It’s a fine line between quality and quantity when it comes to a brand’s SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy, and one Emma Cullen, projects and marketing manager at Melbourne tourist attraction Eureka Skydeck, says was a challenge for them.
Conceding writing copy for SEO is repetitious, Cullen said it was hard, but she would sit there continuously re-writing and re-reading it to make sure it sounds okay.
“It’s about trying to put together creative content that doesn’t seem like it’s repetitious, but also to maintain the SEO and the keyword minimum criteria,” she said.
It’s one SEO strategy to use repeating words or phrases on a webpage, which can increase the likelihood of a website coming up when a user searches those types of terms. But you can’t just stuff a whole heap of repeating words in and hope Google pushes you straight to the top of the search. The balance between quality and quantity is delicate – cross too much into quantity and the page will read badly, get bad reviews and ultimately get pushed down.
A Google search of the quality versus quantity debate also pulled a number of results, with the general viewpoint being quality will always trump quantity.
Google’s own SEO guide for beginners suggests: “Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.”
“It’s hard,” said Cullen. “I will sit there for a long time trying to read and write it and re-write it and make sure it reads well to someone who is actually trying to find information about that topic.
“It is a challenge to try and write that copy, and I guess the more times you do it, the better you get at putting the same sentence in quite a few times.”
When we had a look at the Eureka Skydeck homepage, there were four variations of ‘things to do in Melbourne’, four ‘Melbourne tourist attractions’ variants and ‘Melbourne’ was mentioned 14 times, which were written within around 400 words of copy.
“When you’ve got a whole list of key terms for, say proposals, and you have to work into the copy four different ways to say ‘romantic night in Melbourne’ or ‘romantic proposal ideas’, so the copy, I believe, does become quite repetitious,” added Cullen.
“But that’s not exclusive to us, that’s for all brands that are trying the same strategy.
“The strategy has moved away from just trying to develop heaps and heaps of back links to a lot more credibility. I think Google is now aware you can’t just list a heap of backlinks to your site and that will move you up [in search].”
Not having the in-depth knowledge themselves, and the fact the digital landscape changes at a ridiculous pace, Cullen and the team enlisted the help SEO company Shout.
The brand had realised when people were searching specifically for Eureka Skydeck, the brand was coming up in Google, however when the more generic terms were being searched – such as ‘things to do in Melbourne’ – it was a good scroll down the page before the Skydeck was even mentioned.
When we Googled ‘things to do in Melbourne’ however the Skydeck’s new website wasn’t one of the top results – we had to click to the fourth page – Cullen said the strategy is only halfway there. There’s still a few more months to go.
The results so far though are pleasing for Cullen and the team. Monthly ticket sales have increased by 10 per cent each month, said Cullen, with a 38 per cent lift in traffic website, and 4.5 per cent increase in sales leads. There was also an 80 per cent increase in the click-through rate in generic terms.
