Quality content is, without a doubt, the most important part of SEO. As a content creator you should focus most of your efforts on it and enjoy it while doing it.
If what you need is to improve your positioning in search engines, forget about SEO and don’t obsess, focus on the content and the needs of the audience, leave aside the metrics, tools and tips that flood the Internet. It will be useless to take SEO courses, follow strategies and tips, know and monitor metrics… etc if our content is empty or we do not enjoy doing it.
All the SEO tips and tutorials that you will see throughout this course will simply help the search engines find you, position you better and faster, but, if the content you offer is poor, in the long run, your position will be negatively affected. The same will happen in the opposite case, someone who barely applies methods to improve SEO but who has really useful content that helps users will little by little see how their SEO positioning will improve.
If you are in a hurry and do not have time to read this complete SEO course, I recommend that you at least read and meditate on this article since, by using only the quality content part, you will be able to improve SEO without having extensive knowledge.
Why create quality content
The main objective of SEO is to attract users and our main objective is to obtain traffic to, for example, make money on the Internet, obtain prestige, improve the image of a brand… etc. To do this, it is necessary, in turn, for users who visit our website to carry out certain actions, such as, for example, a purchase, a click on one of our advertisements or simply reading the content that we offer them.
If we now focus on the user we will realize that he has a need or problem that he tries to solve through the Internet, for which he performs a search and visits web pages to obtain the solution to his problem.
Very good but… What does all this have to do with SEO? Well, if we do not create quality content, we are not solving the user’s problem or their needs and, as a consequence, we are not going to meet our objective since it depends on the user.
Think for a moment… How many times have you come to a website that, apparently, provided a solution to your problem but, when you have wasted fifteen minutes of your time reading, you have realized that it was empty content that did not provide a solution to your needs? Would you visit it again? Obviously not, that is why I affirm that Black Hat SEO or over-optimization techniques in the long run end up in SEO penalties that hinder our positioning in search engines.
Another reason to create quality content, which is increasingly important, is artificial intelligence. Until recently, the operation of the Google algorithm was based on unknown static variables that, with a little effort and practice, could be intuited and, as a consequence, the algorithm could be fooled using Black Hat SEO techniques.
However, today and although it remains unknown, I am convinced that Google’s algorithm incorporates artificial intelligence that little by little will become more intelligent and will learn to distinguish quality content from empty and poor content without need of using static variables.
In other words, I believe that the future trend of Google’s algorithm, through artificial intelligence, will not be based so much on SEO techniques, metadata and HTML structure but rather on the content itself that will be able to process it, analyze it and thus know if it is really useful or not in the same way that a human being does.
Again you will think… What does artificial intelligence, SEO and the positioning of my website have to do with it? Simple, if you focus on quality content and not so much on SEO itself and derived techniques, you will be preparing your website for the future, it will be less likely that a change in Google’s algorithm will negatively affect you.
In fact, if our content really is quality, with artificial intelligence in search engines, little by little we will see how our positioning improves in them without having to apply and learn complicated SEO techniques.
What is quality content
Once we know why creating quality content and how it affects our web positioning, we are going to reflect and analyze what quality content is.
Useful content that solves problems and needs
The reason why users browse the Internet and visit our website is because they have a need or problem and they want to solve it and, if possible, quickly.
If the content we offer does not contribute to meeting a need or problem, no one will visit us, the abandonment or bounce rate will be high and, therefore, we will lose positions in search engines, it will negatively affect our SEO, as simple as that.
Maybe some of you remember Homer Simpson’s website, why didn’t anyone visit it? Because it was a website that did not help or serve anyone, not even Homer himself.
Examples of quality content could be writing a SEO course like this to teach people, creating an article that teaches users how to mow the lawn with a brand’s new machine, or we can even aim to help ourselves writing a blog about a certain topic that we want to learn and delve into and that, most likely, may interest someone.
Entertainment is also a necessity so, if your site entertains someone even if it does not solve any problem, we can also consider it as quality content.
The important thing here is to have a clear objective or purpose, a need or problem to solve that we never lose sight of.
Original content that is not a copy
If the content is duplicated what value do we bring to the Internet? What’s the point of investing time and effort into it?
Let’s not confuse copying content with consulting sources to write it. An example of this is this SEO course, to write it I obviously had to consult external sources but I have written and structured it myself, in the way in which I understand and process the information. I think this can help users understand certain concepts that, in my opinion, are explained in an excessively convoluted way and that information is very difficult to find in a centralized way.
It is necessary to keep in mind that duplicate content entails SEO penalties and, therefore, we are going to achieve the opposite effect, deteriorating the position we occupy in the search engines.
Structured, processed and summarized information
There is no point in shooting information at the user if we have not previously processed, summarized and structured it in a way that is easy for the public to digest. We have to make it easier for the user to understand what we are explaining.
