The film Field of Dreams came out in cinemas in 1989, and launched a single phrase that stuck in the minds of everyone who watched it (and many who didn’t). The film’s central character, beset by doubt, wonders whether he should bother to build the stadium of his dreams, and whether anyone will even show up to it, and is told by a voice: “If you build it, they will come”.
Since 1989, that phrase has been used to death by people seeking the cheerlead the ideas of others. In the world of digital marketing, you’ll often see it rendered as “publish great content, and they will come”. The comforting message behind this is that if you provide well-written blog posts and evergreen content, then people will find you and they’ll love your site. But is it actually true? As much as we’d like to think that a cutely crafted article or a timely analysis of an issue would draw in the traffic we’re looking for, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that’s not the case.
Great content is good, but it needs to be seen
There are innumerable famous chefs in the world, but there is every chance that the best cook on the planet is someone you’ve never heard of. They’re cooking dinner every day for themselves and their loved ones, while less talented chefs are opening prestige restaurants in Manhattan, London and Paris. The reason is that – perhaps deliberately – the non-celebrity chefs don’t put themselves on the map by seeking engagement from the industry. However, if you’ve got a website you want people to visit, you’re going to need to put yourself out there. Any lead generation agency will be able to tell you how to pull more people in, and that’s when the quality of your content will become more widely known.
They can provide strategies and techniques that not only draw attention to your site but also enhance your B2B website strategy, ensuring that visitors not only come but stay and engage with your content. By applying these tactics, the visibility of your website in a crowded digital space will significantly increase.
Great content is good, but it needs to be searchable
Search engines are how most people online find what they’re looking for. When was the last time you typed an entire website URL into your browser? Even when we know the address, many of us still type out the name of a site and let Google do the rest. Long story short, you will want Google to pick up your content, and it’s not going to do that just because you know how to craft a clever play on words. Yes, good content can augment the traffic flow to your website, but if nobody can find it in the first place, that’s not a lot of help. If you can write good content, you can write good SEO-friendly content. It takes longer, but it’s worth it.
Great content is good, but you need to promote it
A great content writer isn’t always a great content promoter. As skilled as you may be with language, that doesn’t automatically translate to being good at promoting it, especially if you feel that good content should speak for itself. In an ideal world, maybe it would. But in the real world, you have to be prepared to speak for it. That will involve promoting your content in every way you can think of. Social media promotion, using hashtags and targeted posts, is one way. You’ll also need to look at joining online communities, writing guest posts on other blogs, and paying for ads among other approaches.
If you create great content, maybe they will come. Eventually, the content will be what people associate with your site. But it’s fanciful to imagine that great content will be enough in the beginning. You’ll need to put the work in to begin with, and it will take more than the content itself to draw traffic to your site. If you’re prepared for a bit of hard work, you’ll get that traffic – just remember that it won’t come from nowhere.
