As you may or may not know, your website’s content is vital to the success of your website’s SEO performance. Google rarely indexes an empty page or even small amounts of content for keywords/queries that actively get searched by users.
Table of Contents
Quality and Quantity
While the search engine might index a low-quality, short 2-300 word page into their system’s cache, the page won’t have a chance ranking for any query of importance with healthy search volume that helps drive consistent, relevant traffic to your site.
You might still notice a low-quality page of a website appear when searching the page’s exact title or a specific chunk of its page content in quotes, but such specific keyword phrases are rarely searched by relevant visitors or prospects.
As we move into an era of better-optimized voice search technology, quality content will matter even more, as the number of competing sites performing continual Content and SEO maintenance increases.
Regardless of the way Google operates (and other search engines) with the ultimate goal of serving the highest quality and most helpful content for every possible search query, many business owners, and even specialized marketers continue to push away or ignore the value of producing consistent, helpful content, let alone thinking about the optimal architecture of said content.
There could be many reasons for this, such as time constraints, lack of resources, lack of results from a past effort, or a lack of understanding in that SEO and Content are both long-term business investments that require continual optimization. Search engines also love seeing a healthy level of website links and content updates on a regular basis.
While there are some exceptions to acquiring short-term traffic from one-off pages or blog posts (such as strong links from reputable sites already pointing to the new page content), individual pieces of content don’t usually net impactful results in short periods of time without smart syndication/promotion and/or very good on-page HTML optimization.
But over time, through blending both quality and quantity of pages and professionally written blog posts under your website domain, a snowballing traffic effect generally occurs without any promotion or marketing work on your part!
As a result of blending SEO and Content efforts, your site has a much better opportunity to rank for a high volume of longer-tailed phrases, while strengthening your website’s ability to rank for related high-volume, competitive keywords.
More Content Means More Data
Just as important, with more great content comes better search analytics. With more search position data, you’ll have an abundance of insight into how you could improve, reformat and re-link your content to become extra powerful and relevant to search engines for your target keywords.
This is the ultimate power of long-term, consistent website content posting campaigns when performed properly alongside SEO tactics like improving internal site linking and page architecture.
Content writing can be frustrating without patience and a long-term investment type of outlook, but know that on a 6 or 12-month scale for content campaigns that stick to it, the effort often provides great compounding results to both site traffic, overall search visibility, and ranking opportunities.
Don’t Forget Content Architecture
If you want a successful traffic-generating site in 2017, you can’t just publish individual pieces of even quality content and call it a day. Well, you can, but it’s not the best use of your time! A “team” of linked up, related pages under a website will win over a bunch of siloed off or “orphan” pages that are difficult for search crawlers to detect and decipher meaning from.
In this hyper-competitive digital age, you need to think about the way in which all of your website’s content pieces interrelate such as:
- Phrase linking between related pages of content.
- The diversity of link types between pages of content.
- The position of links other HTML elements on content.
- Topic and keyword distribution across related pages of content.
- Reducing redundancy and differentiating words and paragraphs, even if two related pages in your site are very similar.
- And more!
Crawl Bots Are Pretty Smart
Google’s crawl bots are smart enough to query a page and query all pages connected to it, traveling forward and reverse, deciphering many HTML elements, indexing them, and deciding how each page correlates to other pages in its system to help make ranking decisions. Correlation is HUGE in all things SEO, ranking, and search engine logic.
For example, say you have a 1000-word page on how to cook salmon. You checked the current top 5 or 10 ranking pages for “how to cook salmon” while writing the piece and outdid the existing content in terms of:
- Page length/word count
- Semantics/related word usage
- Answers to relevant topic questions found in Google’s “People also ask” snippet
- Incorporating info about related searches (Google’s related search suggestions)
- Diverse HTML elements ie. H1/H2 tags, lists
- Images with relevant titles & alt tags
- Overall quality and helpfulness from the point of view of an interested user
Awesome! This page might rank for “how to cook salmon” somewhere in the range of pages 1 and 2 relatively quick.
Teaming Up Page Content
Now, what if the competing website with the current top-ranking page for “how to cook salmon” includes 4 more internal pages related to cooking salmon, such as “how to fry a salmon” and “how to bake a salmon”? And these pages are answering the questions in the search engine’s “People also ask” section relatively well, while linking back to the “how to cook salmon” page?
Then, chances are your “how to cook salmon” page will struggle to outrank the competing page, unless more inbound contextual content is added to and improved within your site through consistent SEO and Content efforts. The competing site has fed the crawl bots much more relevant info at both a page and domain level about “cooking salmon” that it’s acquired a nice, locked-in ranking position.
Content Matters
To sum up, if you’re a business owner with a website and you’re interested in Texas SEO services for example, please keep the value of locally relevant content production in mind. Content raises the baseline for incoming traffic due to wider local search visibility. The most helpful, educational, and content-active websites that are strategically linked together will win more search engine real estate and soak up traffic share far into the future.
If you write your own content regularly, wonderful! If not, we can help you with providing strong, SEO-optimized content on a regular basis. Content that will act as dividends for your website for the life of your site’s existence.
As you can only improve existing content so much, we strongly recommend blending SEO and Content Writing services together for maximum impact and to build authority in your niche/industry.
Yes, content writing and architecture can be a pain if you don’t like to write or think about the writing. Yes, it’s time-consuming. But, it has to be done if you wish to outrank many of the competing sites of today and drive relevant visitors to your site to discover your brand, grow referrals/mentions, and generate new sales.
HONE Digital Marketing is a leading digital marketing agency based in Lubbock, Texas. We specialize in professional SEO services, PPC ad campaigns, and digital marketing consult.