Is website content optimization related to article word count? How can content marketing and SEO help website rankings?

 

On the value of SEO content marketing

Content marketing can convey the brand's services, products, and image to potential customers (Leads), establish the relationship between the brand and consumers, increase brand loyalty, and improve conversions (Conversions). With the advent of the digital age, no matter what kind of marketing strategy, "content" is involved, such as:

1. Social Media Marketing (Social Media Marketing) : Before implementing social media strategies, you need to write related posts
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) : The Google search engine is user-oriented, and hopes that the content of the website meets the needs of users and that the content of the website is continuously updated
3. PPC (Pay per Click) : The operation of PPC advertising also requires website content to support

SEO and content marketing are actually two different things, but they can have a great intersection. SEO lists the needs (main target keywords, long-tail keywords, different types of articles, etc.), while content marketing comes from Meet the requirements listed by SEO. SEO needs article content, and content marketing is article content. The value of SEO content marketing is that after optimizing the article content (including product pages, blog articles, news content, etc.) of the website through SEO, in addition to attracting more natural traffic from search engines, it can also integrate valuable content. Provided to users .

Relationship

Many articles have mentioned: the more words in the article, the more helpful it is for SEO, but is this really the case?

This is not the case. Although articles with more words can have more chances to compete for keyword rankings, John Mueller explained that the word count of a website does not help improve rankings, nor is it one of the factors that affect Google rankings. Too many articles have more words instead. It may affect the content of the article that was originally set to be conveyed.

Having the same word-count as a top-ranking article isn't going to make your pages rank first, just like having a bunch of USB chargers isn't going to get you to the moon. But, I'm still tempted to buy some of those USB chargers... https://t.co/TIuJHwHufn

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu)  February 8, 2020

The article content of the website itself is used to provide information to readers, so the number of articles that each website should have varies according to different industries, and Google cares about the relevance of the article content to users. If you only write articles for the sake of writing articles (Light Content or Useless Content), it will only waste Google’s crawling budget and company resources, because simply writing articles and updating articles, but the content of the article does not bring value to users, for Site search performance (Search Performance) and ranking are not directly helpful.

Note: Light Content: Articles with repeated or little content

The impact of article content on SEO ranking

Low-quality articles are not helpful for ranking, but what are high-quality articles?

According to Google guidelines , there are two key points:

1. The content of the article should be in line with the user’s search intent and can solve the user’s problem, not just for search engines to read and compete for website ranking
2. The content of the article must be unique and provide value to users (get linked and shared)

Writing good article content has the opportunity to help brands increase the number of visitors (Visitors), reduce bounce rates (Bounce Rates), and increase conversions (Conversions). SEO can help good articles provide consumers with more accuracy and efficiency.

In line with the content structure of the SEO article

• Use H tags appropriately to allow search engines to understand the article structure more quickly

In line with the SEO article content structure, you need to include several text tags (H1-H6). The smaller the number of the H tag, the higher the importance of the title. The H1 tag can be used in the headline of the article, and the H2 can be used in each paragraph. Minor headings, H3 is suitable for subheadings within paragraphs.

Ideal SEO article content length

• 100 words, 2000 words, as long as it meets the user's intentions, it is a good article

As mentioned earlier, the number of words is not one of the factors that affect Google ranking. If 100 words or 200 words can be used to send the information that users want to know, then it is good content. If you need 2000 words, of course, there is no problem. , The focus is on the intention of the content of this article to convey to users. For example, if the same topic or the same keyword that you want to compete for ranking, you wrote about 500 words for a specific topic, but found that the competitor wrote 4000 words on the same topic, and the competitor’s ranking Relatively high.

Under such circumstances, do you think you need to write longer articles to compete for ranking?

The answer is: not necessarily, say it again! Google emphasizes "solving user needs and giving valuable information." Although articles with a large amount of text may be easier to cover the needs of some users, in fact, if you re-examine the content of 4000-word articles, Maybe a short 500 words can satisfy the user's intention!

In fact, the number of words in an article does not really say how much you need to write is better, but the more you write, the more you can help the audience answer different questions, and perhaps it will be more helpful for ranking. Therefore, in terms of article content, "solving user needs and providing valuable information" will be more meaningful than discussing the word count of the article. After a certain number of website articles accumulate, the problem of content duplication may appear. Let’s talk about the impact of duplicate content on the website and how to solve it.

The impact of website content duplication on website SEO

When Google determines that there is duplicate content, it may affect search rankings and consume the crawling budget of the page. Too many duplicate contents on the same page will also spread the weight of the page.

How Google judges duplicate content

Like fingerprint recognition, Google uses different indicators to compare similar article pages to determine the degree of similarity.

For example, if the page content of a product in Germany, Switzerland, and Australia differs only in price and currency, and the description of the product is the same, it will be judged as duplicate content on the Google search engine. The solution to this problem can be improved through hreflang. Google will give the user the correct language version of the page based on the user’s location and through the hreflang tag.

Two ways to deal with duplicate content

• Forwarding via 301

If similar articles are on different URLs, the page weights of similar articles will be dispersed. It is recommended that the weights of similar articles (pages) can be concentrated on the same page through the 301 forwardings that can pass the weight, which can help search Ranking competition, but remember that the redirected page users will not see the original content.

• Use Canonical properties

Another way to deal with duplicate content can be to add canonical attributes to the code of the duplicate content, pointing to a standard page, so that the search engine can clearly tell the relationship between the two duplicate content pages.