If you’re a website operator, digital marketer, or online businessperson, the last thing you want to hear about is another big paradigm shift in search engine optimization (SEO). It’s already hard enough wading through a buzzword-filled faux-hacker culture focused on “gaming” search engines for views, or even navigating the ever-changing guides to SEO best practices from more buttoned-up sources.
Without a serious set of technical skills at one’s disposal, it has always been easy to get caught in the weeds of SEO — the keyword density, the backlink farming, the mysterious algorithms that shape the very destiny of our online ventures. But here’s the plain truth about SEO today: Nothing matters more than the quality of the writing featured on your website.
Already powerful search tech injected with new AI features focused on language-learning makes Google (and other search engines) better than ever at parsing and evaluating human writing. When Google ranks your website today, it isn’t scanning your HTML for the right density of keywords or links. Instead, it’s checking to see how well your content aligns with its high standards for relevance, clarity, and trustworthiness.
Many see this as a positive change for SEO, online marketing, and the internet in general — or at least an opportunity for one. By forcing website operators to host content that is informative, accurate, and actionable (as opposed to simply keyword-packed), the entire internet and its audience will naturally benefit from the increased quality. Of course, high-quality content doesn’t write itself, presenting a challenge alongside this opportunity.
What Does My Search Engine Consider High-Quality Content?
High-quality writing naturally becomes a subjective and fairly personal concept as soon as you go beyond basic grammar and spelling. To that end, let’s dig a bit deeper into what exactly you need to do to create content that will satisfy Google and other modern, AI-powered search routines (which will, in turn, grow your audience and reinforce your brand).
Google’s current guide to search quality emphasizes the “E-E-A-T” metric, referring to experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. While the precise details of Google’s algorithmic mechanics do, of course, remain hidden under the proverbial hood, this comprehensive guide helps webmasters and online business owners better understand how a website’s quality and relevance are ranked. These high standards are meant to protect Google’s flagship search product from being exploited by gimmicks, shortcuts, or unoriginal AI copy-and-paste jobs.
Learning how to actually write great content is a lot like mastering any complex, multifaceted craft. It takes years of practice and requires remembering many different things at once when first starting out. Sadly, a master’s degree in creative writing is beyond the scope of this webpage, but here are a few key concepts you should focus on as you start your own journey toward better content:
- Envision your readers and understand who you’re writing for before you ever sit down to type. One part of making your content relevant is writing it with the correct tone, style, and vocabulary level for your intended audience. Expertise is extremely important, but so is your brand’s unique voice — never sacrifice one for the other. When it comes to the internet, good writing means user-focused writing.
- Answer real questions. If you’re not sure where to begin, start scanning your customer emails and comments for actual questions folks have asked about your products, services, or background. These can make great topics for full blogs and informative web pages. Once you’ve posted a few of these, consider expanding your reach by posting pieces that address broader questions about your industry, service area, or specific area of expertise.
- Get everyone on the same page. Pumping out great content can be a full-time job in and of itself, so there’s no shame in enlisting some help. In fact, it’s likely that the other areas of your business would suffer if you personally spent all of the time necessary to write, edit, and post great original content on a consistent schedule.
This is why many website owners and digital marketing providers work with third-party writers to generate their content. This is a great strategy as long as you communicate effectively to make sure your team understands your audience, your voice, and what makes your brand unique.
- Inform, engage, convert. The purpose of high-quality writing is manifold. For starters, hosting high-quality written content makes your website more valuable to your audience in an immediate, tangible way.
In addition to being a good outcome in its own right, this further establishes you as an authority in your field while building trust and recognition for your brand. It also keeps visitors on your website longer, making it ever more likely that their visit will end with a purchase, reservation, email sign-up, video view, or whatever other action you’re trying to get them to take.
If you’re having trouble understanding how the super-simple concept of good writing actually works as a high-end SEO tactic, let’s walk through a stripped-down three-step model of the process:
- The mere presence of good information gets more visitors to your website, not only because web users are seeking high-quality info, but also because search engines are rapidly becoming better at evaluating human writing for readability and real usefulness (and are weighing these criteria more and more heavily when compared to traditional SEO benchmarks involving keyword density, site maps, and backlink catalogs).
- The quality, depth, accessibility, aesthetics, and digestibility of your oh-so-great content keep those users hanging around your website longer (and coming back more often) than ever before.
- The payoff comes when all of this increased trust in your brand (plus, perhaps, a few powerful suggestions woven seamlessly into your well-crafted content) organically encourages more conversions, clicks, sales, etc.
Better Content Matters Now More Than Ever
If your SEO strategies are stuck in the 2010s, Better Content Matters can offer a powerful, swift, and future-proofed content overhaul. We leverage our deep roster of writers, editors, digital marketing pros, and subject matter experts to bring every client’s ideal content strategy to life in a cost-effective and totally customizable way.
Reach out today to learn more about putting our world-class services to work for you, whether you’re just uploading your first website or managing a portfolio of projects that requires thousands of words of fresh content on a weekly basis. No job (or topic) is too big, too ambitious, too complex, or too niche for our multi-talented team. When Better Content Matters, there’s nowhere else you’d rather turn.
