These days those of us who work with SEO can’t get enough of talking about “Good content”. Good content is the magical pill that will take us to the top of the Google rankings, give us hordes of regular website visitors and make that worrying bald spot disappear.
With Google’s Panda update making some of the older SEO tactics obsolete, and with companies like Automated Insights working to make human content writers redundant, it’s easy to see why there are so many people keen to shout about the virtues of “good content”. But these same people all seem to be frustratingly vague about just what good content is.
Perhaps the best way to do this is to show you what bad web content looks like. After all, nobody is going to say “bad content is part of my business plan”- but there are a number of mistakes the websites seem to keep making over and over. After that, I’ll show you some websites that provide good content, and tell you, very specifically, what it is that makes that content good.
What makes bad content?
Bad content isn’t just about poor English, bad spelling and punctuation, or generated by article spinners. There are plenty of mistakes that otherwise savvy, intelligent people can make when putting together their website’s content.
The primary mistake most common among people writing content for the web is that they don’t ask the question that every blog writer, poet, twitter user or stand-up comic should ask themselves before ever committing a word to paper. That question is “Why the hell should anybody care what I have to say?” This question has become even more sidelined as we place more and more priority on SEO. Content writers are constantly being pressured to put more thought into placing their key words than into actually creating a body of text somebody would want to read.
In fact, more than anything else in this blog, you should remember to ask yourself “Why the hell should anybody care what I have to say?” at the end of every paragraph and sentence. If you can’t answer that question, it’s time to rewrite.
If you aren’t sure what good content is, the chances are your business isn’t built purely on getting people to read your site, so we’re going to focus on websites that are actually trying to sell you something or provide a service. There are lessons to be learned from entertainment sites such as cracked.com, such as how easy it is to write list articles, and how not to moderate a comments section, but that won’t be where we’re focusing our efforts.
Giving you information you want
The first website we’ll be looking at is OkCupid’s OkTrends blog. OkCupid is a free site, but its goal is still to get users to commit every bit as much as if they were paying money. To use the site’s services you will need to fill out a profile, post a picture and put some of your personal information online, so OkCupid has to persuade you that this is worthwhile.
So the first thing you’ll notice is that the OkTrends blog doesn’t contain a single call to action. You can read through all their blog entries at no point will there be a bright blue link saying “Click here to fill out your profile”. You’ll find calls to action on OkCupid’s front page, but once you’re in the OkTrends blog the writers respect you enough to give you entertainment and information without explicitly trying to sell to you.
Instead the OkTrends blog makes the most of its unique selling point as a source of information. Running a dating site means that the blogger has access to data from about 7 million people’s profiles. They use that data to create infographics that demonstrate, for example “Exactly What To Say In A First Message” or “The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating”. The blogs provide specific information that nobody else has that will be equally interesting to OkCupid’s users and anyone else who happens to be passing by. A by-product of this is that, if people like a blog entry they are more likely to post it to Twitter or Facebook, spreading it among their friends and followers.
But OkCupid is still making its money from advertising click-through. How do you provide “good content” for a website that is actually trying to make its customers pay them money to buy a thing?
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roduct feel like a personal recommendation
An example of a website doing this well is Iwantoneofthose.com. Iwantoneofthose.com is a shop, nothing more or less, and every page is filled with products you might want to buy. Part of the appeal of this site is the novelty value- this is a website where you can buy an iPhone case that looks like an Etcha-Sketch or a USB stick that looks like a dog is humping your keyboard. Aside from the products the site sells, however, its content works because the description for each product is unique. The SEO benefits of this are obvious- Google loves itself some unique content. However, good content means thinking about how your content affects your actual human readers. By providing your own sales blurb for each product, rather than simply copying the PR guff that came with the product, you give the impression that the product is hand-picked, that this is something you would use. It also gives you room to turn a simple product description into something that is entertaining or informative, which as before, means your readers are more likely to pass around links to your content.
Blink SEO is a leading web content and SEO agency based in Norwich, Norfolk.