I’ve rallied on about the importance of content quality before now, but it’s great to see a BBC article backing up my claims on the matter.

Clearly, the quality of online content touches many.

As I write, this article is currently trending as ‘most read’ on the entire BBC site – quite some prevalence given the massive international stories breaking at the moment.

The matter could even be seen trending on a popular joke website:

Joke about the impact of spelling mistakes on eCommerce.

Clearly, the issue of content quality touches many of our online experiences. It’s compelling material.

Sean Coughlan’s article covering the state of online content covers Charles Duncombe, a web analyst and entrepreneur from London, who all-too-often finds himself face to face with spelling issues both online and offline.

According to the article, 99% of communication online is done by the written word. Personally, I disagree with the figure but would go so far as to say that a majority of the sales process is governed by the written word.

Just as a pre-recorded apology for a delay to your train journey fails in every way to sound sincere, so would a video sprite guiding me to enter my card details seem quite creepy.

The time-honoured method of written communication is still a vital component in eCommerce.

According to Duncombe, “millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes” – when projected across the whole of Internet retail.

Some might argue, but given that more than £500m sales are made online in the UK alone every week, I am inclined to support this claim.

Casting one’s thoughts to one’s own Internet use, when even so much as a single spelling mistake, even a typo, rears it’s ugly head, one’s trust in a site plummets back down to ground, and often through the floor to the basement.

Better search for an alternative, and quickly

Duncombe goes on to explain that revenues generated per visitor from corrected written content, after the discovery of a mistake were twice as high as with the error in place.

It is perhaps a strange element of our online buying habits, not that we so revere good spelling and grammar, but that we hold written errors in such disdain.

My personal take on the article is a confirmation that while perfect spelling may not double your online revenues, it will certainly guard against lost sales born out of the removal of confidence that poor content brings.

A number of customers have approached us after having purchased unusable content, and then having to go through the embarrassing procedure of subsequently having it proofread and reworked.

In the vast majority of cases, the amount of customer investment in terms of time, resources and capital involved in content rescue hugely outweighed the costs of choosing a trusted provider in the first place.

In conclusion, I’ll say that errors and inconsistencies do cost millions.

However, I support this statement in the sense that a saving made on the rates of a professional content agency can manifest itself in a far greater loss of content efficiency, and not in the sense that magic words can miraculously double your sales.

The Fence
67-69 Cowcross street
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I’m looking forward to the event, and to meeting lots of interesting people from the digital and eCommerce community of the United Kingdom. The event takes place from 18:00 -23:00, so if you are attending, be sure to say hi!

The London Content Strategy Meetup will be an exciting melting pot of discussion and idea-sharing for professionals working in the content arena. If you are attending, come and say hi, and if you are thinking about attending, sign up now to get on the guest list.

Tuesday 7th June 2011 @18:00-21:00

The Mermaid Centre, Puddle Dock, London, EC4V 3DB

See you there!

For this example I will be examining travel and tourism. As subjects, I will be examining identical male twins, separated at birth and raised in different environments.
Twin A grew up in the city and has a fast paced and stressful job. Twin B lives in near isolation in a quiet rural community and works in a post office. They’re both interested in a Mediterranean holiday to a mountainous area on the coast.

Why are they looking for a holiday? We can say with some confidence that they are looking for a holiday for different reasons. The city twin may be looking for relaxation, whereas the country twin may be in search of excitement, although this is not a blanket rule.
In eCommerce, a text usually plays a part in the buying process. The role of that text is to inspire a visitor to become a customer, or rather, deliver the right impulses to convert a visit into a sale. In travel, that text is often a travel guide, but nevertheless, it is a product description.

We must ask ourselves what the twins are looking for in a product description. Essentially, the twins are likely to be inspired by different product descriptions. One by thoughts of tranquil retreats or luxury resorts, the other by adventurous pursuits in the mountains or on the coast.

So what evidence is there to warrant such a content strategy?
Well, research has shown that personalised adverts have increased conversions by up to 60%, which is significant.

Content personalisation should not be considered a blanket rule for the future. While it can of course be applied to many products, consider it a way of streamlining your business by reducing bounce rates and increasing conversions. Additionally, it can be a way of gaining an advantage in competitive markets.

In terms of most applications of Ecommerce, this involves the rolling out of international sites, in the local language, with the needs of the target audience in mind. It’s a big thing today. Many of the leading online shops are managing operations in several markets, or at the very least, have concrete plans to do so.

Yet it needn’t be daunting. With the right content provider as a partner, the process can be done in manageable stages, and in a budget friendly way.

A word all too often associated with localisation is translation, which is what springs to mind when one thinks of rolling out an international site. However, when you’re goal is to localise your keyword marketing strategy, there are a few additional elements that need to be taken into account.

For example, direct translations of keywords from an source language into a target language may not be the best choice in terms of search. Dictionaries may

What is the Panda update by Google? Google’s Panda update is intended to improve the browsing experience for those looking for informative content, achieved by raising the visibility of sites deemed to have high quality content, and reducing the visibility of sites with lower quality content.

Why is it called the ‘Panda’?

