“Content is king” has been the marketers battle cry since January 1996 when Bill Gates published an article touting the value of content and surmising that it would be where “real money” is made.
Arguably, the creation and consumption of content is pretty darn important today, right up there with air, water and money.
With more than 4.57 billion active internet users and 61% of them having made purchases directly from a blog, it’s imperative to prioritize the strategic value of your content development.
Top 5 tips to structure content:
Those technical details considered, content is still not created equal. Google ’s primary mission, other than to “do no evil,” is to give their users exactly what they need without having to go to the second-page graveyard.
To ensure they deliver the best results first, they calculate 3 major content factors.
With the lightning fast changes in our world right now, it’s imperative to keep your content on point and up-to-the-minute factual. Other than historical based searches, time-sensitive information is the most sought after data. If you're searching for “ hurricane update,” you want the most current information not last year’s storm statistics.
Google displays the date of last update on your search results listing and the most current news stories across the top of the page.
If the information on one of your pages changes frequently it is considered more active and therefore more valuable. If there are “facts” on your page that have become obsolete, these need to be updated or removed in order not to run the risk of being penalized.
Remember from Chapter 1, Google greatly values facts in your authority scores and including up-to-date information, statistics and news is always going to generate more active profiling.
It’s a good idea to update your content as often as is appropriate considering your topic. Whenever updates are required to the information, making a comprehensive overhaul is more impactful than just changing a few words or numbers.
Google does it’s very best to ensure that the results they serve up are accurate. The algorithm compares your data against their “ knowledge graph,” which is an information repository containing data on just about any topic you can imagine. If your data is faulty, your search positions will be too.
Google is also a stickler for proper grammar and appropriate phrasing. They know when spammers spam. Be sure to write in basic natural language and go ahead and run your content through a grammar checker like Grammarly .
The more thoroughly and uniquely you cover a subject, the greater the odds of ranking in top search results. Simple concept but an art and science to achieve.
Covering a subject in-depth means that you provide all the information that searchers are looking for in all the ways they may like to consume it.
Browsing your keyword library for semantic phrases and frequently asked questions will help you develop pieces that precisely answer these questions using a variety of multi-media.
Thin content and shallow listicles just don’t cut it on their own. If you don ’ t cover a subject in its entirety, users will leave to find a more reputable source which will increase that deadly bounce rate.
However, as listicles and thinner pieces like checklists are likely to be a part of your overall content library, be sure you link to your more authoritative piece from within thinner content, which passes on valuable link equity.
As you create new content, think through all the various ways your customer might be searching for you. The more versatile, factual and meaningful… the more attractive your content will be to searchers and search engines.