try and fill our websites with as much text as is humanely possible? Won’t that get us the highest ranking in Google? Why don’t we just write pages and pages and pages of stuff, as much as we possibly can, and we’ll get to number one, won’t we? After all Content is King.

Content is king, but only if the content is high quality and is genuinely helpful to your users. Anything else is indulgent at best, and harmful at worst. Why? Because if you follow every SEO rule, you will have a highly visible website that no-one wants to visit.

Is it better to get 100,000 viewers a month and a 10% conversion rate, or 50,000 viewers a month and a 20% conversion rate? Without a doubt, the latter. It’s cheaper to market to 50,000 people, it’s cheaper to pay for the bandwidth of 50,000 visitors. In fact, the only argument I can think of for the former is "brand awareness" – but that argument falls flat on it’s face – because it’s better to have fewer people who love you than many people who like you.

Content is king when it’s quality content. Quantity is fine if you’re the next Wikipedia, or have an amazonian amount of stock for your online store. Even then, Amazon and Wikipedia have excellent quality (and no that’s not debatable – wikipedia may be a dubious source of real fact sometimes – but it delivers exactly what it promises – an encyclopedia by the people for the people).

Most websites would do better with half the word count. Are there ways in which you can cut down on your content? Remove anything that doesn’t give real value to your customers. Ask yourself the simple question after each sentence – so what? "Alpha Wave Media are pioneers of excellence and employ cutting edge technology to serve our clients needs" – so what? Yawn. I expect that from any web creation company. "Alpha Wave have 8 years experience making websites work for businesses". It’s shorter, but much better.

Go through your website and after every question, ask yourself "So what?". The result will be clear concise text that resonates with the people you can help.

Ben