We really eager to learn and know how the content is actually generating value to the web. If all the value is being generated by top publishers/brands then what exactly the small publishers/niche site owners suppose to write to survive?”
Mueller responded:
“SEOBot _ If you’re looking for a mechanical recipe for how to make something useful, that will be futile – that’s just not how it works, neither online nor offline. When you think about the real-world businesses near you that are doing well, do you primarily think about which numbers they focus on, or do you think about the products / services that they provide?”
What Mueller seems to be saying is that focusing on site visitors, not Google, is the way to understand what “unique value” content is.
I recently presented at a search marketing conference on the topic of seven things publishers can focus on to improve their content. There’s a lot to say about optimizing content but really, publishers and SEOs can get pretty far by taking Mueller’s advice about thinking about how you would approach selling to people in an actual store or focusing on writing for people (like I’m doing right now).
Others joined the conversation to essentially ask the same thing, looking for specifics on what Google is looking for in content. Mueller had said all there is to say about it.
Mueller advised:
“If you count the words in best seller books, average the count, and then write the same number of words in your own book, will it become a best seller? If you make a phone that has the same dimensions as a popular smartphone, will you sell as many as they do? I love spreadsheets, but numbers aren’t everything. “
Takeaway
If everything a person has learned about SEO centers around strategies for keywords, worrying about “entities” and whether articles are interlinked with the right anchor text then what Mueller is saying will sound confusing. I’ve been doing SEO for 25 years and I remember a time where SEO was about creating content and links for Google. But this isn’t 2004, it’s 2024 and we’ve reached a time with SEO where it’s increasingly not about creating content for Google.
Read the discussion here:
Hi John, is there an ideal content length that performs better on Google search results?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Roman Samborskyi