I’ve always believed in the long-term benefits of genuinely good content on a website, but recently I had the opportunity to observe those benefits first hand with solid data. It’s always good to see data backing up best practices in digital marketing so it’s worth sharing that example.
A UK-based digital marketing agency had previously worked on developing the digital marketing strategy of The Live-in Care Hub, a not-for-profit organisation in the elderly care sector, for over 4 years. The strategy had been successful but, for a variety of reasons, the organisation had to cease their activity in 2022.
For the next year the website did not have a single change but the library of evergreen content, in-depth articles and research reports continued to drive increasing numbers of visitors to the informational/educational Live-in Care Hub website. After about a year the traffic starting to decline gradually due to inactivity on the website but even after 18 months of inactivity there was still a decent number of visitors to the site, demonstrating the long-term benefits of their highly valuable content assets.
In today’s competitive internet landscape it’s worth a reminder of what just some of those benefits are:
Enhanced User Engagement
Engaging content keeps visitors on your site for longer, reducing bounce rates and signalling to search engines that your content has reached the intended audience, and that people have found what they wanted and expected. Users are more likely to return if they find valuable, high-quality information and also more likely to share content on social media and amplify your reach – potentially attracting new audiences and referrals.
Improved Search Engine Rankings (SEO)
Well-written content that is helpful and people-centred demonstrates to search engines like Google your site’s purpose and enable it to appear in the search listings for related queries. The same informative and insightful content will also naturally gain backlinks from other websites, signalling credibility and trust to both people and search engines. This provides sustained traffic over time as you can see in the graph below. This is particularly important for organisations such as The Live-in Care Hub because all of their content relates to the health and care of elderly and frail people so needs to be created by experts with real-world experience in their field.
Image from Google Analytics 4 courtesy of The Live-in Care Hub
Better Conversion Rates
High-quality content helps educate users, addressing concerns and enabling informed decision-making. In the case of live-in care for older people, where care is provided 24/7 in a person’s own home, this is a lesser-known alternative to care homes in the UK so raising awareness has been a key objective. The content was crafted with the intention of guiding people towards further information, particularly positive statistics on health outcomes when cared for at home. Calls-to-action on this non-profit website were, therefore, not about promoting services or products, nor about seeking subscriptions or sign ups, but instead about genuine educational materials for elderly people and their families.
Sustainability and Compounding Value
While technology and healthcare treatments advance at pace, the problems and concerns of elderly people in our society remain consistent. Evergreen content on these timeless topics continues to attract readers long after publication, providing ongoing value. And there is a compounding effect – the more quality content created, the greater the cumulative benefit as a website attracts loyal audiences. Of course, in this example the visitor numbers could only be sustained for so long once new content ceased to be produced and eventually their competitive advantage was lost.
Fortunately, 2 years after it’s closure, The Live-in Care Hub was reformed with some of the original members and the same digital marketing agency, Ditto Digital, was employed once again to rebuild their digital marketing strategy.
Rebuilding The Competitive Advantage
Quality content that differentiated this website from competitors because it’s main focus was on raising awareness of better options for elderly care, had always served the organisation well. It had enabled them to be positioned as a forward-thinking leader via their educational content in the form of articles, research reports and case studies.
The new digital marketing strategy will again invest in high-quality written content. However, 2 years on the digital landscape has changed and so more effort will be placed on more clearly demonstrating the organisation’s real-world experience and expertise in their field; and on improving the user-experience by improving the speed with which people can interact with the website. Hopefully, I will be able to keep you posted on progress.