We often hear the saying that content is king. However, with the face of marketing changing all the time, it is difficult to know just how relevant content is. The short answer is ‘very’. Gone are the days where you could get by with duplicate content and keyword stuffing.
Today, it’s all about the quality, originality, and informative nature of the content you put together. It must excite, inform, and delight — if your content marketing campaign is to be a success. With that being said, read on to discover more about why quality content is so critical.
Did you know that four million search queries are conducted every minute on Google alone? As consumers, people want to find the best answers for their searches, and they want to do so as quickly as possible. Because of this, we are increasingly turning to the Internet to make purchasing decisions and to learn about different services and products.
If you are a business owner, you need to look at this from a different perspective. Rather than using Google to find out about various items, you need to think about how you can use this to reach your target audience, get your message out, and help them become a loyal customer. The answer is simple: quality content.
Before you can understand why quality matters, you first need to be able to distinguish good quality content from poor quality content. You can do this by looking at some common characteristics. Let’s begin by taking a look at poor quality content. Some of the common characteristics you can expect here include:
On the other side, good quality content shares the following characteristics:
It is essential to keep in mind that content exists across your digital platforms. It comes in many different formats and forms. We tend to only think about blog posts and website copy. However, content can come in many other forms, for example, premium content, like whitepapers, podcasts, and e-books, as well as landing pages, text ads, email campaigns, social media posts, and informational videos.
Now that you have a good understanding of the difference between good quality and poor quality content, it is important to look at why quality matters and how it impacts SEO. Search engines reward good content in several different ways.
This includes looking at trustworthy websites that link back to your content, as well as looking at factors like alt text on images, meta descriptions, and H1 tags. It is also important to take a look at the negative impact that poor quality content will have on your website.
As search engine algorithms favor original content, websites that have duplicate content are going to rank lower in the search engine result pages. In the beginning, the penalties for duplicate content were designed to make sure that an unscrupulous person could not copy content and then pass it off as their own.
Recently, however, this has become a method for discouraging websites from publishing the exact same content across different pages on the same site. If the content is not carefully crafted with a unique and specific goal in mind, it is going to lose its impact. The same applies if there is not a certain purpose in mind.
You need to consider the fact that content has an impact on user experience. A user will spend around 10 to 15 seconds on a website page at any given time on average, so you want to make sure that this amount of time counts. A lot of people think that user experience is only applicable to design.
However, that is not the case. If someone lands on one of your content pieces, you need to make sure that you provide exactly what that user is looking for, and you need to ensure that they can access the information easily. This means that you should break up your text using italics and bold for emphasis, bullet points, and using different sections.
You should not include a bunch of keywords at the bottom or top of your page in order to rank for SEO. You also need to make sure that you do not hide content in a text that is too difficult to read or is too small. You should also use images, as this will help you when it comes to communicating your main messages.
It’s a good idea to link out of your website to high authority websites when you need to back up the data you have supplied. You will make it easier for users to take the next desired step with intuitive architecture. You also need to make sure that your content is mobile-friendly. After all, smartphones are the main platform used to access the Internet today.
As you can see, there is no denying that you need quality content if your content marketing campaign is to be a success. In the past, you may have been able to cheat the system by using poor quality content or simply reusing content that you had found elsewhere on the web.
However, this is something that you most definitely cannot do today. We hope that this article has helped you understand that you need to prioritize quality if your content marketing campaign is to be the success that you hope it to be.
Author Bio: Andrew Oziemblo, Founder & CEO of Chicago SEO Geeks, the digital marketing & SEO agency helping businesses achieve long-term growth goals.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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