How SEO Works Today
Why is the term “Content is King” important to your business
By Thomas R. Reich PhD
For over 20 years, SOE or Search Engine Optimization has been the bread of butter of tech savvy PR pros everywhere. Marketers wanted to get attention to a client’s website or on-line store so the “SEO Guy” would spice up the blogs and other content with keywords and links. Though writing was important, good writing was rare and the expression “Content is King” was not the driving the on-line marketing world.
Until very recently, Google would take notice of these “SEO” words and bump up your website to the front page. That would allow searchers to “stumble” across that website easier, not on the merit of answering the searchers question, but merely because the piece of content contained a particular keyword. (Many Google users, like you I bet, thought of these “SEO Fixes” as annoyingly repeated words in a page that more times than often did not contain the answer you were looking for.)
Why are Things Different with Search Engine Optimization as we Move into 2018
Today, things have changed drastically, and over the last 6 months or so Google is honestly trying to fit content to a question asked. One reason is Google’s algorithms have changed and are now catching onto the SEO tricks and actively working to offset them. Their latest update, Panda 4.0, was designed to make content – rather than the keywords – the rightful king of the search engine. The search engine giant’s aim in that update was that their users will find relevant content to answer their queried question, not poorly written irrelevant content stuffed with relevant keywords. Yes today good writing is a must and “Content is King”
Google followed the Panda 4.0 update with an entirely new algorithm, AI in nature, that’s right Artificial Intelligence based! READ MORE ON GOOGLE RankBrain HERE
However, the more things change the more they remain the same. While SEO isn’t quite what we thought of it before, the idea still remains the same, write in a mathematical way the search engines will recognize. But now, it’s it is something every smart business owner can understand, it is based on actually what information is contained in an article and how it is convoyed. Business owners understand when content is king instead of a word being repeated over and over and paying for a guy to repeat that word in just the right places. Now it is all about having great information about what the business owner understands, their products and services.
The New SEO Deep Content Marketing; Why Content is King
You have probably heard the expression “Content is King,” too many times now, but what exactly does that mean to your business? How can great targeted content bring pre-qualified prospects to your door ready to be closed, rather than just a generated phone call? One way that is very successful is By making a company website the hub of information on what it is your firm sells or represents rather than a sales advertisement.
A company website and indeed all coordinated marketing in any form should be interesting, well written, have lots of pictures (we will get to that later) and lead to a core of targeted information. By making that company the information leader if their field, they will begin to get more and more of what is called “organic” search engine traffic, that is the new “SEO”. Organic traffic is visitors to your company website that you did not pay PPC to get there, traffic that got to your website because they searched for something related to what your company represents and ended up on your company website.
Some Guidelines when Content is King
One of the “rules” of writing blogs and creating other content in the new world of Google RankBrain Deep Content Search, is to create content that is consistent to exactly what your company represents. Does that mean you have to keep creating content, keep this up and hope for the best? Is there no longer any way to “SEO Optimize”? Yes of course there is, that is what marketing companies do, but now we are more old school, actually making a website that will make sense to your customers and prospects!
This goes beyond keeping to one central topic, the website must up its standards and try to increase the quality of existing content as well. This could mean slowing down a bit, being more selective with content, rather than throwing as much as you can against the wall to see what sticks. If you write one blog that’s completely amazing, it could be worth more than 30 that are subpar. Include good pictures that have search power on their own and that blog has power that is called “sticky” (Again we will talk about that later).
Google’s new algorithm focuses on what the content is about, how well written it is and how easy that content is to read. If you write a blog post about the rug industry, it has to be great information on the rug industry and stand on its own as a complete answer to a question asked by potential searchers looking for information about rugs. No longer does Google send traffic to a website because an “SEO Expert” inserted a ton of keywords. Now you can begin to see why content is king in the new form of optimizing for search engines well into 2018
How do You Insure Your Content is King
The main thing to remember is that today good research and professional writing on a subject that actually makes sense for your companies market is far more important than Keywords. Though SEO still has it’s place, a blog, article or page must still be optimized to make the content easy for search engines to “read it” or more accurately “scan it” that content should no longer be controlled by repeated keywords.
The Google algorithm was changed to weed out the “spammy” aspects of search results on Google and other engines caused by “SEO Experts”. How many times have you searched for “how do I fix a flat tire” and got endless adds for service stations selling oil changes. The idea is to better serve the searchers and take them to the information they are actually searching for. Now your website gets the opportunity to actually provide good information, not an advertisement for what you sell. Now that content is king, your company website can be rewarded when it actually provides well presented information, beginning to get the picture?
Your goal is to get content that is informative, funny and easy to read, full of visuals and as easy to access on a computer as it is on tablet or phone. It should share out well to all social medias, the pictures should link back to the core of information and be shared out to a well organized social media network – well I could go on forever, but suffice to say we know what we are doing. Give us a call – The Cheetah Marketing Group.
