Introduction: Content is a king or not?
We are all driven by a simple fact “Content is King“. The online world of content marketing is robustly driven by this marketing strategy. Creation, publishing, and distribution of valuable and consistent content becomes a key factor in driving customer action and generating a reliable base of the target audience. Many digital marketing strategists keep content marketing at the forefront of their strategy. Churning millions of words of content daily becomes a target to gain search engine rankings.
But hold on, read this out!
- Is content really the king?
- Can content alone suffice to boost your site traffic?
- Will thousands of pages of content make you popular with the search engines?
Here, I would like to place a Question “Is this just a myth that content is the king or is it for real”??
Questions are many and they are thought-provoking.
Let us first consider the facts that drive this popular saying that “Content is King.”
4 Reasons Content is the King!
Drives SEO Ratings–
SEO is the most popular acronym these days. Search Engine Optimization is a marketing technique focused on increasing the visibility of your website in search engine results. SEO includes all the elements required to improve rankings and drive the traffic to your website.
People use the web to ask a question or find answers to a problem or an issue. The search engine matches the user keywords to generate a list of relevant search results. These search results will only have value if we tie them to relevant content that answers the user’s query. Here, Content is the Key. If you have the relevant content on your website, the search engine will pick it up.
Key for User Engagement-
When we say that Content is the key to user engagement, it encloses an important fact. Maintaining user engagement on your website is not an easy task. With the average attention span of an individual dropping down to 8 seconds from 12 seconds, keeping the same set of users engaged over a while becomes a challenge.
Your website’s user engagement will be more if the users find value in the product or service offered by you. Here also, great content plays a role. If what you have posted on your website or blog can keep your user’s interest, they will spend more time with your product. This will lead to increased awareness about your brand which will henceforth be discussed among the users.
Increased Sales-
When your content influences user engagement, you can always benefit by increased chances of their visit to your website. Providing engaging content helps you to stand out. This also becomes important for branding your product. Great content will automatically keep all the user engagement metrics like click-through rate, pages per session and conversion rate in check. More users will ultimately lead to more sales and subsequently, more profits for you.
Increased Brand Awareness-
Good content closely relates to great user engagement. This, in turn, leads to increased website traffic and higher SEO rankings. More traffic will generate more leads and results in building up your brand. You can successively gain and keep new customers. What else are we looking for in Digital Marketing? We seem to have reached the target by a great content build-up strategy.
Sounds easy, isn’t it?
Content is the key to achieve all the above targets. You cannot hope to build website traffic if you do not have great content. But there is a cliché.
Web Analytics reveals that several factors are favoring the ranking of websites by the search engines. And quality content is just one of them.
The SEO periodic table by bigbuzzinc will surely help in listing all the important ranking factors.
There are a few distinct factors that affect SEO or your website rankings.
Top Factors affecting the SEO of your website:
Quality–
We have been discussing content all this while. The content on your website should be unique, concise and relevant. Simple content is not enough. Content should be optimized. Gone are the days of the Internet, when websites could achieve a high search engine ranking just by loading the text with keywords, or more specifically, Keyword Stuffing. This no longer exists. Content should be relevant and should have some length to it.
Link Generation–
The step towards getting other websites to link back to your website. Building links is one of the key components of search engine optimization (SEO). We should tie the content to high-end links (do-follow).
Authority–
Your website should have an audience base and a solid network to talk about it. This will come through enhanced traffic ratings and user engagement metrics. You can work upon increasing your website authority by working on the user experience of your website in multiple ways.
Trust–
User Interaction on your website should be positive and trustworthy. After all the hard work of generating optimized content and leads and taking care of the engagement metrics, the one important thing that you can gain is user trust and loyalty. Loyal customers will keep returning to your site.
These factors tell a different story. This calls for a revision of the popular adage.
"Content is not King".
Hence, Great Content plus SEO is King.
After this entire bustle about “Content is King”, here we are testing the reality. With new insights into modern SEO, we can now infer that Great Content along with SEO will do the wonders for your website and business. We can now revise the strategies as follows:
Breaking the Myth:
Good Content strategy involves a good combination of the following three factors that drive sales and your website traffic. We will now see how Content plus SEO is the new king in the online world.
Value over Keyword Stuffing–
Increased focus of content marketing strategies on content over the years had resulted in the generation of zillions of words of repeated content. Rewriting and spinning the article in several ways had become the norm. Keyword stuffing gained prominence over relevance. Search engine rankings did increase, but they added no real value to the internet.
Lead Generation over Content Generation–
Now SEO rich content has gained prominence. Any content added to a website should have a purpose and significance. Whatever you are posting on your blog or website should result in targeted traffic to your site. There is no use adding content if it cannot generate leads.
Quality over Quantity–
Another myth that needs to be busted is adding content to your website consistently, in the race for search engine rankings. There is no such evidence that shows content consistency is linked with high SEO ranks. Adding high-quality content just 2-3 times a week, or even once a week in certain cases, is optimal, as long as you get the necessary links, pointing to your content.
Conclusion:
Content, alone, is not the king. Good SEO practices, coupled with some amazing and useful content and links rule the web. Even though you may write content in an SEO friendly way but rule out the other aspects, search engine rankings will still suffer. It’s time to do a reality check. Content still matters. But we should target the user rather than securing ranks in page searches.