I was reading an interesting article from SEO guru David Quaid over the weekend entitled ‘We need to stop saying “Write content for the user” in SEO‘
It’s a thought-provoking piece, and he puts across a very valid point – namely that building authority is key when it comes to search ranking. Google doesn’t read your content and think “Hmm, that’s a well-written, thoughtful piece that will genuinely help users.” It can’t analyse in that way.
But what it can do is look for signals that your content is of good quality and user-focused. How? By looking at how many sites link to you and what authority those websites have. By looking at how close (ie how many links between you and them) you are to high-profile, respected, and trusted sources in your field. And by seeing if users come straight back to search results after visiting your site, which implies that they weren’t satisfied with the content they found there.
As always, that’s a simplification, but in essence, those are some of the key ways that Google assesses the quality of your content.
So yes, having trusted, high-authority websites that mention your brand and link to your content is a sure way of appearing high up in search results.
But don’t ditch your copywriter just yet.
For a start, you are unlikely to get high-trust, high-authority websites citing you if you don’t have well-written, user-focused content on your website. Unlike Google’s crawlers, those websites do have people who can assess content quality subjectively, and you need to convince them that their reputation will be well-served by linking to your content.
And secondly, SEO is massively important. But content is still vital when it comes to establishing your brand, conveying your message, positioning your products and services, and converting and retaining customers. Without good quality content, you waste the good traffic your search efforts bring in.
To Quaid’s credit, he doesn’t suggest we should all stop writing good content. His argument is more that only writing good content is not enough to get you to the top of the heap.
True. But for business owners – especially smaller operators – it’s important to take a balanced approach and get the basics right: create a clean, well-structured website, produce good content that is of value to your users, network externally to get other websites to reference you, and don’t get over-focused on one thing at the expense of all others.
Check out my guide on how to start with content marketing for more info.