Thanks to Libby from Speechless Web Design for this week’s article on why content is so important for SEO.
SEO is a great marketing solution for small businesses to implement as a way of improving their website traffic and increasing brand awareness.
The problem is, however, that a lot of people view SEO as consisting solely of developing hundreds of spammy backlinks to their website and cramming the site full of keywords as a way of making it rank well. Despite that being the case when SEO first came about – it no longer is. This method of SEO is now considered black-hat SEO, and search engines will penalise any websites who engage in it so it is best to avoid this at all costs.
Nowadays, search engines like Google care less about the quantity, and a whole lot more about quality. And what I mean by quality is the importance of writing high-quality content for a website for the purpose of good SEO.
Respectable businesses are now learning how to optimise their website so that they can appear on the search results for people who are actually searching for the products and services that they have to offer. They want to achieve targeted traffic to their site – targeting those who are looking for these services rather than those who just randomly fall on the page with no relevance to their keyword search or phrase.
The Importance Of Great Content
When creating content for your website, the first thing to do is ask yourself “what is it that Google will consider to be quality?”. What Google cares most about is how fresh, researched and quality the content on a website is… but we will come to this in just a moment.
Having great content for your website is a very important way of attracting visitors, even more so than the products. In fact, if you get your content right, then you’ll have created a solid foundation which can be used to support all of your other SEO efforts for your business.
1) The Quality of Content
The main question you need to ask yourself is ‘Does the content offer real value to its visitors, something which is different and unique – something that won’t be found elsewhere?’
Quality content is king. Something so very powerful in SEO. Quality means well written content, free of embarrassing mishaps – to show that you really know what you are talking about. Content which is interesting and provides useful information to its audience to the point that they feel they have actually learned something. Content that is rich in keywords – the right keywords. Content which offers real value, and as a result, other websites want to link to.
Having several backlinks to your site or page from high authoritative sites will tell search engines, like Google, that your site is a good authoritative source. As a result, search engines will place your company’s site in the top search results for particular industry specific words – as long as you have done your website’s keyword research right first.
2) Keyword Research and Content
Of course the importance of great content for SEO is evident. But you couldn’t have great content without performing a keyword research first.
You want to research the keywords within your industry which your website currently ranks for, and keywords you’d like it to rank for based on the keywords search volume and amount of traffic it could drive to your site. You want to produce content based on those keywords – the actual search terms and phrases which people are using. This way you can create content which effectively “answers” their query.
Having done your keyword research, you want to make sure that you have used the keywords sufficiently enough in the content. If you want your site or page to rank for industry specific keywords you want to place these keywords in the copy. It is best to use the keywords every so often, including in the title and the subheadings, but not too much that is looks spammy to search engines.
3) The Freshness of Content
Search engines like Google love new, fresh, content. Similarly, Google hates finding duplicate content. If Google comes across two pieces of content which are identical, or fairly similar, then it will more than likely drop the rankings for both pieces of content for not being original. For this reason, original content is always the winner.
4) Backlinks and Content
As previously mentioned, people used to purchase a large sum of low quality links to their site as an easy way of improving website rankings. However, due to constant changes in Google’s algorithm, this method no longer works.
However, link building still remains a priority in 2017 and 2018. Though the method has changed, and relies a lot more on the quality of links these days. One of the easiest ways to generate backlinks to your website is through reaching out to authoritative websites and offering them something of value in exchange for the link. A great example is offering to write them high quality content. If they are happy with the quality and feel it fits the requirements of their site, then they will more than likely link out to your site.
Writing awesome content won’t improve your ranking straight away. But in the long run, great content will certainly have a positive effect on your SEO efforts!
About the Author:
Libby enjoys socialising. Which means that she likes to go out with her friends, drink, then hit the gym to work it off. She’s a social media addict, who turned it into her profession.
She loves her role as an account manager and researcher at Speechless Web Design. Almost as much as Big Macs. She once ate 3 in 24 hours.
