Quality Content = Better Organic SEO!

Do not be fooled or confused; if you want better organic SEO results, you need your website content. And you need quality content, and we have compiled these articles to review this crucial topic for website marketing.

^[1]The following are various types of website content that, if done right, can turn out to be high-quality content that is very effective:

• Images
• Infographics
• Case studies
• Whitepapers
• Press releases
• Reviews or Testimonials
• Video

Anyone can create basic content but for high quality content it needs to be well researched, planned out and strategically created for it to be most effective. High quality website content that is relevant to the user motivates them to stay on a website longer. Creating content that answers their queries or that is helpful in other ways is what you should aim for; uncovering your users pain points and answering them. High-quality website content can essentially be shortened down to content marketing. Content marketing goes hand in hand with SEO as your SEO will not reach its full potential without quality content.

What is SEO

SEO is short for ‘Search Engine Optimisation. It refers to the process of increasing a websites traffic flow by optimising several aspects of a website; such as your on-page SEO, technical SEO & off-site SEO, which you can learn more about here. Your SEO strategy should ideally be planned around your content strategy. For this you will require three elements, 1.) keywords, 2.) links and 3.) substance to piece your content strategy together.

The Importance of High-Quality Website Content

The creation of quality content should be the foundation of your website and its structure. It is the best way to ensure you are strategically using relevant keywords across all content. Quality content helps to attract the right audience to your website, engage them and work towards getting the user to take action on your website. If the user finds the content valuable, then they are more likely to share it. Creating valuable content benefits the user reading it. Your websites’ search ranks the quality of content and the links within the content to establish page rankings in search engine result pages (SERP’s).

Quality content can be strategically used for generating high click-through rates (CTR) and backlinks. The more users that visit your site and click on your content the better, Google will notice this and improve your websites ranking as it will be deemed relevant to what users are searching for. In line with this, content designed to answer, help or inform users is also beneficial for backlinking, which will again improve your site’s overall performance in SERPs. Creating links to external sites can really help the user get a better idea of the user’s help.

Ideally you want your website page to be showing on page 1 of a search result page anything after page 2 or 3 is most definitely no man’s land. SEO without quality content is like a body without a soul, it doesn’t really serve a purpose. Quality content is very valuable for creating better brand awareness and portraying your business as knowledgeable leaders within the industry.

You would be surprised at the longevity of valuable content, IMS Marketing have published blogs back in 2013 that are still getting good traffic. Likewise, we have seen clients, who have had old content that are still in their top 10 landing pages every year.

Having a mix of content available on your website means that you are appealing to various user’s preferences, some users prefer videos, other’s images and some users prefer reading technical information over testimonials and so on. Having a mix of quality content readily availaHavingasy to find you provide a good user experience.

The Benefit Content Provides for SEO

In order for your content to be effective and get the required results, people need to be able to find it. Content can not be found without good SEO, which includes the use of keywords, internal & external links, alt text and more. So, what exactly are the benefits:

• Content can be found easily
• Good rank positions
• Improved site score
• Improved website usability
• Improved user experience
• Reaching the right target audience

This beginners guide to SEO content may help you better understand the topic at hand.

^[2]What is Quality Content?

In the digital world, content is a mixture of the written, graphical, video, and audio information that is presented on your site and delivered to the world. Specifically, content is the packaging on your website that presents your audience with information.

High-quality website content has the potential to yield tremendous results for a very affordable investment. This content includes the copy on website pages, product and service descriptions, company information pages, videos, photos and blog posts. Although “quality” is a fairly subjective term, a few basic criteria will identify your content as “quality.”

• Focus your content on what makes your products, services, company, and website unique and valuable
• Provide your users with the content they want, need, and expect
• Gain credibility by using original and valid research and by citing your sources
• Proofread for typos, grammar mistakes, and misspellings
• Avoid tricks designed solely to improve search engine rankings

The content you publish may vary by topic or type but the ultimate goal of that content is to promote brand awareness, brand loyalty, and visitor engagement. Producing high quality content for your small business website will produce strong results, both short term and long term. Here are our top seven reasons why.

1. Quality Content Provides Value for Visitors

Even if your business belongs to a relatively remote niche, fierce competition for visitors and readers still exists. However, high-quality content will engage and retain those readers. You may be asking yourself, “How can good content keep visitors on my site?”

The most common answer is that people are more likely to read and share your content if it provides value to them. In other words, the secret is to discover what your visitors want– and then give it to them.

Small business website content can – and should – promote ideas, discussion and interest in your industry, blog, or business. More importantly your content should answer questions readers may have and offer them information that they find useful. Delivering relevant content to your target demographic creates visitor value that will:

• Grow website conversions and sales
• Drive traffic to your site
• Improve sharing of your website content
• Increase the level of engagement of your visitors

2. High-Value Content Generates More Sales

Building trust is a vital part of sales generation for any business or blog. An important method of creating that trust is establishing yourself as an industry thought leader and authority through the content you produce. In terms of sales generation, good content can be especially useful if you know how drill down on your target demographics and guide them to the purchase.

