Have you ever heard the phrase “Content is king” bandied about in online marketing searches? Maybe you’re passively aware of the importance of having well-written, keyword-optimized content on your website, but you haven’t really given much thought to the paramount importance of crafting the right kind of content. As the founder and CEO of a leading Los Angeles Internet marketing agency, I see this mistake every day. Online business owners will toss up some blog articles and a few short page descriptions, and they think they have all of their bases covered. If you think that your content is sufficient, you may be making a very common error in judgment.
The Rise of Content in the 21st Century
Content is the crux of search engine optimization. In the early days of SEO, you could just build a few inbound links and call it a day. As SEO evolved, “a few links” became “a lot of links,” which became “a lot of links with keywords,” which became “a lot of high-value links with keywords,” which became “a lot of high-value links and strong keyword-optimized content.” Well, the tide is turning once again. Now, it’s not enough to simply have several paragraphs of articulate, keyword-optimized content on every major page of your website. With the unveiling of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, the process by which we produce and publish content is evolving once again. Not only that, but content creation is more important than ever.
The Future of Content in Marketing and SEO
In the online business world, marketing and SEO go hand in hand. The search engine is the most important marketplace at your disposal, and search engine optimization is the most high-value form of marketing for your business. When it comes to content creation, your effort is two-fold: you need to appease the search engines, and you need to produce the kind of copy that engages and persuades readers (as you would in any marketing environment). The engagement part is easy, but when it comes to SEO, things are a bit more complicated than they used to be.
The new buzzword in SEO is “entity search,” also referred to as semantic search. Rather than just assessing the search relevance of a key phrase, Google is trying more than ever to assess the meaning (or semantics) of the phrase. In doing so, Google can more accurately deliver desired results for billions of searches. The engine is able to achieve this using structured data, identified by semantic markup tags. Data structure is simply a way of organizing words and phrases—or entire pieces of content—into categories of relevance, sort of like the link hierarchy on your website. The semantic markup (which is embedded into the HTML) provides Google with the necessary information about how the data should be sorted and interpreted.
Why is this important? Because this semantic markup is becoming increasingly important for the content that you produce. It’s no longer enough to simply write an article, count the keywords and call it a day. Your content plan needs to assess the needs of the evolving search engine, now more than ever.
Time to Hire a Los Angeles Internet Marketing Agency
The bad news is that entity search has rendered effective content creation more difficult than ever before. The good news is that entity search has rendered effective content creation more difficult than ever before. Sound like a contradiction? Actually, it’s all about taking lemons and making lemonade. Thousands, or potentially millions, of businesses are now at a disadvantage, because they’re still playing by the old rules. But if you take the wise step of hiring a Los Angeles Internet marketing agency, this is the best time ever to start a new targeted SEO campaign. Never have so many businesses been at a loss about how to adapt to the changing landscape, so if you have the right team on your side, you can start rising through the ranks more quickly than ever before.
Consider Coalition Technologies, a leading Los Angeles Internet marketing agency. We understand the new algorithms, because we accurately predicted the changes long before they took effect. Call us for a free quote at 1-888-800-9101 and we’ll show you how we can help you turn your SEO struggles into search engine prosperity.