Quality Content Helps SEO

seoWe have heard a lot of buzz recently such as, “you should be blogging or you should be posting on social media to get your search rankings high,” as if it’s some sort of magical thing that makes all of Google suddenly adore your website. Even though it’s not “magical”, it is useful information, and here’s why:

Blogging alone won’t help with SEO

The only difference between a blog and every other page on your website is that a blog tends to be published in the form of individual posts in reverse chronological order with the option for users to leave comments on each post. And when most people talk about blogging, they’re usually just talking about adding content to a website on a regular basis. Most low budget SEO providers say, “You have to have a blog and you have to write x number of posts per month.” You hire them and they pump out barely researched content that is loosely related to your industry. Please beware because this won’t help much with your SEO effort.

Quality content will help with SEO

After the changes Google’s made over the past few years, creating quality content and publishing it on your website is the only way to get ranked for anything worthwhile. Whether you publish that content on an existing page of your website or on a blog does not matter a hill of beans. Just as long as you’re creating quality content and doing it rather frequently.

What is quality content you may ask?

It depends on your goals of course–the type of content you write, and the type that constitutes “quality content” will vary dramatically depending on your goals. I’m going to make a big assumption that since you are reading this article, your goal is to drive more qualified organic search traffic with the intent of converting that traffic into customers. So if the goal is driving organic search traffic, then quality content is content that matches the searcher’s intent as closely as possible, and does so better than your competition.

Searcher’s intent

What I mean by “searcher’s intent is the ultimate goal of the searcher when he or she types something into the search engine.

To give you an example, SEO is one of the major things we do. But when someone types, “SEO”, they might be looking for an SEO firm, or they might want an explanation of the term, or they might want to get a job in SEO, or about a hundred other possibilities. Sometimes it may be too difficult to determine the intent of a search query, so you can start more specific. “SEO jobs” for example.

When it comes to creating quality content, there’s a happy medium in there where you get specific enough to understand the searcher’s intent, but not so specific that your content doesn’t bring in any traffic.

Better than the competition

To recap, quality content is content that matches the searcher’s intent as closely as possible, and does it better than the competition. In the end, we’re competing against everyone else for traffic in the search engines. In order to do better than your competition you need to create better content.

Pick a search query you want to rank for, then search it on Google. Does the ranking competition seem to understand the true intent behind that particular search query? Does their content match that intent? Could you do it better? If so, you may just be able to make some headway on that keyword.

The bottom line is that blogging alone won’t help you with SEO. But spending time to figure out the keywords your prospective customers use to find you, the true intent behind those keywords, and how well the competition is matching that intent will help you determine what kind of content you should create and whether it will have a chance of driving quality organic traffic to your website.

If you then create that content, and you do it well, then your SEO will improve.