If you are in the SEO business or in case you are thinking about it, there is one major rule you will have to keep in mind: the search engines don't care about companies; they only rank content. It doesn't matter how great your company is if you can't offer the readers high quality content.
The main purpose of search engines (including Google) is to offer their users the best experience possible. When a user searches the answer to a question, the more details the answer has, the more useful it is for the user. As a result relevant and high quality content will have a better ranking in the search results.
All this determines your goal in content creation: publishing marketable, useful and relevant information. This will boost your ratings and it will ensure that your SEO strategy will have long-term effects.
So here is why content is the key element of SEO:
1. People Are Interested in What You Have to Say
According to Brafton.com 52% of people made purchase decisions based on what they read on blogs and 57% of the marketers gained new customers because of their content. 42% of people look for articles and blogs about the products that they wish to purchase and 60% of the marketers claim that content helps them make better decisions. 61% of the customers say that they are likely to purchase the products of a company that offers custom content. All this should show you how important your content really is.
Now that you know your content makes all the difference, what could you do to improve it for higher SEO ranks and more traffic?
2. Give the Consumers What They Need
First of all, you have to know what your target audience is. Secondly, you need to know what they want and what information is relevant to them. If you don't, you will waste time and energy offering solutions to problems that don't exist. Once you know what the target audience wants, make sure that the content you offer is really helpful.
Think of the most common questions and offer answers. This way you will become the source of knowledge to the readers. While the other people will be too busy with self-marketing, you will give people exactly what they need which is the best self-marketing strategy ever.
3. Just Give Yourself
Regardless of the kind of content you are thinking about, you can be sure that there are hundreds of people who thought of it before you woke up this morning. This is why you will have to find ways to make your content stand out; find ways to present your content in a way that has never been used before.
If your content is similar to the others', you will just need to add value to it. There are many different ways to make your content stand out, such as adding videos, infographics, images, or anything else that would make it unique.
4. Boredom Is the Death of SEO
You may be working in a field that is boring or dry, but you can be sure that they are always ways to add a fun and creative spin to it, even if you are in the field of toilet seats.
One of the most important aspects that you will have to be thinking about is branding, according to Inboundwriter.com. Based on information from brafton.com, half of the users are more likely to visit a page if it appears several times among the search engine results. For this you will need a diversified content strategy. It means that you should have blogs, webpages, images, videos, whitepapers, social snippets, infographics, and anything else you could think of.
All this will result in people being engaged with your brand. You will be able to fill the content gaps and you will maximize the benefits of all your content.
5. Content Reduced to Keywords
When you're searching for something with the help of search engines, you have to type in keywords. These are the same keywords that the users type in to find your content. Since you know what your target group wants, you should have a pretty good idea of what keywords they might use to reach the desired content. All these keywords must be a part of your pages. This way in the moment the user hits enter, your content will be first on the list of results.
6. Can Keywords Reduce Your Ranking?
In order to have high ranks on the search engine results, there is need for your content to contain keywords. So, why wouldn't you include all the keywords that you can think about? The truth is this is a very bad strategy. Keyword stuffing isn't the solution to your problem. If you have too many keywords, the content will lose its purpose and it won't be useful to the readers. This is why there is a keyword density accepted by common sense. If your web content keyword density is higher, it will hurt your ranking. On the other hand, if you don't have keywords, it will become very difficult to attract traffic to your content.
7. Is Your Content Engaging?
If you have high quality content, you will be able to engage the readers and this is something that the search engines also measure. The more time readers spend on your site, the better the rankings will be. If you don't have high quality content, the readers will simply bounce back to the search results and, again, this will hurt your ranking.
8. Be "Socially" Involved
You can see social media everywhere you look. If you get shares, likes, tweets, or any other kind of social feedback, it means that you have high quality content and this is something that the search engines will appreciate as well.
All in all, no matter what kind of feedback you're striving for, it all comes back to your content and whether or not your readers like it. Regardless of what you're writing about, always consider what the readers want; the search engines want the same thing as your readers: high quality, informational, engaging content.