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.