Quality content is crucial for your website to succeed
Quality content sets your website apart from the millions of other ones out there. It’s what guides people to convert on your website. It is also crucial to the success of your search engine optimization (SEO).
What is SEO and why is it so important?
SEO’s main goal is to make your website visible in the organic search (unpaid) results on search engines.
SEO is a long-term, cheaper way for you to attract a steady flow of traffic to your website. Unlike paid ads, you don’t pay per click.
Business owners often see SEO as a foreign concept in digital marketing. But, once you understand the basics behind it, you’ll understand why it’s so important for your website.
What’s the difference between paid search and organic search?
Paid search allows you to pay to have your website displayed on Google search engine results for specific keywords and keyword phrases.
Organic search is based on natural, unpaid rankings determined by Google’s algorithms. You can improve your organic rankings by optimising your website with SEO best practices.
How do you make Google love your website?
Google receives over 5.6 billion searches per day. People are turning to Google for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems.
Google wants to keep people happy by delivering what they’re looking for.
Google’s job is to find the best content for each individual search on the internet. Whether you search, “how to wash a dog” or “how many stars are in the galaxy”, Google has answers for you. And, Google will do their best to show you relevant information, whether it be in the form of written articles, images, videos or shopping links.
To achieve this Google has to put algorithms in place to determine what content is the most relevant for every search made – all 5.6 billion searches per day. An SEO specialist follows a set of rules for optimising your website for search engines, according to what Google wants. Google looks at various factors. One example (out of many) is bounce rate – when someone leaves your page as soon as they land on it – as this shows Google that the content on the page is irrelevant.
But, this set of rules is continuously changing as Google finds better and better ways to deliver the best content to searchers. It’s your SEO specialist’s job to make sure your website is constantly adjusting to stay relevant to Google.
How does content affect SEO?
Many agencies will tell you that your site needs quality content. But, they don’t explain what they mean by “quality content” and why you need it.
One of our goals as SEO experts is to create content that compliments and even drives all our other SEO efforts. Google’s latest version of Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines, an internal document used by Google’s Search Quality team, helps Google rate the quality of websites to bring searchers the best content for their search queries.
Here are a few factors Google finds important for SEO when it comes to content:
What type of content is on your website?
How is the page constructed? Can a visitor determine the purpose of the website and get the information they want or complete the relevant task on the page easily?
Google breaks up the content on each page into three categories:
Type of content |
Explanation |
| Main content | What is the main purpose of the page: an article, product information or video? You need to make sure your content clearly defines the purpose to get a higher-quality rating. |
| Supplementary content | This is any information that helps the user in navigating through your website. This includes the menu tab, footer, social media buttons, related content links and product comments. Supplementary content should enrich the user experience by providing helpful tools and information without distracting from the main content. |
| Advertisements | This is any content or links on the page with the purpose of making money from the page. This can affect the site’s quality negatively, especially if it interrupts or distracts the user from the main content. |
What is the purpose of the site or page?
By determining the purpose of a site, Google can understand its audience. This, in turn, can help your site appear to your relevant audience in search results. Here are the possible purposes of a website, as listed by Google in its guidelines:
- Download software or share files
- Sell products or services
- Share information about a topic
- Showcase media, such as videos or images
- Share personal or social information
- Express an opinion
- Entertain
- Act as a forum for questions and answers
Is your content legit?
E.A.T. stands for expertise, authority and trustworthiness.
- Expertise – Is the content creator knowledgeable, qualities of an expert in the topic they’re writing about?
- Authority – Is the content creator and content itself an authoritative figure in the specific niche?
- Trustworthy – Is the information and data in the content accurate and trustworthy?
Google wants to make sure authors know what they’re talking about. Therefore E.A.T. is an extremely important factor, especially for Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) sites.
YMYL websites include medical, legal, or financial sites. For these types of websites, it’s important for the author of the content to be an expert in their field as the advice on such topics helps people make important decisions.
To help Google verify that the page’s author is an expert, make sure you provide authorship as well as links to appropriate social media profiles.
Here’s how you can prove to google your site deserves expert recognition:
- Provide in-depth relevant content about your targeted topic.
- Include any in-house qualifications, education, awards, etc. that are relevant to your topic.
- If your content is written by experts, include a bio of the author.
- Build your brand across the internet. You can do so by publishing high-quality content in the form of social media profiles, guest posts, podcasts and a YouTube channel to show Google your brand is big and powerful.
You can demonstrate authority by creating excellent content. Your content should address the topic in-depth. Usually, longer pieces of content cover the topic in detail.
To prove your content deserves to be trusted, you need a secure site – HTTPS over HTTP protocol on your website. This shows Google that you have taken precautions to make sure your user data won’t be stolen.
Your content must be 100% original and not plagiarized. You can also include testimonials or reviews as social proof that your website is trustworthy.
Does your content help your users?
As already mentioned, Google wants to deliver the most relevant results to searchers. This is why Google focuses more on user search intent than on keyword match.
Google delivers results based on what it THINKS the searcher is looking for.
This is because, usually, if someone searches “heater”, they don’t want Google to explain what a heater is. So, why would someone search “heater”? Most likely because they want to buy one.
Therefore, instead of creating content to match keywords or keyword phrases, your content should match the intent behind those keywords.
Providing an overall fantastic user experience (UX) will also help you rank highly on Google. Your users should find the information they’re searching for and navigate through your website easily. By updating content and improving other factors on your site to make sure it loads quickly and there are no broken links, you will impress Google and your customers.
Does your content deserve backlinks?
A backlink is a link to your content from another website. If you get backlinks from authoritative websites, Google sees that your content is important and relevant. The best way to get backlinks is to create optimized content, using in-depth, original research.
If you want to go further, your SEO specialist can set up a link building strategy for you. Basically, they will help you get high-quality links from authoritative sites through business directories, original guest posts and other link building strategies.
Do people love your website?
Google considers these two things as important:
- Are people clicking through to your website?
- Are people staying on your website?
We measure your website’s bounce rate and click-through rate to decide whether your content is relevant. The quality of the content affects both of these.
If no one clicks through to the website or if users leave your website as soon as they land on it, the content is probably irrelevant and your website should not be ranked highly. You can improve your click-through rate by creating catchy headlines and you can improve your bounce rate by providing interesting and relevant content on your website that people want to read.
Do you need professional content and SEO services?
SEO is tough… and… ever-changing. It can be tiresome keeping up with all the updates and changes Google keeps throwing at you. Our team of professionals can handle your content and SEO success. We’ll provide you with a once-off and an ongoing SEO strategy that Google and your potential customers will love!