“Good content” isn’t enough
1st April, 2024
Once upon a time, SEOs wrote pages, articles, and blog posts based on search demand and opportunity. Search engines needed that content in order to understand our products, businesses, and services – and ‘rewarded’ those sites with traffic. Businesses and agencies grew, and thrived, around this dynamic.
Now, search engines increasingly don’t want, or need, our content any more. They ‘understand’ enough concepts, verticals, and user problems to solve them without relying on websites as an intermediary. So what happens to an industry that’s ‘optimised’ for content production?
The days of creating content “for SEO” are (almost) over. The system has evolved, and simply creating ‘good’ (or ‘unique’) content isn’t enough. Today, your content must add value to the corpus. It must bring new insight or value to the field, and genuinely solve problems for a broad audience – offering clear, tangible recommendations and solutions.
So if your pages look more or less the same as everyone else’s, you’re about to face an existential crisis. It’s time to start asking, “Why would search engines crawl, index, or rank our content”? They have little incentive to expend resources consuming yet another page about the same topic, using the same keywords, and barely answering the same kinds of questions. Fighting an infinite wave of spam and derivative content, their priorities have shifted from scale to value.
To compete, businesses will need to rethink what and who their content is for, and what types of problems it aims to solve; beyond just ‘rank for keywords’. For content to drive business goals, it must now serve a higher purpose. It must establish trust, build authority, and genuinely assist users in ways that competitors (and Google) aren’t, or can’t.
As we navigate this shift, it’s crucial to understand that the future of content isn’t about abandoning SEO but evolving it. We must integrate genuine value, utility, and problem-solving into our content strategies. We must stop trying to find ways to make our 500-word articles seem helpful, and instead ensure that we’re producing content that is inherently helpful by design.
The challenge for SEOs and content creators is clear: innovate, add real value, and truly help your audience. This will be the benchmark for success – for survival – in a crowded digital landscape where the old rules no longer apply.
