Is the Secret to SEO Quality Content?

Tippingpoint Labs is a content creation agency. We firmly believe that producing enough great content will increase your search ranking organically.

Lucy Langdon, Search Marketer at Distilled, a London agency specializing in SEO

In this Content in Context article, we interview Search Marketer, Lucy Langdon, to test this belief.

Q:  Isn’t the secret to the SEO business all about the content?

A:  Quality content is definitely one of the most important factors when it comes to increasing organic traffic and rankings. However, it’s not just the search engines that value this kind of content. Articles, blog posts, even just on-page copy, can do wonders in improving click through rate, lowering bounce rate, and increasing conversions. The real secret of SEO is to think about how your content needs to appeal to users before it needs to appeal to search engines. Of course, this will only happen if you can get people to look at the content in the first place — it’s kind of a vicious/virtuous circle!

Q:  Is it possible to own a keyword organically through producing enough targeted content?

A:  It would be possible to own a keyword in the organic search results, but it’s important to realize that this will only happen if your creation of targeted content exists within a larger SEO campaign. Although really excellent content might attract links all by itself, you need to make sure your site is technically capable of ranking well and that you can get the content in front of people. You should also bear in mind that the search engines want to avoid this kind of ‘owned’ search result — the greatest value they can provide to their users is to return a varied set of relevant independent results. As long as you outperform your competitors in terms of ranking and on-page usability, there’s really no need to take up all the front page slots in a search query.

Q:  How are tools like WordPress, with SEO plug-ins, making it easier to optimize your content for search?

A:  I write on a lot of different WordPress blogs, and it’s great not having to think about things like SEO-friendly URLs. I think there’s a danger that you can go overboard with SEO-ing your blog, but there’s lots of advice out there that can help you make the right decisions. This post on Problogger is a good place to start.

Q:  How much effort should be placed on catering to Google as opposed to other search engines?

A:  Google obviously has massive market share and we don’t generally do anything in our SEO recommendations that changes from one search engine to another. However, this really depends on your site and your objectives. If, for example, you’re writing content that you want to appeal to users in China, then you should learn about the best practice for Baidu. Similarly, there is a lot of focus at the moment on vertical search, and some of our clients have asked for advice on how best to optimize for this kind of niche search.

Q:  How are social networks and human-edited content changing SEO?

A:  User-generated content (UGC) has made a huge contribution to SEO. Keywords are often divided into ‘head terms’ (usually short and highly competitive, eg., poker) and ‘longtail terms’ (everything that isn’t a head term!). The accumulative volume of longtail search terms often outnumbers the huge individual volume of head terms. The beauty of UGC is that it is written by the very people that search with those longtail terms; it therefore helps your site to target a massive batch of less popular search terms without having to do it manually.

Social networks have become very popular in the world of SEO because of their ability to get content in front of hundreds of thousands or even millions of users who then, if the content is suitable, link to the page that it’s on. For that reason, you’ll often find SEO companies offering ‘linkbait’ (content that is designed to appeal to social networks).

Q:  How does frequent, relevant content play into the SEO world?

A:  A frequently updated website is more likely to be crawled more often by the search engines. If a search engine spider comes to your site and finds nothing new, they’ll leave it a little longer next time until they visit. That means that if you do put anything new on your site, it might take days or even weeks for it to be included in the search engine’s results page.

Fresh content is also very appealing to users, particularly if it’s on a blog. An out-of-date website or blog is one of the 7 deadly usability sins.

About the author

Jim Cosco -

Jim Cosco founded Tippingpoint Labs in 2002 in an effort to pursue the creation and distribution of high-quality content for the purposes of marketing and advertising. Jim’s experience as an executive producer, producer, director, and writer for television programming ranging from local public affairs and national news to reality television, enables him to create compelling stories designed to trigger powerful, emotional responses from his audience. No matter the medium, Jim’s passion for story-telling remains the common thread in all of his projects and is always the founding principle in driving his team to deliver high-quality, relevant content at every turn.

Jim relies heavily on his journalistic routes to create transparent, honest, and open content that helps build trust and nurtures meaningful brand relationships over the long term.

Since the early nineties Jim has devised and executed projects for clients like MTV, Fox News Channel, ABC, Putnam Investments, and Tufts University.  He has directed television shows and independent features, written screenplays and television treatments, and created content for marketing campaigns and product launches.