Following the recent post in our Resource Centre on Google's latest Panda update, we've had a few people asking what good content actually is.
This is an excellent question and it's no surprise that there's a lot of confusion out there as the marketing world has allowed itself to become obsessed with content mania. The best place to start is Google itself, which provided this meaty set of guidelines back in 2011.
Wow, get the picture?
Since the launch of Panda, we've seen a massive rush to create new content, some of it good, the majority of it pretty mediocre. The latest update aims to increase the focus on relevance and quality, and also level the playing field by allowing SMEs to compete with much larger companies that have the resources to turn whole departments into content factories.
Note again the points:
Our interpretation of what this means for your content strategy is that you are far better advised to create a few good quality, in-depth pieces that are relevant to your business than you are churning out tangential, 'motherhood and apple pie' type articles that already exist in spades elsewhere on the web and have little direct relevance to your business activities. If you're doing the latter, you are pretty much wasting your time.
Our advice to clients for several years on SEO has been almost don't worry about it. You should undertake a routine technical check to make sure that there are no obvious own goals in how the site is structured, that it is mobile friendly and that basic requirements like page title conventions are being adhered to, but thereafter, you should just just focus on providing a great resource for your potential customers. We talk about having an obsessive commitment to question answering. What is it that your customers want to know and are likely to be looking up online? Answer these questions well and leave Google and the other major search engines to do their job of making sure they deliver the answers up.
For help with devising your content strategy and for creating meaningful content for your audience, please contact us.
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Neil is a Chartered Marketer and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing with many years' experience in marketing, brand and communications.
CEO / The Marketing Eye
by Darren Coleshill, 5 minute read
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