Google’s zoo’s worth of updates has changed how many people do SEO, from their style of keyword inception to their choice of links and messages. The most noticeable thing that’s changed for many, though, is their content. Gabriella wrote The Hummingbird that Changed SEO a while back, and we’re now living in a post-Hummingbird world. Since Hummingbird and Conversational Search forever solidified the need for clean, high quality material to create a complete ranking package for well-designed websites, page owners everywhere have been scratching their heads trying to figure out exactly what that means.
What is High Quality Content, Anyway?
This is a great question since most clients still don’t get it. All they know is what content is supposed to do. Yet, when you break it down, consider the pressure on the writer, and words. Even when they do understand what great quality content is supposed to do, they still can’t translate the attempt as “valuable”, so it’s not an easy sell nor does it translate well into “cost”, either.
Google has actually created a short guide to help site owners better understand what it is that’s expected of them in this new era of SEO. By now we all know that underhanded practices like keyword-stuffing are out, but what, exactly, is in? According to Google, they want to see content that is useful, credible, high quality and engaging.
The problem with content is that it’s best graded by those who consume it, but Google and other search engines are the ones who are going to determine your page rank. That makes it a tricky dance, to be sure. High quality content should be the backbone of any SEO strategy so that new users and customers find your site organically, but with such a difficult to define metric, it can be hard to know if you’ve achieved your goal.
