Why Content Is More Important than Ever in Google’s Eyes | Varn

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26 August 2015

Why Content Is More Important than Ever in Google’s Eyes

As Google continues to focus its attention on the ‘user experience’, content is now more important than it ever has been. In fact, just this summer Google has added large buttons to help you filter your image content on a mobile.

The attention span of users online has been a big player in Google’s most recent changes though, and 56% of people are to blame for being too impatient to find quick answers. This is why Google has introduced Answer Boxes (image below) at the top of the SERPs when you ask it a question to try and counter-act these users.

This is how the new Google Answer Boxes appear.

This is how the new Google Answer Boxes appear.

 

These users aren’t alone either as 47% of people find text too long to bother reading it, so the chances of the user staying round to appreciate your well-written content is out of the window. Instead, content needs to be smarter because the one-size-fits-all is dead, and it’s lazy.

Here are some things to think about when creating content:

  • Audience – What will your audience want to see or read? Why should they consider your content over any of your competitions?
  • Relevancy and Recent – By linking your content into something recent and relevant, it will make it up to 73% more sharable.
  • Personalisation – Let users control their own story experience and make it personal to them, they’re more likely to share it and interact with it.
  • Life After Publish – Don’t just forget about your piece of content one it is live. The medium lifespan for a piece of content is 2.6 days but this can improve a little with social sharing.

(In fact, Social Media is still playing a big part in content online with around 94% of content marketers posting it on Facebook. What’s more is that there are around 1.3m shares of content per minute on Facebook too.)

  • MobileGoogle has made it very clear that mobile-friendliness is a huge focus for it in 2015, so you need to adapt your content for mobile devices. You can do this by removing large chunks of text and make it more interactive.
  • Consistency – Whether you are creating one piece of content or twenty, it needs to be consistent and of a high standard as this can promote loyalty to your readers.

Building up a loyal readership can take between 12 and 17 months, so it is important to remember that when creating a piece of content it will only likely to start providing a real ROI after a year of publishing it.

How and where you publish this content will play a huge part in ROI too and even though nearly fifty per cent of people find text too long, blogs are still a great way to market your content according to 67% of marketers. So, it is worth considering keeping yours up to date and entertaining.

Videos, images, blogs, infographics, reviews, PDF’s, EBook’s and Podcasts are all types of content marketing and as Google continues to use content more wisely for the user, you should be creating smarter content too.

For any questions or help with your content marketing contact our team at Varn today.

Article by: Tom, Managing Director of Varn Digital Marketing More articles by Tom

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