Drowning in Content

drowning

Content marketing is still everybody’s favourite new boy toy. But he is getting a bit older and more worn, and has to work harder to command attention in a increasingly competitive market.

Sure, he remains cute. A fresh stream of content is still the way to get noticed online, to up page rankings, to establish yourself as an authority with your market and to build customer relationships. But the trouble is the sheer volume of content being produced. We’re drowning in it. There’s more information being posted than there are eyeballs to read it. I’ve heard that as many as 27,000,000 new new pieces of content are  produced and shared online daily.

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Tail Wags Content Dog

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OK, the case for companies to produce constant streams of online content is something like this:

More and more businesses and organizations depend on the Internet to connect with customers and audiences. This means that getting high page rankings in search engines, particularly Google, is a priority.

Universally organizations turn to search engine optimization (SEO) experts to tinker under the hood and do what they can to improve rankings. As Google changes its algorithms, gets wise to the latest SEO tricks and penalizes those it deems to have used inappropriate methods to get high search rankings, content has become increasingly important.

A steady stream of content is what the SEO experts recommend to get noticed and improve placement. It can’t be any old content, acting as a placeholder for keywords, but it has to be “rich”—i.e., stuff that people actually want to read and repost and link to.

Every blog post, for example, is treated by search engines as a separate web page, and if keyword-optimized can help a site get more weight and reach in its ranking assessment.

The regular blog posts can also be used to drive content to the other increasingly important part of organizations’ online presences: their social media.

So companies are open to having good writing on an ongoing bases to fulfill the requirements set out by their SEO experts. The tail may be wagging the dog, but  the dog is happy and that’s a good thing for content developers who want to scratch his head . . . Sorry, I’m getting lost in this metaphor. Time for bed.