Why good content matters more than ever

For many small business owners, getting your head around SEO can be pretty confusing. The hardest part is staying up-to-date with all of Google’s changes to their algorithms.

In the last 36 months alone, the entire SEO landscape has been pretty much turned on its head. But it’s not all bad news. New changes mean new opportunities for businesses (if you know what to do with them). If you are behind, you will probably be left wondering why your website is lost somewhere in the dungeons of Google. 

The online space is now even more competitive than ever which makes the right SEO a MUST for your website.

If you’re not already across SEO, SEO stands for search engine optimisation – is all about key words and phrases… oh wait… Google have changed that as well!

For the first time, the latest ‘Hummingbird’ changes have ditched the traditional keyword based content. Instead, Google want to see more question answering content. So what does this mean? Good content matters!

If you want to be one of the sites that Google recommends, you need to create quality content that the reader can appreciate. You also need to tell Google that you are the author of your amazing content; you can do this by setting up Google Authorship.

Now to the tricky part – integration throughout your marketing strategy. The reason why Google keeps updating SEO algorithms is to make sure that authentic businesses are recognised for the quality of work they produce – not the money that they spend. Have you heard of SEI? It stands for search marketing integration (see my friend Lee Odden’s slideshare on it) and is all about integrating your SEO into your marketing strategy including social media!

When you think about it, SEO and social media are quite similar – they should always be about quality content, building customer trust and establishing your business. Google is trying to create an organic search engine and they are now rewarding websites that have good social signals (with lots of retweets, likes and Google +1’s). Integrating your social media is becoming quite important in Google’s eyes and we’re only at the beginning. As the industry progresses, integrating SEO into your social media strategy will become vital.

Successful integration

To successfully integrate SEO into your social media sites, create great content that people want to actually read about. And always remember to share the content you post on your website. When it comes to your content, make sure it’s interesting and helpful, encouraging your readers want to share it. Remember that sharing is caring – so always send a share back to those who help you out.

While the ‘Penguin’ and ‘Panda’ updates to Google’s algorithm have produced large-scale changes to the way businesses approach SEO, their latest update has somewhat flown under the radar since its announcement. But don’t be fooled, just because it hasn’t been as public as the rest, doesn’t mean it won’t be as important!

If you’d like to see more traffic to your business’ website, we’d be delighted to talk about how our SEO program might help you. You can contact us on (02) 9994 8005 or drop us a note.