* What Does “Build Content for SEO” Mean?

The SEO world is fascinated with “building content”. What exactly does that mean for a music lesson studio owner? (Teaser: It’s much easier than you think!)

By Dirk Johnson

Go to just about any SEO guru’s site and they will tell you to “build content” if you want to rank well. Even Google’s own search engineers will tell you to “create great content”.

What the hell does this mean? And more specifically, what does this mean to the lesson studio owner like you, who already has plenty to do and “building content” is nowhere near the top of your priority list?

The “Throw Crap at the Wall” Approach to Content

Does it mean that you need create all manner of music-related information to post to your website, and then miraculously, someday, maybe years down the road, your site will rank at the top for the keywords that matter to your business?

Sorry, no, it doesn’t work that way at all. In fact, that ham-fisted, backwards approach will likely NEVER work for a music lesson studio! Yet, there are SEO consultants who advise that you do exactly that.

Search rankings are not at all based on the sheer volume of content on your site. Not even a little bit. In fact, the “sheer volume” approach has been tried, and it has failed.

A single page website, executed well, can easily out-rank a site that is loaded with unfocused content.

“Great Content” is Audience Dependent

Let’s break this down with a hypothetical example. It will then become much more clear what kind of content you need for your lesson business website.

Let’s say that you want to create a hub or portal site that is all about gardening and that you want sell ads or be an affiliate marketer to the gardening-related industry.

To do that successfully, you will need to generate a barn full of  gardening-related search traffic.

Informational Queries

People ask all kinds of questions about gardening using a search engine, such as, “how do I lower the Ph value of my soil?”, or “what is the best type of tomato for northern climates?” It’s endless.

To get this kind of traffic, your site needs to be optimized for those kinds of specific searches. You’d want to have content that answers a specific, common question, but with proper title tags, descriptions, headlines, images, and page content.

That’s how you’d compete for general gardening traffic on the Web. You anticipate the most common questions, then answer them with a page on your website.

In any case, those kinds of queries are informational inquiries. People may not be looking for a vendor or a specific product. They just want answers to questions. 

To compete for informational query traffic on a broad-based subject, your site must have a lot of good content.

Service Queries are Very Different

Not every search is an informational query, and not every website needs to try to answer information queries.

Some queries are what we can term “service inquiries”. They come from people who are looking for a service provider who can deal with their issue at hand. Plumbers, locksmiths, mowing services, painters, and yes, music lesson studios.

In these cases, the search query will look like “Plumber in Plumville PA” or “Locksmith in Lock Haven”. There’s a service request, a service area, and sometimes a qualifier like “best” or “cheapest” or “oldest”.

The searcher is using a search engine as if they were using the old Yellow Pages. They just want a list of local service vendors that they can contact.

The person doing the search doesn’t really want to know the details of how to unplug their drain or unlock their car or mow their lawn.  They just want someone who can do it. It’s not an informational inquiry, it’s a service inquiry.

Music Lessons are Service Inquiries

People who are looking for music lessons in their hometown are not at all interested in knowing about music theory or the Italian words used in standard notation. They don’t care about the scale length of a Gibson Les Paul guitar or the various types of harps.

People who use a search engine to find out about “piano lessons in Peoria” just want to know WHO provides lessons in their hometown and what are the various criteria, as in private lessons, group lessons, age limits, skill level, costs, etc.
 
Our Job is to Answer their Questions!

THAT, my friends, is the CONTENT that you need to provide to them, so that your site then shows up in the search results when someone does a service inquiry for music lessons for the various instruments that you teach and for the towns or areas that you serve.

HOW TO: Set up SPECIFIC pages that are focused directly on the service inquires that matter to your business. Match the page title, description, page name, headline, content and images with the service inquiry that you are aiming to attract.

In the content of the page, answer ALL the questions that these people might have about your program. This is how you attract who you want to serve and weed out those you don’t.

That is a “focused landing page”, and THAT is the kind of content that you need on your website to begin to compete properly for search traffic in your town.

A focused landing page IS GREAT CONTENT!

Even though it is entirely self-promotional, a good focused landing page speaks DIRECTLY to the searcher who is looking for your type of service in their town. You can’t create any more targeted content than that.

Google search engineers have stated specifically that they want to deliver the BEST POSSIBLE RESULTS to the people who use their search engine.  When someone searches for “Clarinet lessons in Claremont”, then if you have a page that is aimed at solving that searcher’s problem (they need clarinet lessons in Claremont), then that IS GREAT CONTENT for that inquiry.

You don’t have to explain the variations between clarinets, or how to clean a clarinet, or anything else like that. You are not making money on those aspects of the clarinet and you have no solid business reason to answer them on your website!

Focus like a laser on the service inquiry content that matters to you. If you do, you just might go straight to the top of the results.

Stop Fretting Over the Calls for Constant Content Building

Some SEO gurus want you to “create content” on a regular basis. Blog, blog, blog, and then blog some more.

With proper pages aimed at specific service inquires, the chances are very good that you don’t have to jump through those blogging hoops, and second, if the blog is not aimed at the search terms that are going to bring you clients, what is the purpose of it? Content costs time and money to create, and we have far too little of both in this business. 

Creating content that has no value to anyone, as means to “bulk up” a website for SEO purposes, is a complete waste of time. Don’t fall for it. If you want to do create content for other legitimate business reasons, then, by all means, go ahead, but realize that it will probably do nothing for your service inquiry SEO effort, unless other site owners people link to it from their website. Then it might help your SEO efforts, but don’t count on getting those links 

Your “content”, at least for SEO purposes, should be aimed at attracting the traffic that matters, and in almost all cases, those are the local service inquires for various types of music lessons. Aim at that, and forget the siren calls to waste your time creating content that provides you with no benefit.

Don’t Hold Yourself Back!

Using the SEO Guide for music lesson studios, you can either do all of this yourself, or if you don’t have time, or if you prefer to have someone else manage the basics of SEO for you, please contact me.

And, as always, if you want to get a quick review of your current website SEO condition, please contact me with your website address, and I’ll be glad to have a look and report back to you what I find.

Thanks again for tuning in!