Is Your Content Helping Or Hindering Your SEO?

The importance of creating content to your SEO cannot be understated. Simply put, you are not reaching your full SEO potential if you aren’t creating content. However, while it is important to create content, it is just as important to make sure that the content that you are creating is helping your SEO efforts.

Imagine you’re going on a run. You feel you’re going along just fine, but you know you aren’t reaching your full potential. So, you decide to drink an energy drink to give you the energy you need to go further. Having the energy drink is one thing but if it doesn’t contain any ingredients that gives you energy, it’s worthless to you. Your content creation is the energy drink to your SEO potential and the actual content contains all the ingredients. If the right ingredients aren’t there, it will not help your business. So, are you following the best practices when it comes to content creation?

The Purpose Of Your Content

If you’re creating a PDF, infographic, video, blog article or eBook, for example, the main objective should be to try to solve a problem. Why is this? Someone searching the Internet isn’t going to search for your business or your exact products or services unless they are already aware of your business and considering buying from you. You can’t expect to be found if your content is just focused on making a sale.

For example, if you have a problem with your car, what would be the first thing you would do? You would first want to diagnose the problem. It could be as simple as your car making a rattling noise. What would be the first thing you search online after diagnosing the problem? Would it be:

A) Where are the closest garages to me?

B) Why is my car making a rattling noise?

The chances are you would search something like the latter option as you would want to further understand your problem before you look for a solution. So, let’s say you do search ‘Why is my car making a rattling noise?’, what sort of content would you most likely view first?

A) A blog article detailing some of the potential causes of your car rattling

B) A webpage with an offer of a full car services

You’d probably choose the blog article, right? You could read the blog article and see that the problem you have has a simple solution that you could implement yourself, which would save you time and money on a full car service.

Why is this so important to your SEO? Search engines such as Google favour content that they think is aimed at providing solutions to the problems being searched rather than just making a sale. This means that, while your products or services might not come up when someone does a search, a piece of your content might and that will make the searcher more likely to see it and more likely to become aware of your business.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t be creating content aimed at making sales. After all, you will need to make sales to be successful. You just need to make sure you have content for each segment of the customer journey.

The Information In Your Content

As important as it is for your content to be created with the right purpose in mind, it is also crucial to ensure that any information your content gives will help your business. What do I mean by this? Well, any information you give in your content needs to be:

Accurate and reliable – You can’t just write anything and assume it’s correct. Your content shows visitors your professionalism and knowledge of the sector. If your information isn’t accurate and reliable, it paints your business in a bad light.

Up-to-date – A part of making sure your information is accurate and reliable is making sure it is up-to-date. Just because your content is up-to-date one day, it doesn’t mean it won’t ever become outdated. It is important to make sure you are updating your current content as well as adding new content.

Unique – Think of your competition. Your business isn’t the only business in your sector and your competitors are likely to have content like yours online. Google favours unique content so it is important for you to create content that stands out from your competitors’.

Compelling – Ensuring your content is reliable and unique is very important but if your content isn’t compelling enough to interest visitors, they aren’t likely to read through it. You need to make sure what you’re putting into your content is interesting and something people would want to read.

Useful – Your content helps guide your potential customers through the awareness, consideration and decision stages. It needs to be useful to them or they have no reason to go forward with your business. Think about the questions they want to be answered and make sure your content is created with the intention to answer these questions.

How Is Your Content Performing?

So, having read the above, would you say your content is helping or hindering your website? It is important to remember that your content is just a part of your SEO efforts so if you if do think your content is performing well but your SEO isn’t overall, it could be due to another aspect of it not performing well. Check out this article for tips on making sure your SEO is on point. If you’re unsure of how to improve your SEO, please feel free to get in touch with a member of our team to find out more about how we can help you.