Is Content Really King?

Content is king is the cliche that is often stated in the SEO world. It has been stated time and time again ever since Bill Gates penned an essay with the same title back in 1996. So why is it such a popular phrase? After all, content is a large contributor to traffic flow to a website, and gives you extra pages to rank on search engines.

However, it’s important to remember that content isn’t the be all and end all. There are other important factors that should be included in your SEO strategy.

Consider what is in the content

Before you do anything else to drive traffic, you first have to look at your content. Why would people want to share this post? Is it original? Does the reader learn something from it? Does it stand out from the competition? If you’re answering no to these questions, then it’s best to rework your content to make people want to share it.

To drive traffic, a few things you should include within your blog posts include:

• Links: you’ll want to find who is influential in your niche and posts links to their blog within your articles. This will not only give your blog post more authority and credibility, but also inspire the person you’ve linked to to share your post.
• Quote experts: people love being mentioned within blog posts, and will be more likely to share a post if they are mentioned.
• Images: no one wants to read a post that is just a wall of text. Images not only make a blog post look more aesthetically pleasing, it can also help when reading the post. In fact, if a relevant image is paired with your information, people are 65% more likely to retain that information three days later.   

Content alone is not enough

It’s great if you have the time to produce lots of high quality, informative blog posts for your website. But what difference does that make if you’re not invested in promoting that content? If your content isn’t being adequately promoted, it will not receive any traffic or social shares, and it won’t be a sound investment of your time.

You need to consider different strategies for promoting your blog, such as:

• Social media: social media is a free and easy way to promote your blog to your followers. This will not only help you increase traffic to your website, but also increase your engagement on social media. Use tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule your posts. These tools will help ensure you’re posting frequently enough, as well as posting at the right times of day.   
• Paid ads: the problem with social media is it’s often hard to be seen. There is often so much being posted to News Feeds and Timelines that if your audience isn’t online at the right time, they will miss your post. If you really want to ensure your audience sees what you’re posting, you should consider paid ads, such as Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads or even Google AdWords.
• Outreach: network with the authorities in your niche. If you’re sharing their content and linking to them, chances are they may return the favour and share your content.
• Emails: does your business send emails to its customers? Consider including a link to the blog post within the emails to receive more traffic.

Use old content

If you’re struggling for time to always come up with new ideas and produce blog posts, then this could be the perfect strategy.

So why should you bother updating old content? Because they have been published for a longer amount of time, older blog posts will often have more views. To take advantage of this, look at your most popular blog posts. What can be updated, or can it be repurposed, such as making it into an infographic instead?

Updating old content while keeping the same URL means you’ll still maintain the SEO value of that page, while being able to add new content and promote it to a potentially new audience who haven’t seen the post previously.

Content is still important

So content may not be the king, but it is still a hugely important factor. If you’re going to have a successful content marketing strategy, it’s important to remember:

• Who you’re writing for: don’t just promote your business within your blog posts. Readers want to be able to learn from your blog posts.
• Ask: sometimes if you want something, the best thing to do is just ask. If you’re wanting increased traffic, ask your followers to share your post. Complete outreach and ask influencers to share your post.
• Quality: always produce high quality, interesting and original content. Make sure you’re not posting duplicate content. It may not hurt your credibility, but it won’t rank and therefore won’t have high traffic. Make sure your content is long enough, around 800 to 1000 words. Longer posts will get more social shares and traffic from Google.  
• Mobile friendly: the use of mobile phones is becoming increasingly popular. It’s important to make sure your website is optimized to be mobile-friendly so people can easily read your blog posts from any device.

Do you agree that content is king? Let us know in the comments.