A look at content and why it matters

“Content” is such a commonly-used word in the online sphere, it borders on cliché. It’s ubiquitous not just in the marketing world — “content creator” is the new name for anyone who makes anything online, regardless of medium or, at times, quality.

It’s the same for your business (although quality, in this case, very much matters) — content can be anything! Text, audio, images, video; it all works.

The main thing people often think of as content is a blog, but it can be everything from the copy and imagery on your product pages to educational videos. Other good examples of text-based content that go beyond the blog include case studies, white papers, product demos, and FAQs.

As for why it matters, there’s many reasons.

Blogs are a great way to reach people who may be actively in your market, but would not otherwise reach your site. Periodically review your top performing pages to see which pages are driving the most traffic.

For starters, regularly updating your site’s content encourages people to keep returning to your site. Furthermore, it keeps Google coming back to your site as its web crawler returns to survey your updates. This helps you develop a “reputation” with Google’s algorithm as being trustworthy, reliable, and generally of value to users.

Another aspect of consistent, high quality content that helps with your Google ranking is the SEO keyword factor. Simply by writing (again, high quality) work that naturally strings together long-tail keywords, you’re making yourself visible to users who otherwise wouldn’t see you.

But that’s still not the last way that regular content helps your online visibility. Beyond what we’ve already mentioned, content marketing is the most effective organic way to build a strong backlinking profile. Significantly again, though: You build up these links by focusing on quality — not on just content as a vehicle for links. That’s because, by ensuring quality first, you ensure people are more likely to keep coming back and “recommend” your site to the others through their links. Obviously, building those backlinks takes a while so you have to be patient — but committing to that will build a strong foundation for the future.

What makes good content?

If you only take one sentence away from this piece, let it be this: Write for the human first, and the machine second.

Just trying to fool the Google algorithms that seemingly run the internet won’t work; they’re far too advanced for that because, ultimately, the internet still comes back to the millions of humans on it.

Accordingly, don’t use clunky, jargon-heavy language that turns users away because then you’re losing out on engagement. And of course, keyword spamming is an absolute no go! Not only is doing that completely unhelpful, but it can actually hurt your Google ranking. Because, again, it comes back to quality.

We find that it’s much easier to pick a subject and write how you see fit than to robotically focus on a keyword and try to just foist it into a piece. The former will almost always end up with you naturally including long-tail keywords without having to sacrifice usefulness to the reader.

Of course, there’s still some algorithm-friendly practices that can help you out.

You should still do keyword research and keep your findings in the back of your mind when writing. Quality will keep people engaged and returning; including the right keywords (without compromising integrity) will ensure that that quality gets seen in the first place.

This is also related to knowing what your readers (or viewers) want. You can determine this in a number of ways. One good practice is to analyze search query traffic from Google Search Console to determine how your site is acquiring organic traffic — this will help you see which of your existing content is most popular, giving you insight into what you do that works versus what you do that might be less successful. There’s also tools like SEMRush that help you view what competitors are ranking well for.

Other characteristics of good content?

Stick to what you know and make yourself an authority on that subject. For example, our blog is all things digital marketing.

Establish yourself as an authority on the subjects you discuss. To begin with, that means sticking with what you know; there’s no point talking about car detailing when you’re trying to sell dog shampoo. Even if you want to cover how a dirty dog in the car can make the car need detailing — thus using it as a selling point for your dog shampoo — it’ll lower your overall quality if you’re just spewing out nonsense about which you’re not knowledgeable. Also, avoid duplicate pieces where you’re pretty much just rephrasing the same thing over and over. What are unique angles and topics you can discuss instead?

And included in establishing your authority is just being trustworthy; cite sources when applicable and all that.

Also, when including a link — regardless of whether it’s directing to another page on your own site or to an external location — use clear anchor text. This gives Google better context as to its contents.

Lastly, we alluded to this early on in this piece, but just provide enough content to satisfy user interest. This applies to not just publishing regularly but making sure you clearly answer the user’s “question” that brought them to your site. You know those pages you end up on through a Google search, where they include roughly 300 words of introduction, then like four sentences that actually discuss the question at hand, and then end with some variation of “So there you have it”? Yeah — don’t be like that. Content like that is all but useless and, while you might get some hits at first, eventually that will come back to hurt you.

So there you have it! No, we’re kidding, we wouldn’t dare end it with that. But in all seriousness, these are all great points to come back to when establishing your business’s online presence through content creation. The great thing about this endeavor is that it’s straightforward and has practically endless possibilities. But above all, it builds on itself; the longer you keep at publishing high quality content, the better it all performs — creating a dependable foundation upon which your entire digital brand can grow.