Many factors affect user experience and satisfaction. Website loading speed and other performance metrics are part of it. Intrusive elements of the page on the experience are another.
Content, however, is one of the primary determiners of a “good” or “bad” experience.
Does the user find what they’re looking for? How long does it take?
Is the content accurate and complete?
Is the content trustworthy and authoritative?
The answers to these questions reflect whether the user has a good or bad experience with your content, and this determines their behavior. Bad experiences tend to result in the user leaving without engaging with your website, while good experiences tend to result in the user spending more time on the page or taking action.
This makes content critical not only to your SEO efforts on search engines but also to your website’s performance metrics. Serving the right content to the right users in the right way impacts whether they become leads, convert, or come back later.
Leaning into quality and experience is a win all around. Good experiences lead to desirable behaviors. These behaviors are strong indications of the quality of your website and content. They lead to positive outcomes for your business and are correlated with successful SEO.
What Kinds Of Content Do You Need?
Successful content looks different for each goal you have and the different specific queries you’re targeting.
Text is still the basis of online content when it comes to search. Videos are massively popular. YouTube is the second-most popular search engine in the world. However, in terms of referrals, it only sends 3.5% of referral traffic to the web in the U.S. In addition, videos have titles, and these days, most have automated transcripts. These text elements are critical for discovery.
That isn’t to say videos and images aren’t popular. Video, especially “shorts” style videos, is an increasingly popular medium. Cisco reported that video made up 82% of all internet traffic in 2022. So you absolutely shoulder consider images and video as part of your content strategy to best serve your audiences and customers.
Both can enhance text-based webpages and stand on their own on social platforms.
But for SEO, it’s critical to remember that Google search sends the most referral traffic to other websites. Text content is still the core of a good SEO strategy. Multi-modal AI algorithms are getting very good at translating information between various forms of media, but text content remains critical for several reasons:
Plain text has high accessibility. Screen readers can access it, and it can be resized easily.
Text is the easiest way for both people and algorithms to analyze semantic connections between ideas and entities.
Text doesn’t depend on device performance like videos and images might.
Text hyperlinks are very powerful SEO tools because they convey direct meaning along with the link.
It’s easier to skim through text than video.
Text content is still dominant for SEO. But you should not ignore other content. Images, for example, make for strong link building assets because they’re attractive and easily sharable. Accompanying text with images and video accommodates a variety of user preferences and can help capture attention when plain text might not.
Like everything else, it’s down to what best serves users in any given situation.
SEO Content: Serving Users Since Search Was A Thing
Search engines match content to the needs of users.
Content is one-third of this relationship: user – search engine – information.
You need content to perform SEO, and any digital marketing activity successfully.
The difficulty comes from serving that perfect content for the perfect situation.
So read “How To Create High-Quality Content” next.
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