From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO
Content SEO
- Content is the foundation of successful SEO. It is as if you're trying to build a beautiful house, you've got great framing, you've got great exteriors, wonderful lights, look at the beautiful glass you've put in, but you didn't build a good foundation to put it on, and it all topples over. So having great content is the number one thing you can do to assure that everything else will be successful going ahead. Unfortunately, understanding what content means is a hard thing to get your mind around. I've tried to describe it to some people as if you're writing something more than just a brochure. You're writing something that makes people feel like they've taken away something, that they really will remember. Or, if food is your thing, is that you've had a great meal that you've really enjoyed, that you've really savored, as opposed to, I went in and I had something from fast food, and it did the job but I'm not going to remember it tomorrow. You really want to do a great job with your content. You want to provide answers to people. You want to provide something that goes beyond just selling to them. If you have this kind of material, that's going to do well for you. The other thing about content is that you need to think about how you're writing your content, in the way that someone who is seeking your information might be thinking, or searching for it. So for example, if you sell running shoes, you might think it's clever to call them Athletic Fleet Foot Things. And so, all the content on your website might use these words, get our great Athletic Fleet Foot Things, and you think it sounds wonderful, but someone who's searching for running shoes, might not find it because you didn't actually write in the language that they are using. It doesn't mean that you have to use them words over and over again, exactly the way someone might put them in. Search engines are very smart these days, can understand things like synonyms. But still, you do want to speak in the language that they're using, to increase the chances that you'll do well with your content. So overall, content is very important. I understand the difficulty in trying to know whether you have great content or not. There's no easy tool I can point you at, but I can give you an exercise, which is do some searches for the terms that are important to you and your business. Look at the content that's showing up in the top results. Read through some of that content and look how it compared to what you're already doing. Are the people who are showing up there going above and beyond? Do they seem to be doing things in a different way or in a richer way, than perhaps what you're doing? If so, that's what you want to go towards, that's the goal you want to seek. That's the goal that you want to exceed.
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