Quality Content Needs to Take a Flying Leap
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Content is king! Good, quality content is what you need to rank your website! Have you heard those phrases lately? In fact, we’ve all heard them so much that our ears are still ringing with the proclamations. Yes, quality content can assist in your rankings, but that is not the only factor to consider in this day and age of SEO optimization. The sentiment of having unique content has been instilled in us so repetitively that we are a bit brain washed in thinking that is all the higher we need to go in order to appear in the top searches.
You might be searching your competition and see what kind of content they are producing, and rightfully enough, you think you can do just as good or better. That seems to be the mentality in many content marketing strategies these days. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it also means that you will soon be missing the mark. With so many changes coming from Google and the many ranking signals taken into consideration, it is getting more and more difficult to come up page 1, page 2 in Google. The companies you see there have been working aggressively to stay in those positions, so it’s going to take a bit more creativity on your part to try and snag a spot.
This is where it is time to think outside the box. No longer can you safely color inside the black lines. It’s time to be bold and slash through the lines and create your own drawing. Your new writing mentality is to create content that is leaps and bounds better than anything already in search. If certain keywords seem elusive and difficult, move on. Don’t even bother with content that you don’t think you can take above and beyond your competition. You need to be able to create and maintain content that is hands down superior to the best results on search.
What has changed you ask? There are many factors, but the top game changers are user experience, expectations, and links.
User Experience
User experience means having what the visitor is looking for easily findable on your website. Users having to search for more than a couple seconds typically get annoyed and go back to Google. This increases your bounce rate which may lower your search engine rankings for that paticular search term. The second factor in user experience is appealing to look at on any type of device.
User Expectations
As a result of all these rules to create a great website experience for customers, user expectations have gone through the roof. Users expect websites to look great, function efficiently, load pages super fast, answer questions instantaneously. Basically, we’ve gone around the wheel enough times to expect fast, very high quality results consistently.
Now we know we can’t just be average with quality content and have any old Joe write the material. This is the time to sit down and put on your industrial strength thinking cap and do a bit of homework. We’re talking content auditing folks. It is a lot of work, but the results could be gold. If you want to produce content that is exclusively unique and extremely better than anything out there, sit down at the computer and type in your questions to Google. Take a good look at the results, who comes out on top, and what kind of information is being provided. Look at everything and ask yourself some questions. What is being asked and answered in the search results? How detailed is the information being provided? What about the use of visuals? What is the quality and style of writing? Is there any information that is lacking or missing? If the information easily accessible or do you have to click through a bunch of pages to find what you are looking for? Do pages load easily? Navigable?
When you take your content writing seriously and take your research seriously, you can achieve content that is indeed not just average, but phenomenal. This will help you boost yourself right over your competitors and give you a real shot at ranking well. Content is important, but it’s not okay to be average, so color outside the lines and give the people something to read about.