The Illusion of SEO vs. the Reality of Great Content

SEO techniques will increase your search rankings and SEM will get you traffic on the top search engines. But a boatload of quality content will also accomplish these things and prepare you for the more contextual future of search.

Plus, quality content will snag you a whole net full of other benefits. These ancillary benefits include:

• Higher conversion rates
• Increased sales
• Brand building
• Increasing brand reach beyond your dotcom
• Greater customer education

Using hooks

You can pay for SEO/SEM to build your links and increase your clicks and ranking. But without quality content, this is just a simulation of what your audience can and should be doing naturally. It’s an empty excercise. It’s pole fishing without a hook.

Weird Al Singing 'Craigslist'

In pop and rock music, the hook is the turn of phrase that drives a song. Whether it’s the Black Eyed Peas’ Boom Boom Pow or Weird Al’s It’s on Craigslist, the hook is what snags you and keeps you. It doesn’t matter how many people hear a song once and forget it. What matters is the people who keep listening and tell their friends.

Quality marketing content is no different. By creating something that resonates with your consumer-base, you hook them in. By enabling and making it easy for them to share it, you build links and drive traffic.

The illusion of SEO

This is the process that SEO attempts to mimic. It creates a picture of a presence to search engines. But when your marketing plan is all form and no content, where will your potential customers end up? Somewhere else.

When you hook your customers with great content, the search engines don’t just latch on to an illusion, they help to spread a reality — the actual presence of valuable content. This drives conversion rates.

The future of search

A content strategy will also position you for future success. As search becomes increasingly contextual, drawing upon many different threads, it will be more important that you have established a content presence across many channels. Engines such as Kosmix and Duck Duck Go are already providing search results of this sort.

Microsoft is also trying to sell contextualized results with their new ‘Decision Engine’ Bing. However, as we previously noted, the Bing launch by Microsoft neglected to create online content hooks. They are trying to sell a contextualized search experience using everything but contextualizable content.

Takeaway

Stay in reality. Stop playing the search game of today. Create and distribute valuable content. Gear up for tomorrow’s search.

My question to you

Are you thinking beyond today’s SEO/SEM game? What are the search results for your brand in Kosmix? In Duck Duck Go?

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."