Google is constantly changing its rules with regard to the factors that determine your website’s Page Rank. The techniques that positioned you at the top of the rankings last month may be less effective this month, and those that didn’t work at all now have a real impact. It can leave you feeling like you’re playing a perpetual game of SEO snakes and ladders!
Google’s Penguin and Panda updates in particular have been causing havoc for millions of fellow website owners. It was not long ago that the links built to and from your website had an almost ubiquitously positive effect on how the Google bots ‘saw’ your website. Today, Google favours websites that provide useful, high quality information over those that create thousands of links to unrelated sites. It is about the quality of your links, not the quantity. But creating quality links to your website is no easy task. An alternative approach to SEO success is to implement an effective content marketing strategy.
The Top 5 Benefits of Content Marketing
1. The results are quantifiable
It’s a lot easier to measure the effectiveness of content versus the impact of a link. For example, with today’s social media widgets you can quickly keep track of shares, likes and +1s. You can see how much organic traffic your content creates, how many people were referred to it by another reader and so on. This is virtually impossible to do with links.
2. Content is rarely detrimental to your website
Provided that your content is well-written and informative Google will rarely class it as spam. If you fail to use the right keywords in the right places your efforts may be wasted but it won’t be detrimental. Links on the other hand can harm your website rank tremendously if the search engines deem them to be unrelated to the theme of your site theme, which most bought links tend to be.
3. Creating content is more cost effective
We found that the demand for our SEO services in London increased dramatically around the time that Google began emphasising the importance of quality content. The good news is that the costs of hiring a copy writer are significantly cheaper than those of a professional link builder.
4. Your content is immune to algorithm updates
The algorithm updates periodically released by Google rarely affect content on a website. They do however tend to affect links you may have already built and links you were hoping to build in the future. Google is notorious for changing the rules pertaining to links and link building because the ultimate aim of Google is to keep every website as natural as possible. By doing so they move a step closer to Larry Page’s dream that the “perfect search engine” would “understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want”. If your website is currently based on dubious links then rest assured it will be penalised by Google at some point in the future.
5. Writing content is a lot less time consuming than building links
One of the factors that Google uses to assess the usefulness of a website is the frequency with which new content or new links are added. It doesn’t take ten minutes to add a short blog post to your site every day or a longer piece a few times a week but it can take hours to find even a single link that will be judged as worthwhile. Even better, if you make use of our SEO services in London you won’t have to spend any time at all on either activity because we will do it for you.
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