Only the Right Kind of Content is King

Whether we’re talking about a podcast, blog, website, or any of a dozen ways marketers use social media, the buzzword (actually it’s a buzzphrase) is “content is king.” What this means is that the bad old days of internet marketing that included keyword stuffing and other tedious or outright black hat tactics are fast becoming a thing of the past. The problem with these techniques is that we were developing an internet full of, to put it bluntly, crap. Search results were mostly junk, which grabbed Google’s attention.

Before we go further, we all should stop a moment and reflect on the idea that, sort of like the old country song from Alan Jackson – paraphrased to fit the present circumstances – “If Google ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” The truth of the matter is that a vast majority of the world wide web’s traffic goes through Google first. How high or low your website ranks in search results is a direct result of how well you please the search engine Google god.

The tricky thing about pleasing the Google god is that they keep changing the rules of the game, continually tweaking their algorithm in search of the “perfect” search result for cyber surfers. Keyword stuffing used to be okay but now it’s not. Now content is king, which, in Jason Hartman’s opinion, is the way it should have been all along or, as we said in the headline, the RIGHT kind of content is king.

What makes content the right kind? We could argue the fine differences for the rest of eternity, but here are a few characteristics we believe describes the kind of content Google and customers want.

  • Customer focused
  • Provides value
  • Entertains
  • Compels
  • Sounds authentic because it IS authentic

This is all good stuff, right? The kind of content we all would like to see at the top of a search result. There’s just one problem with it. Creating killer content, whether for a blog or podcast, is hard work. That’s why marketers in previous iterations of the internet went for the low-hanging fruit. They overused keywords. They stuffed in too many backlinks. They made the written copy of their website unreadable, circular, and completely self-serving.

Here’s a simple lesson for podcasters to learn. All that junk from the past? Forget it. A completely self-serving approach will get you sent to page nine million and twenty one in search results. Put the customer first by creating great content. Profit will take care of itself. (Top image: Flickr | Sean MacEntee)

The Speaking of Wealth Team