There are many different aspects to Internet marketing, with SEO being one of the most popular and most effective, but just how important is content? You could be forgiven for thinking that once you have paid an SEO company to optimise your website, the work is done… and to be honest, many SEO companies think and work that way as well.
However, all on-page SEO really does is to tell the search engines what your website is about. On-page SEO makes sure that when the search engine spiders crawl your website, they’re made aware of the keywords, the industry and general tone of your website. SEO ensures that your pages are properly indexed and none of your existing pages and content is wasted.
SEO is like chapter headings, but with the content, why would anyone read the book?
Google has a mission to remain the most successful search engine, and with Yahoo surrendering to Microsoft and Bing having to pay people to use it, all Google has to do to remain the best is to offer people useful answers to their queries. These answers come in the form of websites, your website for example, as an answer to someone’s search.
Of course, if your website doesn’t feature any useful content, Google won’t offer it up as a result in its index. If it did, and it wasn’t useful, the user might use another search engine instead. After all, that’s why most people use Google rather than Yahoo or Microsoft, MSN, Live, Bing, whatever the hell it is. Their results are easy to manipulate with SEO, which is why their results aren’t as useful.
As a test, look at the websites which rank above you in Google when you search for the keywords that you want to appear for. They could be your competitors, or generic websites with information on your industry.
How many pages do those websites have indexed? You can find out by entering ‘site:www.stuckon.co.uk’ into the search box (replacing our URL with the one you’re looking at). They probably have more pages than your website, and they’re probably updated regularly with new content. This is why they rank highly in Google; this is why you need content to match them.
Look at your own website. If you were looking for information about your industry and found your website in Google, would you be satisfied with it as a resource for information?
If not, you can’t expect to Google to rank it highly, can you?
- New report hints how content can be successful - June 19, 2018
- Improve your web presence with help from Google - April 18, 2018
- Complementing your content marketing strategy with email - March 7, 2018
