Save lives, change your content

This post is fairly off topic. Nontheless, I’m going to talk about the thing that’s not at the tip of most people’s tongues in early January – cigarettes. Yes, I’m here to talk about giving up smoking.

Today, I was working from home and happened to have to work in front of the warmth of a coal fire (while office was cold and heating was being fixed). I also happened to be in front of a television, a television that was on.

On RTE’s The Afternoon Show they had a feature about giving up smoking and they have three people who are going to try and be quitters in front of a national audience. Fair dues.

So I started to look around at the websites that are there in the give up smoking space – big especially in early January and in the run up to Ash Wednesday and Lent.

Typing ‘give up smoking’ into Google, I noticed a few suggestions coming up in the Google Ads space. The first was a HSE site, the second from Nicorette, the third from Pfizer.

In the organic listings, the first was the HSE, the second was Allen Carr, the third a discussion on Boards.ie forum. Click on the magic pages from Ireland button and the results change ever so slightly, the HSE comes in first and second place, Allen Carr third.

These results, I think, are a good indication of how companies – no matter what their business is – should ensure they have really good organic content to get themselves higher up in Google. The HSE website is very comprehensive, they are trying to help people and give them lots of options and information compared to some of the other sites that are just trying to sell a product.

Sure, people do often need more than willpower to kick a habit, but they also need support and information. Keep this in mind when looking at your own website. Do you provide enough free help to people, enough resources, enough how tos, etc?

Start on a plan on how you can help others by improving your website content and see a return on investment. You may not save lives, but you may change them.