The choice by Google to name this update the panda isn’t random. The act of cultivating and hosting acres and acres of low quality content, made simply as filler and without any great focus on providing any useful information is known as farming. It’s quite a frowned upon act by the search engines, as it exploits the algorithms and pollutes the search engine result pages.

Search engines frown upon this practice for a good reason too. It damages the browsing experience of the user if they have to hack their way through a forest of keyword-stuffed results just to get to something that meets their needs; quality information. The Panda update is reducing the visibility of the low level content and giving preference to the high quality content. Therefore, the Panda is eating, cutting down, or otherwise destroying the forest that has grown up around, surrounds, and can often deter or even prevent users from finding the high quality content they desire.

So where do we draw the line?

There are many ways in which a search engine can assess the quality of the content on a page. Consider the following:

Have you ever said: “WTF is this?” and clicked [back]…?

You probably have. That’s probably because the content of the page you visited was irrelevant, repetitive, or poorly written. That’s because little focus was given on providing you, the user, with any kind of quality material. It was simply a page designed to grab your attention for a moment.

You can bet your bottom Dollar also that there was an advert on the page. It’s a low end tactic to gain traffic, but is done so off the backs of search engines, and at the expense of user experience.

Search engines are designed to sort through high volumes of data, and return accurate and relevant results. They do so by taking note of what you have on your pages (AKA: indexing) and use this information to determine how relevant and useful your page is in relation to the search query. This is done through an algorithm, which is a series of instructions to be followed (by a computer, for example) in order to perform a function.

People soon learned to trick search engines. By increasing the number of instances a keyword appears within a page, you make the page appear more focused, more specific, and perhaps more relevant. However, if the number of instances simply increases disproportionately to the amount of relevant information, this becomes another frowned upon activity known as keyword stuffing.

The tactic of keyword stuffing has been used widely in order to trick search engines into thinking that a page is more relevant than it actually is, usually to generate impressions for a particular advertisement. Search engines don’t like this because it pollutes results and makes the engine seem less effective at finding relevant information.

More often than not, the keywords are stuffed into what is known as filler text. Almost nonsensical mumbo jumbo that creates no argument nor answers any question. It’s there, parading under the banner of content when in fact, it’s really nothing whatsoever at all.

You only have to ask yourself how often you have hit the ‘back’ button because what you were reading was generally a load of rubbish to improve your understanding of how search engines, and how this update works. On a daily basis we are confronted with blocks of text in websites. It’s part of the browsing experience, some might say.

However, search engines are logging data, and keep a record of this. They use it to assess various aspects of pages, such as quality. If a page has, for example, a high bounce rate (a high rate of people clicking the [back] button), accompanied by a very low average-time-spend-on-page value, then one can reasonably conclude that the page wasn’t very relevant to the search term entered into the engine.

Therefore, it’s low quality. Let’s put it to the bottom of the pile.

In contrast, sites with lower bounce rates and longer time-spent-on-page values indicate that users didn’t want to hit [back] as soon as they landed on the page, and that they actually spent some time reading the information. Hopefully they got something out of it.

Have you ever said: “This is drivel” or words to that effect…?

You probably have, and that was probably because what you were reading was drivel. It could also have been produced by a machine. There are some companies who promise to auto-generate content, but it must be said that the effort going into creating that content is minimal, hence the generally accepted definition of the adjective, ‘automatic’ which in this sense of the word is essentially:

“functioning with little or no human input, effort, or control”

Remember the Internet is a communication platform, designed for people to share information with each other. It’s not simply a way of attracting attention. True, you can attract attention for your business via use of the Internet, but the Internet itself is not a fast track to success, nor was it ever made to be.

You can attract attention by providing good quality content. Publish an informative article that delivers the information people are looking for and you will be on to a winner. People will enjoy reading it and are likely to:

1. give you their custom (if a business related article)
2. share this with their friends (if interesting, well written, etc.)

Both of these outcomes are great from your perspective. Either somebody buys from you and/or shares your content with their friends, thus exposing your content with their friends, who are more likely to trust the word of a friend than the occasionally sinister undertone of an advertising or marketing message.

Why will this have happened?

You addressed the needs of the user, rather than your own. You provided sought after information, and just as importantly, a good user experience. Your goal should be to make people pleased to have visited your page, read your article, blog post, description, guide, or whatever.

In conclusion

You could argue that good content was created with the intention to inform, and that content created with the sole intention of attracting attention can be categorised as bad content, and you wouldn’t be far off. However, the upshot of this entire article is not simply to rant about how content that can be good or bad, it’s about the Panda update.

The bottom line is that Google’s Panda update is designed to determine the quality of a page’s content through quantifiable means such as bounce rates and times spent on pages. They are publicly stating that they are now ranking digital content according to what they consider quantifiable means of determining quality.

What may have worked before is to a large extent now confined to the realms of history,. For this reason, the smart web shop operator will be looking for ways in which to adjust, synchronise or even replace the content that search engines are now deeming to be low quality. Remember also, that updates such as Google’s panda are certainly a thing of the future, and certainly not going to be limited to a single search engine.

/rant