23 Aug What is content, anyway?

Your users crave it. Your customers can’t get enough of it. Google crawls, assesses and ranks it. You can’t keep up with the demand for it but your business needs it to be found.

It’s blog posts and Facebook updates and all kinds of Tweets. It’s Instagram pics and Pinterest posts and YouTube channels. It’s images and words and video. It’s branded and unbranded and all of it is trying desperately to go viral.

But what is it, really? What does it need to be to be effective? Cost-effective? Useful?

In two words –

1. Quality
2. Relevance

It used to be enough to slap up a bunch of thick blog posts full of keywords and you’d see your Google search ranking rise. You didn’t need art. You didn’t need video. You just needed more and more keywords. More than your competitors.

That is no longer enough.

Today, your users are savvy and smart, but what they’re really after is quality content they can use. Content that informs, educates and sometimes entertains them. Google and other search engines have grown smarter, too. They know what users are looking for and they reward sites that provide the quality.

It’s not just feeding the content machine that matters. It’s feeding the content machine with QUALITY. Your content has to mean something to your readers. It’s a tool you should be using to establish your market expertise, not just raise your search ranking.

Make your content smart, relevant to your customers and original to you, and you’ll see more success. Put up quality content that other sites are using and that will help. Put up original content, copyrighted to you, and you’ll do better. And don’t be afraid to lean on content experts to help provide that relevant, quality, original stuff for your sites.