There are multiple techniques to structure information such as URL SEO friendly and HTML sections. In fact, the HTML language was created for this purpose, to structure information independently of its format, for which we already have CSS.
Information generated by people for people
When we learn SEO we tend to change our way of thinking and, with it, our way of writing content. Let us never lose sight of the fact that we are writing for humans, not for Google robots or other search engines:
- Content for humans, a factor that must be paid special attention to. This means that we can use SEO techniques, but without going overboard because otherwise we would make reading very difficult and we could earn some SEO penalty if we are detected. If at any time you have to make the decision between optimizing a text and ensuring that it is understood and easy to read by the user, opt for the second option. Content written for robots is not quality content.
- Human generated information, another important factor given the rise of artificial intelligence like ChatGPT. Avoid generating content with robots, in the end it will be noticed and there will come a day when algorithms will be able to detect it. Also, think for a moment, what is the content that most attracts and engages you, what format does it have? For me, personally, the articles that hook me the most are those that are humanized, those where you can tell that there is a person behind it, where, from time to time, a joke is made even if this is not optimal for SEO.
Easily accessible content
This point refers to ensuring that no one or anything has difficulty accessing the content. Within this category we can find two sections:
- Content accessible to humans, for which we will use techniques such as mobile compatibility or mobile friendly for SEO or alternative descriptions in the images with the ALT attribute for people with cognitive difficulties.
- Accessible and indexable content by Google robots. This point, in turn, has an impact on the previous one because the way people find us is through search engines.
Expand information by browsing with links
This section is achieved through the <A> HTML links. SEO Off Page, one of the main categories of SEO, is responsible for everything related to the links on a website.
In fact, the web in general and links in particular, emerged with this purpose, to allow the user to navigate among information dispersed throughout the World Wide Web.
Updated information
Updated information is one of the variables of Google’s algorithm. Keep in mind that Google will rank sites with recent activity higher than those that have been abandoned or are updated occasionally.
We might think that this means that, for example, we cannot write in our favorite programming language Cobol, however, this is not entirely true. Although it is a very old programming language, Cobol is still used today and, therefore, there are users with information needs and interest.
This refers more to useless content, which is no longer useful to anyone because it is outdated, such as, for example, telephone numbers or services from a company that are no longer provided because it has changed location or sector. SEO and outdated content don’t mix well.
Enjoy creating content
Maybe it seems silly to you and you think that this does not affect SEO or web positioning and you are right, but in the short term.
Creating quality content is a difficult task, positioning a website takes time, it is not done in two days. In the short term, it may work for you to write things (or even have a company and its corresponding website) that you don’t like, but in the long term, it will end up taking its toll on you.
This is just like work, when you work a few hours a day on something you don’t like it becomes boring, this in turn generates poor results and this, in the end, will end up generating poor quality content and… we already know where this ends, in a worse SEO positioning.
Therefore, enjoy, create quality content that you like, that you really want to generate, apply small SEO techniques along the way and, little by little, you will see results.
Examples and ideas to create quality content
Suppose you have created a website for your business, you have read this SEO course where we explain that content is the most important thing to improve your positioning and you have decided to get to work… but you don’t know what content to generate… Well, next We are going to list some ideas and examples to create quality content:
- Product analysis and reviews. Every potential buyer uses the Internet to obtain prior information about the product to be purchased and its characteristics. If our website is dedicated to selling gardening products, we could make a post about the characteristics of the latest lawn mowing machine on the market.
- Product comparison. Likewise, it is very interesting to read about product comparisons, advantages of one over the other, weak and strong points, graphs, comparative tables… etc. Suppose we are dedicated to graphic design, we could create a post where we analyze and compare some graphic design software.
- Courses and tutorials, whether for a product you are selling or something related to your business. If our website were, for example, selling second-hand trucks, we could create tutorials on how to change the oil in the latest models that have come on the market.
- Lists of useful tools, again, that are related to your business. Suppose we sell web page creation services with WordPress, well, an idea would be to make a list of the most used plugins in WordPress, their description and how to use it.
- Share your day to day. Lately this is in fashion and the truth is that it works very well. It basically consists of sharing your day-to-day work over the Internet. A very good example is that of a store that is dedicated to fixing consoles and, through social networks, comments on the different breakdowns and how it solves them.
As you can see, the content ideas to create to boost your website are endless and it is not the objective of SEO to carry out an analysis of all the possibilities, simply use your imagination and enjoy your work.
If you need more ideas to attract and retain the user my advice is to think like him, as if he were on your website and ask yourself some questions such as: What needs do I have? What content would I like to see? Does this content already exist? In what format do I prefer to see it? What type of content would encourage me to make a purchase?… etc. The important thing is that what you write is related to the website where you are writing it.
To finish this article I would like to share with you a video that I really liked since it reflects (or rather affirms) that SEO is destroying the Internet due to bad SEO practices like the ones we have been mentioning in this post:
