Why is High-Quality Content Important for SEO
Everyone talks about SEO all the time because we know SEO makes our website easy for both readers and search engines to read. Do you think you could make your site likable by Google just by implementing all SEO techniques without producing high-quality content?
The answer is NO.
All search engines are in the business of pulling out the most relevant content that can answer people’s queries. Their ultimate objective is to get you the answer (solution) you are looking for more efficiently and faster.
Even if you have stuffed your keywords in the title, title tags, body content, headings, subheadings, and images, it will get you nowhere with poor content.
Without high-quality content, it will only result in a waste of time, effort, and resources.
Why is High-Quality Content Important for SEO?
Don’t get me wrong here. I do agree that you should use the right HTML tags and structure data to market your posts and websites. You should know the Google Ranking Factors and implement them in order to allow Google knows what your site is about.
As we all know, search engines deploy bots that crawl websites and index the content. Website architecture is no doubt an important element of SEO because it allows search engines to understand how you outline your website.
However, in order to boost SEO rankings and gain traffic, it is essential to have great content on your website.
To demonstrate this, I’m going to break down the SEO campaign is much like your car and show you why is high-quality content important for SEO.
At the very core, your car takes you from Point A to Point B. Your SEO campaign at the core can also take your business places, too.
With all the most advanced car accessories and engine installed on your car, it for sure will bring you from Point A to Point B faster than any car that does not have these fancy luxuries. However, your car will not last long if the driver does not have the right driving skill to operate the car.
Similarly to your website, with rock solid SEO tactics you have implemented, they will bring you a lot more traffic to your site. However, with poor quality content, not only it will be penalized, it will continue to go down the rankings and beaten by the competitors.
If you write high-quality content, search engines will for sure help your site get more exposure.
How to Create High-Quality Content?
I bet you have heard “Content is King”. To be precise, “Quality Content is King”.
We create high-quality content not only to allow our site to be ranked on search engines but also to engage and provide valuable information to the readers.
#1 Research and Create Original Content
If you are aiming for first-page search results, you should shift your focus to produce high-quality content, rather than excessive keyword stuffing.
Google evolves continuously over time and it is smart enough to present content based on its quality to readers, and not based on how many keywords in the content.
Therefore, it is essential to consistently create high-quality and engaging content that deliver value to your readers to see success in SEO.
No matter how good you are in your niche, you can’t just pick up a topic in the middle of the air and write about it. To make your content worth appreciation, you need to keep learning and make sure you have an adequate knowledge of your niche. This is where research comes into the picture.
There are many resources online where you could access them at zero cost.
– Wikipedia: Wikipedia no doubt is the first resource I would choose to get all basic information about my niche. Most of the time, you can also get some historical data of a subject.
– Google scholar: It is sometimes good to provide information based on published research papers from universities and experts. This not only provides valuable details and information but also gives confidence to your readers.
– Google books: Similarly to Google Scholar, citing quotes and references from books under public domain can be a great add for your article. Other than that, you could also access to free ebooks from Project Gutenberg.
#2 Understand Your Readers
Different types of content appeal to different types of reader.
It is very important to know the audience you are targeting and tailor your content to connect with your desired audience.
Most of the content marketers fail because they have implemented wrong content strategy – “build it and the traffic will rise”.
There is a reason that some content marketers struggle to attract new readers while some can’t keep up with demand.
Those who succeed in gaining lots of traffic are those who know their audience.
Your ultimate goal is to identify what kind of content your readers like to read and share. You could use the following ways to identify your audience:
– Ask for reader’s feedback in blog comments and through your social media platforms.
– Check how many social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest) shares on each post.
– Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. You can trace how many people read your posts and which are their favorite posts. Other than that, demographics overview on Google Analytics breaks down your visitors by age, gender, interest, and behavior.
Google Analytics
Google Webmaster Tools
– Google Trend. You can also explore the trends and related keywords your readers might be interested. A search of “Make Money Online” on Google Trend in this example show you the interesting trends over time.
