Google explains why quality content is necessary
Creating quality content, naturally, should be at the heart of your SEO efforts. You need to get keywords on your site so that search engines are able to find it. This gives you organic traffic, which then gives you the potential to make sales. It doesn’t matter how good your website is or how great your products are if no one can find the website. Keywords make that possible, along with a lot of other tactics, such as social media marketing or pay-per-click advertising. But keywords are usually where people start.
However, it’s important not just to think about these keywords. Think about the content as a whole. You must have quality content. It’s the only real way to have sustained success. Recently, Google’s John Mueller went on Reddit and talked about the rise of mediocre content and why this is going to be a problem for many site owners.
Creating fluff content
The issue that Mueller cited first is that a lot of the content being created is just too fluffy. It doesn’t offer enough value to the reader. As he put it:
“The problem… is that it’s easy to end up with mediocre, fluffy content, which search engine quality algorithms might pick up on, and then assume the whole site is like that.”
After all, Google’s goal is not simply to direct traffic to a website. It is to find the user a website that truly gives them the information they’re looking for or the answers that they seek. That’s why Google attempts to determine the quality of a site and assign a ranking based on that quality. You don’t want the search engine to assume that your website isn’t going to give the reader any information or that it’s just packed with fluffy keywords.
Is this growing more common?
This has always been an issue, of course. Decades ago, you had people stuffing sites with keywords and turning them invisible or making them the same color as the background. It’s now well-known that tactics like this are detrimental, but that doesn’t mean that the basic idea has ended.
One area that Mueller talked about in his recent Q&A was the rise of AI content. He said that using content that doesn’t provide enough real info, especially in the long term, is going to be very “painful when it catches up to you.” He also added that “All of this applies even more if you’re taking short-cuts with gen-ai content.”
This doesn’t mean that keywords aren’t useful, and it doesn’t even mean that AI can’t be a helpful tool. It just means that site owners have to have the correct focus when they begin their SEO efforts. They have to try to provide useful content that provides value. As long as that is your goal, you should be successful. Get in touch with us here at Content Customs to find out more about how we can help you reach these goals.
