I learned several successful marketing methods by writing articles online. The same rules apply to business websites.

Writing useful content on your business website, to give your readers something of value, will help bring more traffic and lead to business success. It will also give your website a professional look.

Here are five ways to achieve that non-cheesy professional looking website.

1. Attracting Quality Visitors

When you write quality content on the Internet that offers value to the reader, you will get quality traffic from search engines. When I say quality traffic, I’m talking about visitors who are looking specifically for what you have to offer.

If your website is not focused on the kind of person you want to attract, then you will get misdirected traffic. Those people will leave as soon as they arrive.

Using the wrong terminology or the wrong keywords might cause a search engine to match a query with the wrong topic. This causes a misguided visitor to fall on your page.

You didn’t want them anyway, but search engines don’t know the difference. If Google tracks short visits or bounces, then they will assume your site is cheesy and has little or no value. This will lower your ranking to the point where you may no longer get search engine traffic as all.

2. Make Good Use of Google Analytics Reports

Your Google Analytics reports help discover poorly performing web pages.

Poorly performing pages may not necessarily be poorly written. They may just be attracting the wrong traffic. Using the wrong terminology or the wrong keywords might cause a search engine to match a query with the wrong topic. This causes a misguided visitor to fall on your page.

When you review you Google Analytics reports, you can see what search terms visitors used and why it matched to one of your pages.

With this information, you’ll know what changes you need to make in order bring visitor traffic that matches your business. That’s a quality visitor that you want.

3. Add Value to a Marketing Website

You can’t just sell stuff. You need to provide something of value to the reader. Write about your products with helpful guidance and useful information that your potential customers are really looking for.

These readers will stick around since they found something that relates to what they want. They’ll read what you have to say and they may even check out other pages on your site for more content if they feel they got something of value from you.

Since I had started writing online I began writing articles for my business site too. I wrote informational pages that were not focused on selling. Their purpose was to give the reader something they can use, without asking for anything in return.

Prior to this, my business site was full of product descriptions. I thought I had a professional website, but it was too focused on sales content and not on providing helpful discussions. I didn’t realize I had a cheesy website.

By changing the whole concept, including articles that provide value to the reader, I found that visitors stuck around long enough to eventually become paying customers.

4. Rework and Improve Web Pages

The job never ends. It’s important to pay attention to what works and what doesn’t. The information I get from Google Analytics reports is terrific.

You can get a lot of useful data about how well your articles are working, and why. This information is a goldmine.

It’s important to review poorly performing web pages and work on improving them. I like to analyze non-working pages by comparing them to the ones that are working. This helps discover what might be missing as well as what works.

Google notices when pages are updated. Those pages get a higher ranking because they want to send search traffic to pages that are being maintained rather than pages that as left to stagnate.

Google assumes pages that are not updated occasionally may be outdated or obsolete. Therefore, it’s a benefit to you to keep your pages up to date.

5. How to Get Content Ideas for Your Website

Articles are useful for sharing information among all customers. As I had conversations from time to time with customers, I would write articles about the topics that came up and post them on my business site.

The questions people asked, and the answers I gave, were always useful for other customers too. It was important to everyone for me to take the time to write these articles and include them on my website.

As it turned out, the informational pages helped bring search engine traffic. It also had positive results with sales of my products. No longer a cheesy look. People were getting what they came for and didn’t feel I was just interested in taking their money.

Conclusion and Review

You see, when people do a search related to your product, Google will put more value on web pages that give the reader something of value.

If all you have are pages full of advertising or sales-focused product descriptions, then you are falling into the vast sea of all the other e-commerce sites that are selling things on the Internet.

However, if you have pages with useful articles, Google will eventually send more traffic your way. It takes time for that to build up. They rank those pages based on how long people stay to read.

Google also ranks based on how long people stay within your entire site. If a reader feels they got something of value, they may be encouraged to look around your site some more.

Google tracks if someone left completely or if they followed a link to another page on your site. If your visitor first sees something that is focused on a sales pitch, then he or she will leave quickly. That short duration looks bad for you. Your search engine ranking will suffer for it.

When you provide value with useful articles, visitors may come back for more. You get repeat visitors. Google keeps track of repeat visitors too.

Now you know how to avoid that cheesy look with a professional looking website that will attract quality traffic, improve your website ranking, and improve the success of your business.