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Content marketing may be a relatively new Internet buzzword but the concept behind it goes right back to the age-old business slogan of ‘keep the customer satisfied’. Give a visitor what they came for and they will do more to boost your traffic than any amount of technical back-room trickery. In the past some search engine optimisation (SEO) practitioners ignored this and focussed instead on primarily keeping the search engines happy. This no longer works. Today the first, and most effective, way to optimise a site’s position in search rankings is to ensure it delivers high quality, valuable content.

The change is being driven not by consumers but by the search engines themselves who are competing to deliver the most relevant results to their users. Google in particular has made huge strides in developing algorithms that go far beyond simply differentiating between content that is unique and original, and that which has been copied from elsewhere. Its search engine is now said to be so sophisticated it can rate content on how valuable it is to the end user. Technology like this means a welcome end to the days of crude SEO agency techniques such as cramming content full of keywords and buying in thousands of back-links.

Powerful tool in SEO agency arsenal
For such a technical field of marketing the concept of using content for optimisation is surprisingly simple. It is also remarkably powerful. You create content designed to inform or entertain your audience. You place it on your site and on the broader internet in places your users visit. They notice your content, engage with it and share it with friends who visit your site. Thanks to the great content the site provides they stay longer, visit more pages and tell more people about it. The result is solid, regular traffic that is noted and recognised by Google and other search engines as a sign of a worthwhile site.

To be fully effective a content strategy should take the broadest possible approach to its target audience. The site itself should of course carry high-quality; unique core content that is tightly focussed on its subject, but it need not end there. Regularly updated blogs, up-to-the-minute insider news, a user forum, surveys and competitions are just a few other ways to deliver high value content to visitors. To attract new visitors, however, the strategy also needs to extend to encompass all the places people hang out in – the social media, YouTube, external forums, other websites and blogs.

Content rules
Good content will achieve things no outdated optimisation technique can hope to deliver – an audience that trusts and values the source of its information. Today’s internet users are sophisticated and demanding. They don’t waste time on worthless content – there is far too much of that around already. They also don’t like to be misled by sites that fail to deliver on what they promise. Neither do the search engines. Old-style optimisation is dead. These days the internet is ruled by content.

Article posted on Friday, November, 9th, 2012 at 10:50 am

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