This blog post was inspired by some information that I heard a company give to a potential new client of ours. The advice was based around the importance and benefits of blogging and general advice about content creation. They were advising their client that it was essential that they created regular content as a SEO strategy. Creating regular content would help increase rankings as Google would see the site as active and would regularly crawl the site. The thing that alarmed me the most about this advice was that quality of the content was never mentioned. All the emphasis was on quantity. The advice seemed to imply that lots of content = success. I want to set the record straight in this post.
Content for contents sake has very little value for your site or blog. It has very little value for your SEO or audience engagement. The best you can hope for is that it will do nothing, the danger is poor content will actually start having negative effects - if not with your rankings then with your audience engagement.
Ask yourself how much forgettable content you ended up creating last year? Probably a more scary question is how much time did you invest in creating it?
The web is full of forgettable content, and racing to generate lots and lots of content only increases the problem.
So how to we avoid the pitfalls and ensure that our websites and blogs are full of quality, engaging content? Here are a few tips that might get you started.
Do your research
Research is actually much more than just getting your facts right. (Although accuracy is very important!) To write good content we need to know what others are saying, what questions are being asked and where there is a gap or need that you can fill. Good conversation and engagement requires us to both listen and respond but so often we are so keen to get out our opinions and ideas we forget to listen first. Nobody likes that person at a party who spends the entire time talking without listening to other peoples views, yet this is how so many people approach content marketing. Research takes time but is a must for creating high quality content that people will want to consume.
Create content that inspires conversations, meets needs, or answers questions
Of course there are other reasons for creating content but hopefully this sub title makes a useful point. Following on from your research you should have a good idea of content that your audience will want to consume and share, content that will get them talking or help them solve a problem.
Create content that is unique
By this I mean either content that is truly unique, i.e. it hasn’t been said before, or, delivery an existing idea in a unique way. This can be done by giving a different opinion on a subject, or giving emphasis on a different point. By doing this you will be adding value to what you are commenting on.
Add value
This leads me on perfectly to my final point. What ever content we are creating, one of the most important questions that we can ask is are we adding value? Is this post going to be of help or interest to our audience? Are they going to find its useful? Does it answer their question or problem? If the post adds little or even no value, then it’s just noise and it has no value to your blog or website - not for SEO purposes or for the purpose of generating leads or links.
So lets make a commitment to write less in this year, but make sure that what we do write is high quality. Content that your audience want to read, engage with and share - content that is good for your site and marketing.
