Content is SEO. More specifically, it’s one side of the SEO relationship. One core function of search engines is to connect users with the information they’re looking for. That information might be a product listing, a review, a news story, an image, or a video.
The other core function of search engines is to retain users.
Search engines retain users by ensuring their confidence and trust in the displayed results. Over time, they build expectations that using their platform is a safe, streamlined experience that quickly leads users to what they want.
SEO success depends on being found by your target audience for what they are looking for and consistently providing a satisfying user experience based on the context of the queries they type into search engines.
Search Is Built On Content
The core function of search engines is to help users find information. Search engines first discover webpages, they parse and render and they then add them to an index. When a user inputs a query, search engines retrieve relevant webpages in the index and then “rank” them.
Search engines need to know what pages are about and what they contain in order to serve them to the right users. In concept, they do this quite simply: They examine the content. The real process behind this is complicated, executed by automated algorithms and evaluated with human feedback.
Google constantly adjusts and updates it algorithms with the goal of ensuring the most relevant content is served to searchers.
This relationship between searchers, search engines, and websites, has come to define the internet experience for most users. Unless you know the exact URL of the website you intend to visit, you need must find it via a third party. That could be social media, a search engine, or even discovering the website offline and then typing it in. This is called a “referral,” and Google sends 64% of all website referrals in the U.S. Microsoft and Bing send the next largest amount of referrals, followed by YouTube.
Getting discovered by people who don’t already know you depends on search engines, and search engines depend on content.
The SEO Value Of Content
Google has said it prioritizes user satisfaction.
It’s confirmed that user behavior signals impact ranking.
At this point, whether this relationship is causal or correlative doesn’t matter. You must prioritize user experience and satisfaction because it’s a key indicator of SEO success.
Written language is still the primary way users interact with search engines and how algorithms understand websites. Google algorithms can interpret audio and videos, but written text is core to SEO functionality.
Enticing clicks and engaging users through content that satisfies their queries is the baseline of SEO. If your pages can’t do that, you won’t have success.
High-quality content and user experiences aren’t just important for SEO; they’re prerequisites.
This is true for all advertising and branding. Entire industries and careers are built on the skills to refine the right messaging and put it in front of the right people.
Evidence For The SEO Value Of Content
Google highlights the importance of content in its “SEO fundamentals” documentation. It advises that Google’s algorithms look for “helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people,” and provides details about how to self-assess high-quality content.
- Content, and how well it matches a user’s needs, is one of the core positive and negative factors in Google’s ranking systems. It updates systems to reduce content it deems to be unhelpful and prioritize content it deems to be helpful.
- In fact, Google’s analysis of the content may determine whether a page enters the index at all to become eligible to rank. If you work hard to provide a good experience and serve the needs of your users, search engines have more reason to surface your content and may do so more often.
- A 2024 study in partnership between WLDM, ClickStream, and SurferSEO suggests that the quality of your coverage on a topic is highly correlated with rankings.
Content And User Behavior
Recent developments in the SEO industry, such as the Google leak, continue to highlight the value of both content and user experience.
Google values user satisfaction to determine the effectiveness and quality of webpages and does seem to use behavioral analysis in ranking websites. It also focuses on the user intent of queries and whether a specific intent is served by a particular resource.
The satisfaction of your users is, if not directly responsible for SEO performance, highly correlated with it.
Many factors affect user experience and satisfaction. Website loading speed and other performance metrics are part of it. Intrusive elements of the page on the experience are another.
Content, however, is one of the primary determiners of a “good” or “bad” experience.
- Does the user find what they’re looking for? How long does it take?
- Is the content accurate and complete?
- Is the content trustworthy and authoritative?
The answers to these questions reflect whether the user has a good or bad experience with your content, and this determines their behavior. Bad experiences tend to result in the user leaving without engaging with your website, while good experiences tend to result in the user spending more time on the page or taking action.
This makes content critical not only to your SEO efforts on search engines but also to your website’s performance metrics. Serving the right content to the right users in the right way impacts whether they become leads, convert, or come back later.
Leaning into quality and experience is a win all around. Good experiences lead to desirable behaviors. These behaviors are strong indications of the quality of your website and content. They lead to positive outcomes for your business and are correlated with successful SEO.
What Kinds Of Content Do You Need?
Successful content looks different for each goal you have and the different specific queries you’re targeting.
Text is still the basis of online content when it comes to search. Videos are massively popular. YouTube is the second-most popular search engine in the world. However, in terms of referrals, it only sends 3.5% of referral traffic to the web in the U.S. In addition, videos have titles, and these days, most have automated transcripts. These text elements are critical for discovery.
That isn’t to say videos and images aren’t popular. Video, especially “shorts” style videos, is an increasingly popular medium. Cisco reported that video made up 82% of all internet traffic in 2022. So you absolutely shoulder consider images and video as part of your content strategy to best serve your audiences and customers.
Both can enhance text-based webpages and stand on their own on social platforms.
But for SEO, it’s critical to remember that Google search sends the most referral traffic to other websites. Text content is still the core of a good SEO strategy. Multi-modal AI algorithms are getting very good at translating information between various forms of media, but text content remains critical for several reasons:
- Plain text has high accessibility. Screen readers can access it, and it can be resized easily.
- Text is the easiest way for both people and algorithms to analyze semantic connections between ideas and entities.
- Text doesn’t depend on device performance like videos and images might.
- Text hyperlinks are very powerful SEO tools because they convey direct meaning along with the link.
- It’s easier to skim through text than video.
Text content is still dominant for SEO. But you should not ignore other content. Images, for example, make for strong link building assets because they’re attractive and easily sharable. Accompanying text with images and video accommodates a variety of user preferences and can help capture attention when plain text might not.
Like everything else, it’s down to what best serves users in any given situation.
SEO Content: Serving Users Since Search Was A Thing
Search engines match content to the needs of users.
Content is one-third of this relationship: user – search engine – information.
You need content to perform SEO, and any digital marketing activity successfully.
The difficulty comes from serving that perfect content for the perfect situation.
So read “How To Create High-Quality Content” next.
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Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
