There is a lot of misinformation on the internet, especially in SEO where “experts” will spin a point of view to get more visits to their site. One person is telling you “content is king”’, another say’s that Googles so smart you don’t need much content. Let’s talk about each and look at this from a realistic perspective.
Content is king
This statement is pushed hard by anyone that’s ranked a site with a lot of content. They firmly believe in the importance of content in SEO.
People that believe this think that the more you create, the more likely you are to rank for more words, mainly because those words are actually on the site now.
This makes a lot of sense. However, Google is much smarter than this. They look at the site as a whole and decide for themselves what the site it really about. They also might consider some of this content as very similar to other content which really doesn’t add value to a visitor.
On another note, adding new content on a regular basis does prove to Google that your site is current and active. They want to send people to sites that aren’t old and stagnant so this can help with rankings and crawls.
Finally, content absolutely is king because it tells Google what your site is about, and without it, your customers won’t stick around or even know what you do. So from a broad view, content is the most important thing you could have!
Content is becoming irrelevant
There is this very strange view going around online that says that content isn’t all that important, links are all that matters..
It seems like most people take this literally. The point here is not that content is irrelevant. Content truly is everything. But, the point being made is that Google weighs links heavier for rankings than anything else.
But if you have no content, then your site is meaningless.
Our thoughts on the importance of content in SEO
We have clients that come in all the time saying they need to push out as many new blog posts as possible. They are concerned with quantity over quality. They understand the importance of content in SEO, but they don’t realize what’s truly important!
This approach is rarely rewarded with great rankings. Google and Bing want to provide searchers with the best possible results so you won’t jump to a different search engine. This is why they want QUALITY posts that provide the best information.
So posting for the sake of posting is not a great strategy. We (and Google would probably back this up) prefer to see sites that have a lot of quality content to offer visitors. Whether this is 5 articles or 100. The point is that it should be easy to navigate and answer their questions or interest them.
Rather than meeting a quota of 10 new posts a week…. Focus on what it would take to create quality helpful posts. Maybe your team could make 1-2 a week but really take the time to make them shine. This will make a real difference in your rankings, and actually keep customers on site and trusting you.
More is not better than quality in just about any situation!