The Importance of Content Writing in Your SEO Strategy
Make sure you’re sitting comfortably for this one!
Understanding the importance of the relationship between content and SEO is a bit like the relationship between fish and chips, a cup of tea and a biscuit or a knife and a fork – sure, you can try to have one without the other, but you’ll only be making life difficult for yourself (and far less tasty).
SEO and content exist in what a psychologist might refer to as a ‘codependent relationship’ – they both need one another to survive and to achieve something.
How, you might ask? Well, to put it simply –
SEO and Content: A High-Functioning Co-Dependent Relationship
To put it shortly, SEO needs to ‘hang off’ something, and that ‘something’ is content.
Content is what people actively search out on Google; it’s what gets indexed in Google; it’s what people enjoy reading, sharing and responding to.
On the flip side, SEO can (and does!) exist without content….but only in some forms (alt tags on images, backlinks…but arguably, you also need content for these too). If you’re trying to improve your SEO without content, then surprise – you’re likely to just have a list of keywords, floating in mid-air.
Content, on the other hand, can and does exist without SEO…but it has to work a lot harder. You see, SEO-infused content will be much more discoverable and much more user-friendly. Because, if content is written and there’s noone around to discover it – because there’s no way of discovering it – has it really been written at all?
This is that metaphorical content tree.
What is ‘Content’?
Ah – a question for our times – what exactly is ‘content’?
The answer really depends on who you’re asking…because otherwise it’s just too simple, isn’t it?
Ask any of the website content writing services online and they’ll tell you that content is anything with written words: blogs, articles and so forth.
They might even include ‘copywriting’ under that umbrella – and for the purists among you, ‘content’ and ‘copy’ are similar but not the same: content is much more informational, while copy is much more sales-focused.
Ask anyone else online (away from any website content writing services) and they might tell you that ‘content’ means…any of the following things:
- Videos
- Images
- Podcasts
- Ebooks
- Forums
- Music
- Audio books
- Webcasts
- YouTube
- Spreadsheets
- Instructionals (in any form)
- Social media
…and so forth.
It seems to be that, if you can comment on it, share it, feel something from it or look at it, it’s considered ‘content’.
But then how does SEO fit in to the non-word-related or website content writing services definition of ‘content’?
SEO and Content: Like Fish and Chips
Here’s where our story gets a bit technical.
SEO was born as a result of the emerging World Wide Web; with so much – yes, content – being created, people needed a way to search and find what they were looking for.
SEO developed a way to locate and deliver whatever someone was searching for, by way of keywords. Basically, if you wanted people who were interested in cake, for example, to find your bakery business online, you would have just needed to have sprinkled some cake-related keywords in, et voila – Google would match your site to a person’s query when they input the right keyword.
Sounds foolproof, right? Well, as with most things, the internet found a way to ruin a good thing for the rest of us, and Black Hat SEO became, as the kids say, a ‘thing’.
A Quick Overview of Black Hat SEO
To put a long story short, Black Hat SEO refers to a collection of SEO techniques used to manipulate search engines’ algorithms, and favor certain sites (i.e., those using Black Hat techniques). These techniques include –
- Writing gibberish content, for the sole purpose of stuffing specific keywords in
- ‘Cloaking’ – showing one thing to search engines, and another to users…so users would click through to a site, only to find something other than what they were expecting.
- Spam. A whole lot of spam.
- Awful content. We’re talking the works here – misspelled, poor grammar, or even just a few lines of miserable pish.
We can take from this that SEO and content have always had a symbiotic relationship. But, everything was to change for both SEO and content (and, by extension – website content writing services worldwide) with the Google Panda Update.
A Quick Overview of Google Panda
Sounds cute and fun, right?
Well, Google Panda was the simultaneously best thing that happened to the internet (and website content writing services), and the most destructive thing ever.
The idea behind it was to rid Google (and other search engines worldwide) of all the terrible Black Hat SEO-infused websites out there, and make the internet a Better Place For Everyone.
As such, the Panda update strengthened the relationship between content and SEO. After it, any (White Hat) SEO practices used within content was only as reliable as the content itself…and suddenly, the world needed a whole lot of awesome website content writing services.
The Importance of Content Writing in Your SEO Strategy
And there we have it – the reason that content writing is so important in your SEO strategy is that ultimately, you won’t even have an SEO strategy unless you have content to use with it, and therefore a content strategy.
While it’s a topic for another blog post entirely, developing a holistic SEO strategy requires an SEO professional. They will find the relevant keywords you should be targeting, gauge how competitive they are, and also suggest other strategies for you to implement – but they won’t write the content you need for you.
For that, you need to either find reliable website content writing services, or learn how to do it yourself. However, we also have a few SEO pointers, and there’s plenty of great resources online too.
