The most important thing for SEO in a website is its content. Content lends credibility, builds trust and inspires others to backlink to you website. The greatest content in the internet are the most backlinked and the most visited ones.
Even Google’s content policy such as the Helpful Content Update and the Google Spam Update focus on improving the content in a Website.
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Impact of Quality Content on SEO
The internet is built on sharing information through articles, news, attractive images, infographics, and videos. The better the quality of content, the wider will be its appeal and greater its following.
The strongest point of a website from an SEO perspective that I have seen in my career is the quality of content. Even websites which have poor UI, like the one below, has more than 29,000 backlinks, a DA (Ahrefs) of 42 and a monthly viewer count of 3 Million.
Factors Contributing to Quality Content
There are several factors that contribute to high quality of content. Some of them are:
- Uniqueness
- Originality
- Freshness
- Comprehensiveness
- User Engagement
1. Uniqueness
The internet has more than a billion websites. Even the smallest niches has hundreds of players. In such an environment, there is a need to create a website that stands out.
The benefit of creating a unique website (whether unique in content, graphics or interactive-ness) makes the website and its information stand out.
A new approach which I have seen trending in creating unique websites is the approach of “gamification”. It is a method which uses gaming components such as progress bar, time needed to complete reading and other techniques to let users estimate the effort needed to read the article.
2. Originality
Google is a search engine which basically runs by giving information to others and running ads on those pages. Therefore, it is 100% obvious that it needs high quality content that satisfies user needs.
One such factor of high quality content is the originality. If a website is already ranking on Google (whichever page), there is no need to rank a website which posts the same information. This is also a reason why unedited AI content is often punished. It adds nothing new to the internet.
Another way how originality impacts the quality of content is through Google’s EEAT Rules.
- Experience is proven when you add some real life experience to your website.
- Expertise is only proven through new insights and new information.
All these new information contributes to the originality of your website and therefore impacts its Google rankings.
3. Freshness
Fresh content is always preferred in search topics which are time sensitive. For example, SEO factors that did better in 2010 (keyword stuffing, bulk backlinks) are obsolete and these days Google punishes those websites that use them.
Freshness is also a great weapon in the hands of well experienced SEOs. Let me share you an anecdote.
In 2022, when I worked as an SEO for a crypto news website, I saw an article on “Future Trading Bots” with dropping traffic. Upon updating the article with latest information such as new bot pricing, new benefits with new bots and deleting some information on defunct bots, we saw a lot of instant progress.
Within 3 days, the website was ranking on Rank 1 of Google. Below is a screenshot of the same.
4. Comprehensiveness
Google Helpful Content Guidelines
- After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
- Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
When you want to rank for a comprehensive topic, for example, “The Best Web Developer in India“, you need to make sure that your article is comprehensive. It means that it covers all the topics that can come to someone’s mind when reading the article.
Suggestion: If some related topics cannot be accommodated in the same article, create a link to a page or post that explains the article. For example, this page contains the following link to an article on EEAT Rules, which are most essential in Google rankings.
5. User Engagement
Engaging the user is perhaps the most difficult part of producing quality content. Most users have a attention span of less than 5 seconds.
With my marketing experience and the knowledge I gained through my MBA, I know it for sure that users do not want to read an article unless it startles them somehow. This might be an unknown fact, a summary article, list of top 5, 10 or 15 things or any other such information.
In our practice, we follow the 3-30-3 Rule.
- You need to catch someone’s attention for 3 seconds.
- Once they devote 3 seconds, you have their attention for another 30 seconds.
- Once you capture attention for 30 seconds, you have their attention for the next 3 minutes at least.
To execute this technique, we first use a hook line in the title. For example this article has the title, “The Most Important Factor for SEO in a Website”, which is kind of a summary article.
Once they are hooked, we use the the intro paragraph to answer the question in a straightforward manner. It hooks them for another 30 odd seconds.
Finally, we try to keep the article below 3 minutes to read, but that depends on topic to topic.
Conclusion
Content produces the strongest impact in SEO of your website. Rest all other SEO factors come second.
Any content that is not helpful will not retain its ranking on Google or any search engine no matter the amount of backlinks. High quality content is created through a will to share something new and and arranging information in a way that helps the reader absorb the most information.
This is how you can make sure to make the most impact in your website’s SEO.
