When it comes to marketing, you may have heard that content is one of the most important aspects of your brand awareness – but what is meant by content is king? Content plays a massive factor in most of our lives on a daily basis, regardless of the format you choose to digest it.
Whether it be a video, social media post or written content – consumers are constantly craving for the next topical piece of content to inform or entertain themselves with.
The same is true for search engines. Without content, search engines such as Google ceases to have a purpose. So how and why do search engines prioritise one piece of content over another? To find out how long does SEO take to work, take a look at our post regarding this subject.
In this post, we will be assessing what makes content ‘king’ and why it plays a pivotal role in your overall brand awareness.
What Is Meant By Content Is King?
The term ‘content is king’ refers to the fact that producing high-quality content is one of the most important factors for brand awareness. Consistently releasing fresh content, regardless of the format you choose to display means that you are doing your best to ultimately not be forgotten.
This rings true for both your potential audience as well as the search engines you are using to compete with your competitors.
If you are producing fresh content consistently, this ultimately means that you have a fairly higher chance of seeing a boost to your keyword rankings against a competitor that hasn’t posted any fresh content on their website(s).
For example, if you have a website and you haven’t added any fresh blog posts or made any recent changes to your service(s) or product description(s). You can’t expect to be outranking a competitor who is constantly providing new pieces of content to their website every week.
Google will quickly begin to take notice of your competitor who is frequently providing their search engine with fresh, relevant content and make the decision to boost their website higher than yours for multiple search results.
So how can this be addressed to work in your favour? This is where an effective content strategy comes into play.
Why Good Content Is Key To Your Marketing Strategies?
Good content is much more than writing content that is just well written. In order to implement content creation into your marketing strategy, you first need to have a solid understanding of what you want your brand to represent as well as what your audience connects with.
Writing content that your audiences and search engines will enjoy is one thing. However, it is also important to have content that you are confident will convert new traffic into customers/clients. This is what makes content marketing such a powerful tool.
At first, content can be used to attract new audiences to a particular page on your website – a new blog post for example. These visitors will either like enough content to decide to browse your other pages or leave.
However, in a few weeks time, you might have published another piece of content that has brought those people who first left back onto the website – it is here where your brand starts to resonate with those visitors prior.
How can you be sure that the content that you produce will rank? There are several ways you can do this, two of which for example – you could provide original content that is fresh or you can choose to answer questions.
Doing one or the other will work for some brands but not for others. For example, if you are a driving constructor – a good example of a blog post would be to educate people who are eager to learn how to drive on what to expect with the main test. Perhaps indications on what instructors look for during a test for example.
So what and how does Google determine what is and isn’t good content?
How Does Google Rank Content?
The overall reason why Google decides to rank various pages is due to the fact that the search engine wants to provide users with the best answers/solutions or overall content in general for a particular search query. To put it simply, with it being important to the users to have the best content possible – it is important to the search engines also.
In order to monitor the quality of content that is being published most hours of every day – Google has set up search quality standards and guidelines that will guide people to the highest quality content possible. Content that is both relevant and beneficial to the users.
Regarding the process of making your content appear on search engine results – this is what’s known as indexing. Not indexing your pages on Google will result in your pages not being seen by potential users.
Successfully indexing your pages will result in your pages being visual to audiences which will result in your pages obtaining more traffic. Which in turn will mean any new content of the same quality will result in your website and pages being discovered far more quickly.
Below we have set a list of guidelines to ensure you are indexing your pages correctly in order for Google to evaluate the content of your pages.
- Make sure that all of your most important pages are being indexed
- Review your indexing by using site:domain.com and eliminate any irrelevant pages or content you find to be lacklustre.
- Review the cache of your key pages using cache:domain.com to see if a Googlebot has recently crawled onto your website and discovered if your most recent pages are live.
- And always review the content itself. Content can always be added to or changed to boost its rankings.
It is also important to think about how you will display your page titles and meta descriptions. Your page title and your meta description are crucial as both of these will be the first impression you will give to your potential visitors. Making sure you have a compelling title and meta description will entice the audience into clicking through to the page. You should also make sure to not exceed the limit of the recommended character limit.
Duplicate meta descriptions may also cause an issue, to read why should you avoid duplicate meta descriptions, check out our post going into more detail.
How Long Should My Content Be?
The debate surrounding how long should my content be is an ongoing debate. If you were to ask 100 SEO experts and each person will give you a different answer.
If your main goal is to have your content rank for a particular keyword, we suggest that some research into that keyword needs to be completed first. We recommend looking at the keyword difficulty and search volume. The keyword difficulty is how it sounds, this assesses how difficult it will be to rank at the top for that particular keyword. Whereas the search volume assesses how many people search for that keyword.
There is a multitude of tools you can use to assess these things for your content strategy. We suggest the likes of SEMRush, AHREFS and Page Optimiser Pro. Using these will help you create great content that will rank.
It’s also important to review who is ranking for the keyword in the SERPS. For example, if you are an eCommerce website, you can’t expect to have your product descriptions rank higher than the likes of Amazon. Having those expectations with SEO will ultimately disappoint you in the short term.
SEO is a long game, and having quality content with strategic topical pieces of content is the most important aspect to us. And that is why we believe content is king (or queen).
