Content Marketing for SEO: Why Quality Matters More Than Ever

How can quality content enhance your SEO and help your business reach more new customers.
Published:
June 2, 2017
Category: SEO

Content is still king as far as Google is concerned. So if you want to get your website to the top of results pages and drive more traffic to your website your focus should be on creating the best content you can.

It’s hardly news that Google is on a constant quest to track down high quality content. Their business model is dependant on people searching in Google. If Google cannot provide those searchers with the answers to their questions, with quality content, then they will search elsewhere. The masters of Google’s incredibly complex search algorithms recently put out a little “reminder” that content should not be created purely to generate links. They have a long history of punishing those who are creating poor quality content purely for the sake of trying to game those algorithms. Tactics that might send you straight to position one in the past simply won’t work any more and will more likely result in a penalty. This recent little announcement reinforces the need for an SEO agency that can craft campaigns built on a strong foundation of quality content.

A brief history of spammy SEO

A classic tactic for gaming the Google system a few years was to generate spammy links. The number of links used to be the primary factor in how Google chose to rank your website. So some of the sketchier SEO’s out there set up huge networks of fake websites, purely to create links. Of course Google realised what was going on and sent websites found to be doing this, to the hidden depths of search results. Links are still important, but now quality is far more important than quantity.

What is Google saying?

These days Google doesn’t just want to see links, it also wants to see quality content along side those links. To try and get a hold of these at the lowest possible cost, some people create “spammy” content, badly written, barely in English and stuffed with keywords. They then post these articles across a ton of sites to generate a link from each one. It’s the modern equivalent of link spamming, only its “content and link spamming” in a slightly different format. And Google has caught on. As before, if your website is found to be associated with create low value content links like this, it’s going to suppress your rankings and make your website suffer.

The solution

Don’t worry, you can still get great links to your site by sharing your content online. Putting out press releases, getting featured in blogs and writing up guest articles on various publications can all help. As long as your content is good. It needs to be well written and relevant. And ideally interesting to your target customers too. The catch here is to make sure you aren’t recycling the same content all over the place, or putting all of your big announcements up in just the one place. So, you can see what’s happening here. Google is trying to make the internet a better place by rewarding people who are creating the sort of useful, high quality, informative content that searches will find useful.

Content checklist

Are you making sure the basics are covered with your content?

  • No keyword stuffing (don’t repeat a word endlessly hoping it will help!).
  • Even distribution of content (it’s not all on one or two sites or the same article across loads).
  • It’s written by someone who is an expert in the field, who offers relevant, knowledgeable insights.
  • The spelling and grammar are correct.
  • It’s original!

To do all of these things isn’t always as easy as it sounds. It can take a lot of time and effort to get all of them together, especially if you are making sure you have something interesting to say. It may seem like more effort than it’s worth. There’s a frustratingly simple chicken-egg scenario here. If you aren’t currently getting much traffic to your website, or another place that you are promoting your content, then this could be due to a lack of sufficient quality and quantity of content.

Admittedly, it’s hard to justify spending a lot of time and effort putting in place that content if you realise there isn’t much of an audience yet. So you won’t get traffic without good content, but it’s hard to justify creating content if there’s no traffic. Fortunately, you don’t have to just write and hope for the best. With the help of an experienced content marketing team, it is possible to get started with content marketing to prevent it becoming a complete shot in the dark.

Content marketing strategy

The solution to not knowing where to start, is to create a content marketing strategy. No matter what your industry, or the nuanced benefits of your business, it’s possible to create useful and engaging content; it all starts with research. You can’t provide potential customers with relevant information unless you know what the are looking for.

By having a look at what people will be looking at when they are looking for information, you can start to put yourself in their shoes. You’ll need to have an idea of who your average customer is for example their, age, location and general interests. What helps even more, is knowing what they search for. In our work, creating content strategies for all kinds of clients, we carry out some seriously nerdy keyword research. With the right tools and expertise, it’s possible to work some of the most likely phrases that your customers are searching for. In the right hands, this can form the basis of a powerful content strategy. Because now, you can create content that is actually “optimised”. It’s giving useful, relevant information which is what both your customers and Google are searching for.

And Alloy can help you do all this! Not only to we have a techy team of researchers, our talented copy writers and experienced SEO consultants can create the full content campaign that will boost your SEO. Of course there is more to SEO than content, but we can also help you with on-page optimisations and the publishing of your articles to generate high value links. We work closely with our clients, becoming experts in what they do, while offering a fresh perspective of what customers will be looking-for. We adapt our SEO marketing services to the level of input and progress that you want. If you want us to take the reigns of your content marketing, and drive traffic and sales through your website, get in touch for a free consultation.

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