Over the past few years, we’ve noticed a “return to quality” movement. Maybe it’s just us, but things like slow food concepts (not to be confused with slow service!), craft cocktails, and websites like Etsy where you can get handmade and vintage items, are a sign that consumers are becoming more conscientious and selective about the things they buy, how they were produced, and who produced it.
Following a similar movement, content marketing seeks to deliver the most possible value to the user throughout the customer journey. Content marketing is about building brand awareness by sharing valuable information and ideas about a product or service. It lets your customers know that you care enough about their time to not inundate them with useless crap via every digital marketing channel available.
Search engines feel the same way. They want their customers to find the quickest, most valuable and direct answer to their search queries. And because of this, search engines can tell if your content sucks.
Back in the Day, Computers Were Dumb
Search engines are always trying to stay one step ahead. People started using search engines like Google because they provided relevant results. Because they were attracting users, they sent traffic to the websites that showed up at the top of their results.
When early internet marketers realized that placement means traffic, they revamped their digital marketing plan and quickly found ways to influence their rankings in Google and other search engines. The game was on.
From the beginning, search engines have been consistently making updates to their technology to improve the quality of results and their overall user experience. One of the ways they’ve done this is by changing the way they classify content. Whatever you know about search engine optimization is probably obsolete. If you learned it last year, unless it is fundamental and not prone to manipulation, it’s probably changed.
One thing that is less likely to be manipulated is the quality of your content. If effective algorithms could be written to measure the quality of your content, then search engines could rate it, figure out what it’s about and serve it to the right people.
What is Driving Your Content?
There are many digital marketing tactics that can drive your online marketing. We build landing pages for a specific function, topic or product, and the goal is to convert, but if you’re writing a page without a purpose to specifically drive traffic from mobile devices and other avenues, you’re doing it wrong.
Which came first, the content or the conversion? We feel that because the quality of your content is what makes people make a decision, you should consider this first and then fall back on other on-page factors like keywords, image titles, schema and the like. If you could take away all the bells and whistles of the web, put your article or product page on a piece of paper, hand it to someone and they still say wow this is great content, you’re doing it right.
Developing Better Ideas For Quality Content
Doing proper content research before producing content is crucial in deciphering what your readers are searching for. If you can provide a clear answer to a question or insight on a topic that is frequently being sought out, you will be deemed credible and bumped up in the search. However, don’t focus so much on jamming that keyword into your post that your content becomes clouded with SEO initiatives – search engines will be amongst the first to call you out for keyword stuffing, which will affect your ranking.
Creating content that keeps users on your site, at least long enough to finish reading, is key. If you can keep them coming back and telling their friends that you’ve got lots of cool information to share – double bonus. The more this happens, the more search realizes that its users are your users, and though it may take time, you’ll see them become your brand advocates, helping you get back up.