Not only that, it also shows related terms that people have searched in addition to “Make Money Online. Understanding related keywords to your niche will help you to create relevant content that will bring more audience to your site.
Do your research using the above-mentioned methods before writing a blog post so that you do not waste time and effort on something that no one wants to read.
Once you know what are your readers’ biggest desires, you can create content that taps into the areas.
#3 Creating Strong Headlines
Statistically, 8 out of 10 people read headline copy and only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of your content. To gain more traffic, you have to have a magnetic headline.
Most readers have an average attention span of eight seconds. If your heading is not attractive enough, no one will read it even your post is on the first page of search engines.
A good headline with poor content will trigger more clicks than a poor headline with good content if both posts appear on the first page of Google.
There are a few tools you could use to create convincing headlines that they just cast a spell on your readers.
Moz’s Title Tag Preview Tool or Portent’s SERP Preview Tool are both great online tools that work perfectly fine for me.
Moz’s Title Tag Preview Tool
Portent’s SERP Preview Tool
# 4 Multimedia Gives Visual Impact
Every SEO strategy needs infographics, videos, slideshows, photos, and recipes. Readers respond better to visual information than to plain texts.
It is, no doubt, possible to publish high-quality content without any usage of images and other forms of media. However, a post with visual content normally outperforms post with only plan texts. That’s the reason why you get high bounce rate.
However, you have to take note of the followings if you use media in your post:
– Make sure your image size is optimized because page load times is important for SEO. You could use a free online tool like Online Image Optimizer to resize your image before including it to your post.
Note that you could check your site load speed with Google Webmaster Tools. It allows users to track GoogleBot download time. This is excellent for testing speed at a page-level.
If your image is not optimized, GWT will indicate which image is slowing your page down.
– Beware of licensed images. You could be breaking Copywrite law if you are aware of that. To be safe, download images from Pixabay. PixaBay is a community run database of free-to-use photography. You could always get images with “Public Domain”, which means that you can use them without attribution.
You could also change the Google Image Advanced Search Setting to look for “free to use, share or modify, even commercially”
# 5 Make Your Writing Actionable
Most readers look for web content that is both unique and useful to them. To be precise, they constantly look fo actionable content that they can use.
Let me give you an example, it is not enough to say that the keys to making a lucrative income online are by writing more high-quality content and advertise Amazon products on your website. Almost all bloggers know about it, but if you could give some useful and practical ways of doing it, readers will come back to your site for more.
A non-actionable content does not give the readers any takeaways but an actionable content provides a clear step-by-step guide (best with images) to guide readers how to reach their goals.
Almost all internet users are constantly looking for solutions to their problems or to learn something that can help solving their problems. These internet users often look for an answer that they can solve their problems immediately. How
These internet users often look for an answer that they can solve their problems immediately. However, many content marketers fail in creating high-quality and actionable content. The end result – readers walk away and look somewhere else.
It is essential to offer them something useful once they are done reading. It is totally okay if you cannot offer a solution, but, at least, something useful and valuable to keep the journey going.
By doing this, you are building trust with your readers. They will bookmark your page and will come back again for sure.
The final step of creating an actionable content is to encourage your readers to share your post on social media.
So, it is your turn now.
Share this post if you find it useful to you.
Leave your comments and share your ideas with the rest of us.
Regards,
Alex
Hi Alex,
This is a very professional article based on SEO and i have learned quite a few pointers from reading this. Your content and website looks very professional and you sure have practised what you are preaching on your website. You have a great domain name as well as a beautifully presented website , with amazing content.
Also love the SERP tool. Thank you for making this website, I have found it very helpful, I am also going to book mark it. Many Thanks Naeem
Hi Naeem,
Thanks for dropping by and gave it a read. I do hope my post here does give you some insights on SEO. Let me know if you have questions in near future. There are other posts you might find it interesting for content marketing – Which Is The Best Keyword Research Tool For Content Marketing .
Cheers,
Alex
Good Day to You Alex,
Using SEO techniques without high-quality content is like expecting to be able to make a profit selling products and services, simply by adding them to your site, without first researching to find out if they are popular and reliable.
