SEO is a complicated practice, especially if you're just starting in 2015. Things have changed a lot in the past 10 years, making it more difficult than ever for small businesses to compete against businesses with large marketing budgets. But as one of the most important parts of a business's digital marketing strategy, you can't ignore SEO.
Content is easily one of the best ways for businesses to take control of their rankings and build up authority with Google and other search engines. It's the simplest strategy, but it's also one of the most effective.
Let's explore the three reasons why your business should be serious about the content it's producing if your goal is to improve search rankings.
Great Content Attracts Links
Links make the web go round. They tell search engines how your site relates to other sites, what your site is about, and lets them know which pages on your site are the most important.
By creating great content, you'll naturally attract links from sites that want to provide their users with the best information possible. If you're just writing content to rank for a set of keywords, you're only going to see minimal results at best.
If you concentrate on providing value to visitors instead of pure SEO benefits, your work will always pay off.
Content Length Can Affect Rankings
A study by serpIQ showed that the more content a page had, the better it ranked.
Think about the content that's on your site now. Is it more fluff than substance? Is it ranking? Could it rank better?
If you're dealing with more fluff than substance, lack of rankings, or being outranked by your competition, you absolutely need to beef up your content. Not only do you need to add more content to your existing pages, but you need a schedule and strategy in place for the creation of new content.
Google Rewards Quality Content (and Punishes Low Quality)
Google wants you to create quality content. They've said it time after time, but for most businesses it doesn't seem to sink in. The search engine's Panda update cracked down on sites that used thin content, which can mean content that adds no value, recycled content with minor edits, or duplicate content .
But what qualifies as quality content?
Quality is obviously subjective, but from a search engine's perspective, quality content means the content is relevant to the target topic and user data shows they think it's valuable.
If users are clicking back to search results after just 5 seconds on your site, that tells Google that the content didn't provide them with what they were looking for or was just plain irrelevant to the original query. CTR and time on site are two of Google's biggest quality signals.
Bonus Infographic: 10 Reasons Why You Need SEO to Gain More Business
10 Reasons You Need SEO to Gain More Business | Wikimotive
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