SEO and keywords are important pieces to getting your site and business seen online, but they’re not absolutely everything. We would say they’re not even the first step. The first step begins with your content. Keywords and other advanced SEO tactics can’t cover up bad content — so good, relevant, well-thought-out content is the beginning place.
So how do you know if your content is good or not? How do search engines know if your content is good or not? There are two really good things to help you know if you have a solid content foundation:
Strive for genuine relevance in your writing
If you want to speak from a place of authority, your content has to be genuine and relevant to your visitor. Speak to the visitor first, and search engine spiders a distant second. Your content should answer the questions that visitors would ask, use the language that they would use, and present real solutions to problems that they want to solve. All of these things will help you reach the people you need to reach and build a good reputation with them.
When writing your content, don’t optimize the article for keywords at the same time. It’s just like your English teacher told you in high school… write first, edit later. Writing with search engines in mind up front will make your writing come out sounding mechanical or disjointed, which cancels out any benefit you might have thought to gain by writing for the machines first.
Do provide video, audio, imagery and links as resources, whenever possible. This makes your content very useful to visitors. Make sure that any resources that you provide are legit, and genuinely helpful. But don’t just provide the resources; also make sure that the information (or a summary of it) is available as readable text. This is a benefit to both your readers who may not be able to use the resources as intended, as well as to search crawlers.
Make sure your content is of useful length
If you provide tons of content (think hundreds of pages or posts), but each one is super short and doesn’t provide much detail, that content likely isn’t particularly useful to visitors. Search crawlers know this, and generally tend not to place it in front of viewers very often. If you’re doing all of the things in the section above, you probably don’t have to worry about posts that are too short.
There are also some issues with posts that grow too long. The first issue is that often times, visitors lose interest after a while and may not get the information they came to from your page. They came to find the information that they need, not read an essay, so you may see these visitors “bounce” more often than on your shorter pages. Sites that are focused on people seeing advertising spots will use long pages like this as a tactic (think about recipe sites where there’s an entire blog post with 25 or 30 ads before you even get to the actual recipe… or a click bait article where it says it will answer a question and then you scroll for 10 minutes trying to find the actual answer. . . how many times do you just leave those sites and just feel ripped off? I definitely avoid the site if I see it again, and I doubt I am the only one — so not great for building a good reputation with visitors.) Longer pages can also take longer to load, which is actually a ding against your search ranking. So I guess if you’re trying to get ad revenue, maybe long pages is a good tactic, but it’s not particularly nice for your visitor, so if you’re trying to convert visitors to customers, I would advise avoiding really long pages.
In short, write for your visitor and aim for quality if you want to impress.
You are your subject matter expert for your business, so you’re the best one to tell your story and explain your offerings. If you need help turning that knowledge into words, you can certainly hire an expert to help out, but the initial wisdom comes from you!
