Web Design & SEO Blog

It seems like a lifetime ago that I first started gaming the search results. Back then we were targeting Yahoo! and Altavista to get huge amounts of traffic driven to our websites.  Back then it was a lot easier than it is today to rank for keyphrases relating to your business. The techniques used were a lot less intricate and there were a lot fewer of them.

As time has past, we all know that Google, even though it wasn’t around when the term SEO (search engine optimisation) was first used, can be accredited to the creation of many small businesses and a whirl of fly by nights claiming to be SEO Gods.

One phrase that is common with all SEO companies is the term “Content is King”. This term is not one that can only be used in the SEO world, but it can apply to many different areas of marketing or product development.

But is content really King when it comes to SEO?

In it’s most basic form content is most definitely King. Google will happily slurp as much quality content from your website as it can. So that means the more quality content you have, the better it is for getting your website found on the search engines.

So why did I ever post this article at all if content is King after all?

Well you see, people like take the easy route when it comes to getting things done. If they could copy someone else’s content word for word without affecting their brand or search rankings, they would probably do it just to save time.

Unless you have a proper strategy for how you will develop your content you could just be wasting your time. If we take a client case study as an example, it will probably give you a better idea of where I’m coming from.

For years we focused on developing reams of content on every topic we could think of relating to their business. We spent hours developing content and implementing it on the website.

It had an amazing effect on the traffic to their website. They were exceeding well in excess of 300 unique visitors per day. Their traffic to the website was driven mainly by the many hundreds, if not thousands of keywords the site ranked very highly for.

But as things changed, we noticed that Google was no longer taking the reams of content as serious as it used to and although we were still achieving a high level of traffic, we decided it was time to take a bold approach.

Instead of focusing on the amount of content, we focused purely on the quality. We reduced the number of pages, the amount of content per page and focused entirely on content that would deliver conversions.

Literally overnight the site began to drop in terms of the amount of traffic it was receiving on a daily basis. In the end when everything embedded fully and Google removed the references to the old pages that no longer existed, the site was averaging have the amount of visits per day.

Disaster you might be thinking right?

Well in fact, it was the complete opposite. Although traffic had decreased significantly, conversions and business were up. It was clear to us at that stage that the work we had done on providing quality content that was person centred and written in such a way that engaged with the visitor, it had actually improved the conversions from the people visiting the web.

So the next time you are planning the content for your website, remember that as important as content is you should focus on the quality rather than the quantity (which a lot of SEOs try to push you to do!).

I must also finish up by saying that the recent changes to Google’s algorithm have meant that websites with poor quality content (and lots of it) have been negatively affected by this change resulting in major drops in their previous rankings.