When Content Became King

by Randy Hanskat

Back at the turn of the new century, Google was just beginning to feel its oats in the search world. There were lots of other options for search. Remember AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos, or Ask Jeeves?

That was then. Part of the reason Google came to dominate search was its incessant drive to improve the search experience for the user. The company constantly revises its famed algorithm to adapt to changes in search and to improve the experience. Sometimes these changes seek to head off issues with “black hat” optimization tactics. Other updates, such as the push to reward mobile-friendly sites, react to changes in technology and behavior.

For writers, they can thank Google’s Panda update (actually 20 different updates) in 2011 for providing a boatload of new work. That was the update where Google moved to downgrade the importance of keywords and elevate the importance of page content.

This had become necessary thanks to a whole sector of the advertising world that specialized in “keyword stuffing.” This was the practice of loading sites with search terms, many of which were not accurate to what the sites actually were about or to the services or products they provided. This led to some ridiculous returns on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). And this led to unhappy searchers.

Google wants happy searchers.

It’s All About the Content

So, the company updated the two billion lines of code in its algorithm to reward robust, intelligent, detailed content on webpages. This evolved even further with the Hummingbird update in 2013. Now content was king.

This completely changed how websites were designed and populated. Before these updates, the thinking was that people weren’t interested in reading lots of written content on webpages. Bullet points were the standard for copy. That was a drag for writers and page visitors, as the lack of detailed content didn’t provide much work for the writers or much information for the page visitors.

Websites now need robust content to rank in search. Google’s web crawlers are out there looking at every website and every page on those sites. They’re looking at all the content, trying to understand what the pages and the overall site are about and if they will answer the user query.

You need quality, descriptive content about the services or products you want to be known for. If you extract wisdom teeth and want to be known for that, despite being a general dentist, you want content about wisdom teeth, why they need extraction, and how you do it.

Any content should be at least 300 words, and the writing should be good. This isn’t something to assign to an intern or your nephew. Google rewards good grammar (we’ll get to that in another blog), writing that is free of typos and misspellings, and is easily understood and eminently readable.

Content is king in search optimization because content satisfies search queries. That’s why your website needs high quality content, and you need me to write it for you.

Let’s talk.