What it means to bolster SEO with robust, targeted content

Last Updated on January 20, 2024 by Work In My Pajamas

If you want to succeed at affiliate marketing, it’s no longer good enough to boast strong SEO skills. The same is the case for online businesses and services that want to optimize their position in a Google search. Certainly SEO is still a vital part of web marketing, but recent developments in the industry have relegated it to the back seat. Now—as pro bloggers and web marketing gurus have always said—content is king.

Not just any brand of content will cut the mustard, not anymore. The filler and keyword-rich link baits of yesterday are too toxic to deal with, especially if you want to spearhead a successful web marketing campaign. Strong and focused content—articles and posts meant to attract readers and inform them about whatever it is you’re trying to sell in a natural and well-written manner—rules the landscape now.

At least, that’s the kind of content that makes the cut on Google now.

The Penguin update enacted a few months back by Google put the final nail in the coffin for the old-school SEO-rich link baiting articles that became so popular in the past few years. It was a decision that Google made in order to strengthen the collective offerings on Google searches, as they found that far too many services were upping their search rankings not by the merit of their actual content (or their business) but by nature of their SEO skills. Like I said, SEO will no longer be the deciding factor for a business’s success.

But SEO still will play a part in affiliate marketing, just as it still plays a part in determining the Google search rankings. But it won’t be as important as the actual articles that get a little bump from your SEO strategies. You have to write robust material if you want to stand out for Google’s new post-Penguin algorithms, and that’s a real challenge for some online outfits. Sites that rely on spammy articles that read like they were written by a first-year ESL student are in real danger of seeing their business disappear altogether if they don’t step up their content generation.

But what exactly is strong content, and how does it differ from the average article you see on a run of the mill small-time blog? It’s hard to give a standard list of qualities that make for outstanding content, but I’ll try to offer a few key points that I stick to whenever I’m writing:

1. Write in specifics: Use reliable data to back up your arguments and bolster your writing; include facts and figures whenever you can to make your content look more professional and credible. Most people treat vague writing like a huge waste of time.
2. Write with personality: There’s so much bad writing out there, and much of it is bad because its bland and pointless; there’s no energy behind the writing. You can change the direction of your writing entirely if you write about what really matters to you, and do so with conviction.
3. Don’t be a salesperson: Too much web writing—specifically the writing from web marketing companies—sounds like a bad sales pitch. You’ll immediately distinguish your writing from other people in your field if you drop the salesperson voice and speak to your readers (or potential customers) like real human beings.

What kind of strong content do you write for your business? Let me know!

Familiar with the industry, Kristie Lewis knows that not all construction management careers are the same. Read her posts to gain a better understanding or contact her directly at Kristie.lewis81@gmail.com.