An estimated 77% of consumers read online content before making a purchase. Publishing product-specific content such as FAQs, product reviews, and instructional videos or blog posts can help reassure potential customers and lead to sales. A few tips for crafting sales generating content are:

• Add screenshots to reviews
• Include videos when possible
• Write in a conversational tone
• Create blog posts with 800 – 1,000 words or more

The vast majority of the time, a sales prospect’s first website visit will not be enough to compel the sale. High quality and convincing content can serve as the motivation for the prospect to revisit your site in the future and lead to increased sales over time.

3. Quality Website Content Has A Longer Life Span Value

Evergreen content is quality content that survives the test of time and remains useful for your site for many months—or even years—into the future. Evergreen content can be packaged in various formats, including “how-to” articles, top ten lists, instructional videos, and case studies.

For instance, if you work in a technology niche and you write an article about the latest laptop to hit the market, that article may have a shelf life of only a few weeks or months before it’s too dated to be relevant. However, an article about how a buyer could evaluate which laptop would best meet a given buyer’s needs could be relevant for years.

Several elements allow evergreen content to maintain long shelf life. Content that is most likely to maintain value on the web over time does the following:

• It is clearly written so that it provides real value to readers or viewers
• Covers broader issues within an industry or marketspace
• Does not “date stamp” the content with event or date specific information
• It is updated over time
• Complies with SEO best practices

Quality, well written content, such as product or event reviews are still useful and important for readership even though they tend to have a shorter shelf life. Maintaining balance on your website or blog between new items and evergreen content is a key to growing long term website traffic.

4. High-Quality Content Gets Shared More Often

From the earliest days of online music sharing sites to the most recent additions of new social networking websites, sharing is a major factor driving the growth of the Internet. High-quality website content is valuable because it’s precisely the type of content that’s worth sharing.

The simple fact is that the content people find informative, engaging, funny, controversial, educational, or insightful is the type of content they share.

With the continued growth of social media sites and the rapid rise in mobile browsing social sharing is a significant contributor to making your brand visible online. This is true for small businesses all the way up to large enterprise organizations.

The types of content that are readily shared are growing and evolving. Shareable content includes:

• Text-based content to platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat
• Video and audio content shared to YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Facebook, Vines, and other social platforms
• Graphical content postings with images or infographics shared to Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Google+

Your business can round out its marketing mix with the growing number of new and popular social platforms to help ensure success. The key is having quality content that other people want to read or view, engage with, and share with other people.

5. The SEO Value of Quality Content Is Greater

For your content to be effective, people need to find it. You may be a clever or quick writer, but ultimately the greatest content in the world isn’t going to help your business unless it can be discovered. Well written, quality content makes use of appropriate keyword usage, inbound links, and other elements of search engine optimization to make your site more visible on Google, Bing and Yahoo.

As SEO continues to evolve, content marketing and social media marketing have become much more important facets of any well-designed SEO effort. See our post “SEO Changes – SEO Isn’t What It Used to Be” for some insights on how quality content and social sharing are increasingly factoring into search engine optimization and digital marketing in general.

The sharing of high-quality website content on various social media platforms helps with:

• Content discovery
• Website and business visibility
• Visitor traffic to the business website
• Building additional, quality links to your business website

^[3]How Google Defines “Quality Content”

First, let’s talk about some of the basics. Content refers to any copy or images on your website – from your blog posts, to your ‘About Us page to your logo. Content marketing refers to an inbound strategy wherein companies create blogs, ebooks, and emails meant to inform or entertain a targeted audience in an effort to acquire and retain customers. This can happen via organic search or paid advertising that points to the content. When Google says you need to have “quality content,” it means:

1. Each page on your site must serve a clear purpose. Is it to inform? Collect information? Provide directions or company details? It should be apparent at first glance, or your bounce rate will soar.
2. The content must be original, well-written, and researched. We call this a “comprehensive” piece of content.

Google doesn’t want to tell us everything about how to rank highly, but it does want us to produce valuable content. As such, the search behemoth provides detailed guidelines on what we should and shouldn’t do, with an emphasis on the “shouldn’t.”

From Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:

• Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
• Don’t deceive your users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Many of Google’s rules and guidelines are meant to prevent manipulative or deceptive behavior, so we’ll get some of the more obvious ones out of the way right now.

Per Google, avoid:

• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Hidden text or links
• Doorway pages
• Scraped content
• Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, etc.
• Abusing rich snippets markup
• Sending automated queries to Google

At best, people using these tactics are doing so to pad their traffic metrics, usually to either drive ad revenue or increase the value of a monetized website. At worst, they’re trying to steal information. The point is, if you’re using these tactics, you already know what they are so that we won’t dig into them. We’ll leave it at this: These tactics will not bring you customers, but they may get your site shut down or penalized.