It’s nothing but a lot of words, taking up space and useless to everyone.
We are more likely to have traffic with quality content, supporting a decent product, even without SEO, if we know how to leverage traffic from relevant sources, while avoiding “black hat” tactics.
Relevancy is the key.
In fact, “stuffing your keywords” will cause the search engines to penalize your site, resulting in less traffic.
This is why Social Networking has gained so much “traction” (like your graphic) relating to SEO.
With constantly changing algorithms, it is unwise to invest all of our efforts in Search Engine SEO alone.
This makes your #1 point “Research and Create Original Content” even more essential.
In fact, I’m willing to bet that putting our customers first is the most reliable aspect of marketing on every level, especially with our content.
We (most of us anyway) not only have a hard time understanding the more technical aspects of Google Analytics, but are better off supporting the needs and interests of our visitors.
As the search engines become more intelligent about measuring our ability to meet our customer’s needs. Even the “bots” are starting to understand the relationship between our content and customer experience.
In fact, I just created a new “Favorites” folder called “Research Sources” and added the ones you list in this post. Thanks for providing those references!
Yes, I even put your Google references into that folder. It will make a good reminder for me in the future. The “Demographics and Interest Reports” screenshot you provided, is a helpful reminder of what Google is good at doing.
Those of us using WordPress, now have the valuable “Stats” in our Dashboard as well, and I personally find them easier to use, though admittedly not as detailed.
Google Trends is a resource I haven’t used before. In the past, I’ve tried using Google Analytics for Keyword Research, but Google Trends looks a lot easier to use, with less distracting details. Thank you for providing the screenshot!
A note about “Bounce Rate”:
Having a high bounce rate isn’t always a “bad” sign. My new venture is a platform for my Affiliate Marketing efforts. When someone selects my affiliate link, continues on to my affiliate’s sales page and ultimately purchases the product offered, I earn a commission.
The importance of the percent (%) of your bounce rate, will depend on your own goals and the structure of your project.
I’m looking forward to taking some time to explore “Pixabay”. This image resource is new to me and looks absolutely wonderful!
This post is a very good example of “Actionable Writing”.
You not only provide useful and practical advice, but take the additional and time consuming effort to provide a wide variety of links to the tools we need, to take that action.
As a follow blogger and helper, I commend you for this and want you to know that it is appreciated.
Asking my readers to “share my post on social media” is something I personally have a hard time doing.
To me it feels like doing a “Hard Sell”. Even though I would rather not do this, I can see the value in it.
We all have at least one part of doing business online that makes us uncomfortable for very good reasons.
I have read that the first step in overcoming what is stopping us from being successful, is to own it, then deal with it.
You have given us much to think about in this post Alex.
I am happy to share it on my social media of choice, and will try to become a better marketer, by following your fine example.
My Best to You
Arth
Dear Arth,
I guess my “call for action” tactic works. This is the longest comment I have ever received so far. Thanks for spending your time to give this post a read and giving your valuable opinions on this topic.
Keyword stuffing should be avoided if you do not wish search engines to penalize your site. You basically fail when you start counting words as you write.
Many content marketers tend to ignore the relevance and quality of their content. That is why most of the unseasoned writers fail because they focus too much on keyword stuffing.
I do agree with you that Social Networking is an important element in attracting traffic. Most of my traffic come from Social Media like Twitter. One good thing about social networking is it is completely free unless you opt for the special ads feature.
As for “Bounce Rate”, there are different views on this area. I do agree with you that it depends on the project’s objectives, and it may be not a “bad” sign to have high bounce rate. However, for most content marketers, our intention is to get better rankings on search engines in order to gain traffic, as it is free. Unfortunately, Google takes this into account when it comes to SEO.
Thanks for sharing this post with your readers and thanks for you compliments.
Have a good week ahead.
Alex.
Great Info. First time I have seen this type of Information. Thank you
Hi Raghav. Hope you had a good read. You are welcome.
Alex