Why The Right Content is Critical For SEO

Firstly, let’s understand what authoritative web content is.

In short, it is content that proves you or your business is an authority (or expert) in the niche or subject matter your website is about.

Google will match your content to the mountains of knowledge it already has about your subject matter and how that quality stands up against other professional websites.

I can write about SEO here, but if all I do is repeat the same keywords and never use any technical jargon or data that the experts use on their websites, it is unlikely that my website, no matter how professional it looks, will be given any “content authority” rating.

So to gain this authority, a suggested strategy is to create pages that contain “expert knowledge” type keywords that match the subject as well as technical data to products or services, historical information, maybe manufacturing processes, etc.

To make things really powerful, add information that is unique to you or your business.

These pages are unlikely to be searched for in any quantity or even read top to bottom. They exist to prove to Google’s algorithm that your webpage adds real value and is worthy of a top position.

There is an SEO terminology called the “content gap.” This is where missing out on key ingredients of your subject within your niche can dilute your website’s authority. This is because it likely is included in other professional websites.

An example in my niche is web design! I don’t offer this as a service, but I recognise that most SEO agencies do.

So by not talking about web design in some way on my website, it creates a content gap, where my online property does not look as authoritative as others. (Even though I do not provide that service)

So I have included some information on the subject, testing WordPress themes, for example.

These are pages that are optimised for common search terms that your customers are likely to search for. Chances are you will use online tools to establish what keywords they are and how hard they are to rank for. Then you would create a strategy to rank for them.

These landing pages will include the data that your customers are looking for, maybe sizes, colours, etc., and of course prices.

This content may not be in any way authoritative (it would help if it were); it will mainly be marketing or sales copy that promotes the product service in the best way possible to help with conversion.

Ideally, you would link your authoritative pages to the landing pages and vice versa, so your visitors can delve deeper into the subject, should they choose.

It also will create a nice “silo”, for Google to fully understand the subject and related pages.

Having too much sales copy on a landing page can diminish conversion (sometimes the opposite, so a different strategy for different businesses). But adding big call-to-action buttons can definitely help with conversion.

Let’s not forget the images that can say a 1000 words, and for some business services and products, videos can improve retention times and sell even without your visitors reading any words on the page.

Never have exactly the same product description page as someone else! There has to be an element of uniqueness. This is where a good copywriter is worth their money in gold.

Don’t forget that the most important landing page should be your homepage for your brand name. This should be seen as essential. If potential customers cannot find you for your brand name, trust will be the lowest.

There are times when you want to keep your customers abreast of what is happening in your company to maintain engagement. This content may be neither authoritative nor sales-orientated.

Using social media to distribute this content is a good strategy for many businesses. However, when publishing this type of content on your website, I believe it is better to keep it in a separate subfolder such as news or blog.

This type of content could include headlines such as –

• We celebrate 20 years in business!
• Well done to Kelly who has not been promoted to sale executive!
• We have a new business property opening soon!
• Our new range is being prepared for summer!

Hopefully you get the idea that this type of content has a value to engage your customers but is not product or service authoritative and, if included within the same part of the website as a key subject, may dilute the overall subject matter.

I don’t want to worry you; there is no problem writing this kind of content and then sharing it on social media; just do it in a separate blog or news folder.

I know when I look at other websites’ content strategies, I often get frustrated when I see low-quality content ranking high. There are reasons for this; I will try to explain a couple.

First of all, authority does not just come from great content; it also comes from backlinks too.

In fact, most SEO agencies will only focus on delivering authoritative backlinks to gain better rankings.

I will always include a content strategy, because backlinks are the most expensive part of SEO, and it is so time-consuming and, for some businesses, very difficult to justify the cost.

My strategy is to publish the best content I can, reducing my backlink requirement to be competitive.

But there will be websites out there with low-quality content that rank higher because of their powerful backlink profile.

Another reason low-quality content may rank high is with high engagement. For example, a new “Pop Star” with millions of social media followers, suggesting they visit their new website.

These engagement signals. from many people visiting the website will increase rankings even if the quality of content on them is poor.

There are content marketers out there who never attain backlinks or have a social media presence that gets website traffic purely on their writing ability done in mass.

But most of us will attain some backlinks and some social media presence and then create the best content we can.

So sometimes we have spreadsheet-type information that includes useful data for our products or services.

Used in the right format, these can be very useful, especially from an authoritative view.

But this can fall down if you sell the same products as others, and these spreadsheets are just a copy of what is already published on the internet.

If this is so, you would need to add a uniqueness to the spreadsheet page. Either by adding further data that surpasses what is already published or maybe adding some compelling marketing copy.

As much as I would like to have a career that involved AI (artificial intelligence) writing content for me, it just is not going to happen.

There are many out there who suggest that ChatGPT or other services will write compelling content that will rank in Google search without doing anything else; well, they are wrong.

What enhanced this theory was when Google removed AI as something banned from Google or terms and conditions. Because the term AI was removed from its terms and conditions, many assumed it was perfectly acceptable to use ChatGPT to write all their website content.

Of course I tested this with the testing websites I own. To be honest, a few pages at first worked, but gradually over time those pages fell out of the Google index.

So does that mean there is no use for AI in content creation?

No, I am not saying this!

Using AI to research information, which is then transferred into a uniqueness from human writing, is still a good strategy.

What you have to understand is that AI is not creating anything unique. It is just pulling up existing content that exists within Google.

It may attempt to “spin” the information or paraphrase the content, but Google still knows when that is happening. And if here is a clever program that gets around this, it will only work for a short period of time until Google realises and demotes the content.

I want to make clear that no AI in any form was used to write this article. But I may use AI to research others!