Google’s SEO Starter guide emphasizes that creating compelling and useful content is crucial, surpassing most other traditional ranking factors. Understanding the importance of content in achieving high rankings, I reached out to Jeff Coyle, the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of MarketMuse, for his insights.
Jeff offered a perspective on content strategies employed by both successful and struggling sites. MarketMuse, an AI-powered Content Strategy and Intelligence Platform, provides Jeff with expertise in understanding which types of content tend to rank well.
He shared four insights based on data related to the Google core algorithm update and proposed three actionable suggestions for enhancing a site’s performance.
### Useful Content is Key to Ranking in Google
Google’s SEO starter guide covers aspects like site navigation and headings, but it underscores the importance of useful content above all.
> “Make your site interesting and useful. Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means.”
The guide highlights that engaging and useful content attracts user enthusiasm, generating signals to indicate users’ desire to see your site in search results, a hallmark of relevance. Success can be gauged by how often your content is independently discussed online, leading to links and other ranking signals, demonstrating the value of usefulness over mere quality. Therefore, content should be regularly updated to meet evolving user needs.
### Four Insights About Content and the March 2019 Google Update
Jeff analyzed search results for trends to understand Google’s interaction with content during updates and identified four key insights.
#### 1. Sites that Changed Domains
Numerous sites that had split and relaunched into multiple entities were heavily impacted by the update. Typically, publishers might split a declining site into several sites. While effective in the past 18 months, recent trends suggest this approach may no longer be beneficial.
Jeff commented:
“Publishers that have engineered their sites and relaunched them after a negative historical drop and done so by changing domains and relaunching the same or similar content had significant flux.”
#### 2. Long Form Lists
SERPs featuring long form lists experienced much fluctuation. While a clear cause wasn’t identified, Jeff suspected that, for some improving sites, factors like links and authority signals might have mitigated user experience issues.
Here’s what he said:
“There’s something connected to long-form lists existing in a result set with other long-form lists, but, we haven’t drawn conclusions… Basically, there’s a lot of flux when there’s multiple of those in play.”
#### 3. Lower Quality Content
Lower quality content that hadn’t been updated suffered significant setbacks.
“Lower quality content that has historically performed above expectations, hasn’t been updated, and that lives on sites/networks with lower than expected publishing patterns was impacted dramatically.”
#### 4. Sites with an Active Publishing Schedule
Sites maintaining active publishing schedules fared better, possibly due to generating user interest signals. However, the success might not solely be due to the volume of content published.
Jeff stated:
“Sites with a heavy focus on updating content and steady content creation were less likely to decline (small samples).”
### Advice for Publishers:
Jeff offered three crucial pieces of advice for publishers:
1. Content Creation should align with Content Updating/Optimization. Without a consistent strategy for content updates, you risk falling behind.
2. Solely updating content, without creating new content within your areas of authority, poses a risk.
3. Low-quality content that performed well is at greater risk if the site or covered topics remain stagnant.
Content quality is important to Google, and their published research emphasizes understanding content and search queries. Although it’s unclear if content quality directly influenced the March 2019 Algorithm Update, Jeff’s content creation advice is valuable for any content strategy.
