Why Content is King

One aspect of determining the desired audience for your website is determining who you want to reach, which requires an understanding of what you have to offer visitors to your site, both now and in the future.

You may have a deep library of “how to” content, great videos, a unique photo gallery, or an awesome tool that people are interested in using. Each of these can be valuable in building a world-class website that does well in the search engines.

The content you have available to you will affect your keyword research and site architecture, as your site content is the major source of information that search engines use to determine what your site is about. You need relevant content to even be in search (i.e., if someone searches for left handed golf clubs and you don’t have any content related to left handed golf clubs, chances are good that you won’t rank for that search query).

On-site content also affects your link-building efforts. Link building is very similar to PR in that the success of your link-building efforts is integrally related to what you are promoting (i.e., what are you asking them to link to?).

Consider Site A, a site that has built a really solid set of articles on a given topic. However, 20 other sites out there have an equally solid set of articles on the same topic, and many of these other sites have been in the major search engine indexes for much longer than Site A. Site A has a serious problem. Why would someone link to it? There is nothing new there. Chances are that Site A will succeed in getting some links to its articles; however, it will likely never be able to establish itself as a leader because it has nothing new to offer.

To establish itself as a leader, Site A must bring something new and unique to the market. Perhaps it can offer a solution to a problem that no one else has been able to solve before. Or perhaps it covers the same content as its competition, but it is the first to release a high-quality video series on the topic. Or perhaps it focuses on a specific vertical niche, and establishes itself as a leader in that specific niche.

One of the most important decisions Site A’s leadership needs to make is where and how they are going to establish themselves as one of the top experts and resources in their market space. If they plan to make their website a major player in capturing market-related search engine traffic, this is not an optional step.

When looking at content plans it is critical to consider not only what you already have, but also what you could develop. This relates to budget for resources to build the content. A publisher with no budget to spend on content development has few choices that she can make in her SEO plan, whereas another publisher who has a team of in-house content developers looking for something to do has a lot more options. As a result, a critical part of the SEO planning process is to map the SEO and business goals of the website to the available budget to add new content, and to prioritize the list of opportunities to estimate the size of the ROI potential. 

Segmenting Your Site’s Audience 

Let’s not forget the audience itself! This is very important background information for the SEO practitioner. For example, Site A may be a website that sells gadgets. As a result, the site’s developers go out and implement a brilliant campaign to rank for the terms they consider relevant. Being young and energetic, they focus on the way their peers search for gadgets, but Site A is focused on selling gadgets to people who are age 50 or older.

Uh-oh, Site A is in trouble again. Why? One reason it may be in trouble is that the target audience for Site A (the over-50 crowd) may use different search terms to search for gadgets than the younger generation does, and now Site A is bringing in search traffic from people who are not interested in its products, and not bringing in traffic from those who might be!

Similar things can happen with gender.

 For example, women and men may not search for their shoes the same way, as shown in following figure, which lists the top shoe-related search terms.

Difference in search by men versus women

As you can see in the above figure, search terms used can vary significantly by gender. Another major criterion to consider might be location. Searchers in Austin, Texas may naturally want a different version of your product than searchers in Chicago. For that matter, because they want different products, they may use different search terms, which requires extensive keyword research—yet another critical aspect of the SEO process.

THE MYTH OF KILLER CONTENT

You know the saying, "Content Is King?" It's the whole idea that success online is about publishing killer content. Write something that's truly good enough, and you don't have to worry about promoting it. People will find it and spread the word for you.

About The Author-

Naman Kumar

Naman Kumar is new author of ngtechzone. He is a blogger at Blogging Easier, with a background in Programming, Writting, SEO and Technology. He started blogging at the age of 12. He is currently running a free Review Requester Service. In which you can Get Your Blog Reviewed By Professionals! You can Follow him on Facebook | Google+ | Twitter or can drop me a line at naman@outlook.in .