Quality Content For SEO – Why You Need It And How To Create It

Content is king for SEO – long live the king – and other SEO clichés! There’s a lot of discussion around why you need quality content for SEO but, as heroes of the web, we’re here to tell you exactly HOW to craft amazing, clickable website blogs and features without wasting time or money!

Quality content meaning

First, what do we mean by quality content? Ultimately, quality web content means something valuable to your website visitor. It may be educational or entertaining. It may provide help for a practical problem that they are trying to solve.

Quality content can be long and in-depth, or it can be short and concise. Ultimately, it depends on the needs of your website visitor.

Why quality content is important for SEO

As Google’s algorithms become more sophisticated, quality content (aka 10x content) is able to focus more on meaning and value, rather than just links built to a website. In the early days, repeating a keyword was enough to make content rank. Then came Latent Semantic Indexing – and keyword repetition was reclassified as ‘black hat’.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI keywording) is about using synonyms, adjectives and related words to communicate a more precise meaning to Google’s computers. The next evolution still recognises LSI keywording, but goes much, much deeper. Google’s now able to understand how your content differs from everyone else’s and how users feel about that. It uses metrics like click through rate, time on site, screens per visit, bounce rate and on site engagement to determine if your content is truly high quality or if you’ve just added a lot of LSI keywords. In short, there’s no tricking Google on this one – you have to produce good stuff!

Premium content is, frankly, a pain in the blog

Rolling out you’re A-game content means planning, crafting and marketing everything you create. This is, well, very time-consuming. In fact, a 10X piece of content, on par with what the big industry leaders are producing, can take weeks or even months to plan, cost thousands of dollars to produce and a whole lot more than that to promote.

Planning your SEO content strategy

Right, roll up your sleeves and let’s plan some amazing content that gets the job done fast, and without a small fortune’s marketing budget.

1. Get the ideas down on paper

Great content ideas come from everywhere, but there is a list of places you can get them and get them fast. This is the perfect job for the office junior, the receptionist or even your teenager who needs to earn some allowance!

• Facebook groups and Twitter feeds. What are people discussing in your industry? What questions do you see come up over and over?
• What has gone viral before? How can you refashion it for your audience? This is called ‘Skyscraping’ content, that is, finding what’s being discussed in your industry and tailoring it for your customers.
• Site Search. What are your potential customers searching for on your website? If you sell cake decorating kits and everyone is searching for Moana cakes, can you write content on how to create a Moana cake using your equipment?
• Influencer discussions. Is there a big name in your field getting attention on a particular topic? Can you disagree or give another point of view?
• Answer the public. Get a list of questions people are Googling in your area. These can then become blog topics on your site
• Do your competitors all face a single problem? Maybe you all sell shoes but are losing sales because of sizing issues? Can you create the go to guide to shoe sizing – or printable footprints that show exact sizes?
• Responsive posting. Is there a breaking news story or trending topic that you can offer insight about? Can you quickly knock out a useful blog about it and share to socials? Can you take advantage of a hashtag or the Facebook trending articles algorithm?
• Authority content. Authority is the buzzword of the day. Can you create content based in data – solid data, written into a comprehensive but useful white paper? Do you have the resources to poll customers? Can you use your sales data to draw conclusions about your industry?
• Can you demonstrate something awesome in a short web video or a well-designed infographic? This is where the costs start to pile up, so for small business, this one has to be for something very special indeed.

2. Got your list, now what?

How can you give the average customer the best information ever? If you figure this out, not only will you create really useful content for your website, but it will be shared time and time again creating waves of new traffic. Traffic drives personalisation. Personalisation boosts SEO performance. Most of all, it positions you as the brand that understand their problems, which is the biggest step in boosting sales!

For each item on the list ask yourself:

• Do you have something to say about this? Will it be helpful to potential customers? Have they struggled to find the info elsewhere?
• Can you think of a friend or colleague that you would WANT to share this content with? Is it interesting enough to compel you to share?
• Is there a gap? Is your industry failing on this topic? Can you do it better, or at least better for your audience?
• How would your audience like to consume this info? Is it a 2000 word mega blog or is it a 5 image Slideshare presentation?
• If you’re going to go multimedia, is there a way to make multiple videos/graphics/apps/etc in one hit? Can you shoot three different videos on the same day to keep costs down?

Once you’ve narrowed down your list, it’s time to Google it and assess it.

Find similar content and make something better

Google the keywords you’d like your content to rank for. Does amazing content already exist? Can it be improved upon?

If you find amazing content already posted on competing sites, check to see how well it was received and shared. You can use tools like Semrush to see how many websites have linked to it and check the company’s social pages to see how well received it was when posted.

If it looks like amazing helpful content, but it was largely ignored, you may wish to reconsider how clickable the topic really is. If the content ‘fell down’ in some way (bad writing, bad design, bad marketing) you may wish to create your own take on it. You’ll need to make it original and laser targeted to your audience. Be sure to provide unique insights and helpful information missing from all other content targeting your keywords.

Check each article/content piece concept for gaps in the industry. Look for areas where content is badly needed and be sure to alert industry influencers to its existence once it’s posted. Once you have your short list, either block out time to research and create, or book a professional copywriter and designers to make it happen. We can help you create amazing content as part of your SEO strategy – just sayin’.

Quality content for SEO: What to do next

• Share on socials using hashtags and influencer outreach.
• Build internal links to get the rankings ball rolling.
• Approach industry players to link to your content.
• Comb LinkedIn and Facebook groups for discussions around the topic and share our content to the post.
• Revise you’re A-game content and release updated versions.

Quality content for SEO isn’t just about writing to your keyword groups. It’s about pushing your content out there to generate referral traffic and brand growth. SEO is more complex than a few links to a page. Embrace high-quality content and you’ll automatically embrace Google’s ranking requirements.

Need help creating quality content for SEO on your site? Talk to the SEO experts at Media Heroes today!