Now that we’ve weeded out anyone looking for the quick-and-dirty route let’s talk about some of the more nuanced guidelines Google provides.

^[4]Benefits of Content Marketing

1. Your audience will stick around longer.

Great content is an important asset. It has the ability to create positive experiences for your potential customers and compel them to come back for more. It’s your ticket to capturing your audience’s attention and continually reinforcing a positive brand impression.

2. You’ll have better traction on social media.

It’s one thing to increase your social media followers across channels, but it’s quite another to create trendy content. If you’re one of those businesses that doesn’t see much traction despite having a huge following, it’s time to use content marketing to your advantage. Quality content can help your business gain traction on social media.

Track the performance of your content campaigns using HubSpot’s analytics software.

3. Your audience will trust you.

Creating content helps your business build a relationship with your audience. You can answer their questions and interact with customers. When you create value without taking anything in return, your audience is more likely to trust your advice and recommendations.

Ultimately, when your content shows up at the right place and at the right time with the right audience, it’ll improve your brand’s reputation. The more quality content customers see, the more likely they are to associate with your company positively.

4. You’ll generate more and better leads.

Content marketing can also generate leads. When your audience views your content, they’re more likely to purchase from you in the future. Additionally, calls-to-action (CTA) placed directly in your content can generate new leads for your sales team.

So, how can content generate leads?

According to Lindsay Kolowich, the HubSpot Academy Acquisition Ct team manager is a great way to guide users to a lan, the team managing page. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content — inline, bottom-of-post, in the hero, or even on the side panel. The more delighted a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your call-to-action and move onto your landing page.”

5. Original content can improve conversions.

The content you post influences conversions. It helps your audience connect with you and gives them the information needed to make educated purchases.

Even more, if you’re using blog content to bring in traffic, consider using unique images rather than stock photos for a potential 35% increase in conversions.

Additionally, your content should always include a CTA and guide your reader on what they should do next.

6. Your business will become more visible thanks to SEO.

The more consistent, high-quality content you produce, the better it’ll be for your SEO efforts.

For example, your content should help your business become visible online and build trust and authority with your audience. With a developed content strategy, such as the pillar/cluster model, your content should help you rank higher in search engines.

7. Great content can position your company as an authority in your industry.

Creating quality content will also help build your authority online. If your business is established as a credible place to get information, you’re more likely to rank higher in search engines.

Plus, your customers are more inclined to trust you if they view you as an industry expert. Your content should demonstrate your expertise in your field and provide valuable answers to your audience’s questions.

Overall, content marketing is important. But, how can you be successful at it?

One way to tell is to assess the quality of your content. One particularly beneficial assessment of quality is content scoring.

As more businesses are increasing their content marketing budget, there’s never been a better time to incorporate content scoring metrics into your marketing campaign.

With the help of content scoring, you can measure and improve your content marketing performance and offer great value to your audience.

8. Quality content can build brand awareness.

Sure, anything can build brand awareness, but content marketing can do it uniquely.

Our HubSpot marketing experts have written about something called the Surround Sound strategy.

In a nutshell, this content strategy does more than rank your blog article on page one. It makes your content (and therefore your brand) appear everywhere your potential customers are looking for your product.

To execute this strategy, write about topics your customers are interested in so they begin to associate your great content with your brand.

9. You’ll cultivate loyal brand fans.

Taking brand awareness a step further, all the people who raved about your content and associated all those great feelings with your brand are very likely to become brand advocates before ever purchasing your product.

Wait, what?

It’s true, brand fans can be just as loyal and influence their friends and family’s buying decisions as much as a current customer can. This happens when potential consumers see that a business provides value to its current audience. One of the more successful ways businesses can do this is through content marketing.

For example, while I may not be in the market for children’s meal plans because I don’t have children yet, I am obsessed with the Kids Eat In Color blog and Instagram content. I recommend it to my friends and family who have children with picky eating habits. See how well that can work?

10. You’ll save money on your marketing strategy.

Since HubSpot first assessed the cost of content marketing ten years ago, the practice has remained the most cost-effective marketing strategy available.

Upfront costs for content appear steep, and that’s a fair point.

Estimates for blog content range from $150 a post to $3,000 for a freelance writer, but you could go the route of hiring a full-time staff writer to create content for you on a regular basis.

Conclusion:

There are a lot of great ideas in these compiled articles. Without quality content, you will need to spend a lot of money on pay-per-click campaigns! Should you need help in developing a content marketing strategy, do not hesititate to call hughesagency.ca today.

Article compiled by hughesagency.ca

Article References Links:

1. https://www.imsmarketing.ie/content-marketing/why-is-high-quality-website-content-so-important/ ↑
2. https://www.webpresencesolutions.net/high-quality-website-content-7-reasons/ ↑
3. https://blog.marketmuse.com/what-is-high-quality-content-and-why-is-it-so-important-for-your-business/ ↑
4. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/benefits-high-quality-content-consistency-brand ↑