The one thing you need that will boost your SEO, and it’s not SEO
As humans, we tend to pay a premium for things we don’t understand. We pay someone to help us invest, we pay someone to help us with our legal obligations, and now we pay someone to help us get found on Google or Yahoo. Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO”, may be one of the most convoluted terms in the digital marketing world. In the past 10 years, SEO has been a leading question for many small businesses with an online presence of whether it’s worth investing in or not. Though we wish we could simply tell you to fuhgeddaboudit (Donnie Brasco style), it’s just not that easy.
We’ve studied SEO, the nuances and the steps it takes to implement a full-blown optimized strategy. Then we asked ourselves, if we could only do one thing that would reap a majority of the results we wanted, what would it be?
The answer? Consistent content creation.
That’s right, getting a simple strategy together to generate and release content, on your website, on a consistent basis. And guess what? This is the number one piece of advice Google will give you for improving your own SEO as well. Check out their SEO Quick Start Guide - Page 14. They admit it clearly right there on the page:
“Interesting sites will increase their recognition on their own. Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed [in this guide].”
A recent study produced by Ascend2 found that “SEO effectiveness was improving, and content was by far the most important factor in this.” In fact, 72% of the polled marketing professionals worldwide said that relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic. The tactics that trailed behind in importance? Keyword research, link building, social media integration, mobile search optimization, and URL restructuring - all of which are the more complicated tactics and the reasons “SEO experts” can charge so much.
Now, we can’t discount these tactics. They are very important for some of the big-name businesses competing for the top spots with the most popular keywords. But, if you’re a small business and you want to be competitive online, you’re much better off investing in building trust and brand recognition with our consumers. Afterall, “61% of consumers feel better about a company that has a blog” according to Quicksprout. In addition, keywords, link building, and URL structures become naturally optimized within a content marketing strategy, assuming you or your third-party firm is taking proper care while publishing your relevant content.
The lesson to be learned? Given the decision between search engine optimization or content creation, remember, content is king.