Why Quality Unique Content is Important for SEO
Back in the day, if you wanted to get your website ranking highly in search engines all you had to do was cram the pages of your site with as many “relevant” keywords as possible. I’m sure many of you who are reading this still assume that this form of “SEO” still holds weight today but you couldn’t be more misguided. While keywords still play an important role in ranking, the game has very much changed on how they should be incorporated onto your web pages.
Content is King
At some point along the way I’m sure you have come across the phrase “Content is King.” This is a term that many web agencies and internet marketing providers use to “explain” the importance of content. I use it too. However, it has been tossed around so much and so many have become accustomed to hearing it that either people aren’t listening OR they simply do not understand “why” content is so important. I cannot stress enough of how important it is for clients to understand, educate themselves and/or respect the role in which content plays in not only ranking their website but how it engages and informs their users.
What is Google’s Primary Goal?
The first step towards understanding why content plays such a vital role in search involves changing the way you think. While many individuals want to just pass off the responsibility of their website’s ranking onto their web company or marketing agency I must reiterate that it is just as much the responsibility of the individual to have some base understanding of the current “eco-system” of the web and search. You need to WORK WITH your third party service providers just as much as they WORK FOR YOU. Understanding what Google wants is just as important as understanding what your patients want when they step foot into your practice.
So, fundamentally, what is Google’s number 1 goal when it comes to search results? If you answered “To provide great search results” you’d only be half right. Their number 1 goal is to make money. Not what you were expecting was it? You see, Google is like any other corporation in the fact their primary goal is to be profitable. They make money by creating a loyal following of users that rely heavily on the QUALITY search results that they provide. There are dozens of other search engines out on the web but Google remains the top dog because they continue to grow in their popularity and user base by delivering the very best in high quality targeted results to their users. In order for YOU to be listed in those results you have to provide high quality unique content.
What “Qualifies” as Content?
Content, is ultimately what every user is searching for – in some form or another. It may be video, articles, blogs or other social media, but it is all content, and the more of it you have, the bigger your slice of the Google pie will be. If you have more quality content than your competitors for a given keyword or phrase, which site do you think Google is going to send its traffic to if its desire is to give the user the best results and experience possible?
All Content is Not Created Equal
Sure, there are different types of content, as elaborated above, but what is more important is to understand that just having “something” is not necessarily good.
Google wants to see three particular aspects of content
- quality
- relevance.
- uniqueness
Quality is pretty self explanatory – good, well written copy or well produced videos that exude professionalism and authority.
Relevance is also pretty straight forward. If the user is searching on “cars” and you’re your site is about “boats”, clearly it is not relevant. Now obviously that example is oversimplified, but you can infer that the more specifically relevant your content is to what the user is searching for, the more success you will have in bringing those users to your site via Google. Uniqueness is a bit more esoteric.
Uniqueness has most of the costs associated with it. Both being time and/or money. However, there are two fundamental methods you can apply to creating unique content.
Method one is simply to create your own well researched, relevant and unique content or pay someone else to create it. Keep in mind that if you do this yourself, it is not quite as simple as you might think. You need to be very cognizant of SEO tactics and strategies in the creation of your content. Think of it like this. You’re building a football team and you go out and hire the quarterback with the best arm in the field, problem is, he’s blind. Content is the same way. You can have incredibly good quality and even relevant content, but if it is not crafted in a manner which obeys some of the basic laws of SEO your results will be mediocre at best. If you pay someone to create that content for you, you need to ensure that they understand how to apply SEO principles to the content creation process as well.
Method two is to take a quality piece of content that has already been drafted and use it as a “baseline” to generate new unique content. Again, this is not as easy as is implied, so you really need to make sure you fully research this approach or hire someone who fully understands the proper ways to repurpose quality material and ensure uniqueness while preserving quality, relevance and optimizing for SEO.
There are many rules of content creation, but if you stick to these three basic principles – quality, relevance and uniqueness – your site popularity within the search engines will continue to grow. More users and traffic means more to your bottom line and ultimately that is the goal of any business.
We here at Audiology Design put in a lot of time and effort into providing you materials that can help you create a better user experience for your prospective patients and satisfy the requirements of Google and other major search engines so that you can attract more patients to your practice website. Help us help you in creating the best web content in your local market and reap the full rewards of high ranking search engine optimization!