“Content is King” is a common term used by search engine optimisation companies and internet marketers and is especially true of a websites home page.

I had been encouraging one of my clients to add some content to the home page for over a year, and there are some clear statistics on how this has improved things.

For a long time, I was battling with “extra text doesn’t work with the home page design”, or “there is no room to put the text” – but deeper in the site there were always some good content pages built from the same template that could handle this amount of text content.

Eventually I convinced them to add an extra 450 words (there had only been about 50 on the page prior to this – everything else was in a graphic) “below the fold”, so in an area where the users of a “standard” resolution browser would have to scroll down the page to read it.

6 months on I have been reviewing the effect on the “keyword growth”, which is the number of phrases that are used to find the site. At the start of the campaign, when the site was brand new, the client was using PPC to supplement our organic activity on the site, and there initially were a decent number of phrases used to find the site.

This spend was reduced after not generating enough leads at the time, and there were a number of months where there was no growth in the number of keywords being used to find the site. However, looking at the chart below, you can see when this content was added to the site – 6 months on and the number of phrases being used to find the site has more than trebled from less than 500 phrases per month to well over 1500:

This just goes to prove – to be found by search engines, you need to have a decent volume of text content on your website, and particularly on your home page! Content really is king!