Authentic Content Matters On The Web

The web was not made by machines for machines. The web is a human construct, meant to store and communicate knowledge. And to facilitate communication of that knowledge.

Your goal is to create and deploy content that is useful and engaging to your audience and gets them to take action. That goal has to be balanced with the goal of findability - making that actionable content available to your audience. Sure, keywords and on-page optimization are important and integral to getting found. They just don't need to be the only focus you have for your content.

Deep Content Informs & Engages

Any content you create for webpages and websites must be meaty and deep. Shallow content does not inform or engage your audience. Your content needs to reflect all the best characteristics of your brand - and communicate within and from the context of your unique business positioning.

If it doesn't, then your content is either going to be marginally useful (shallow content) or somewhat of a follow-the-leader copycat (no brand support and no unique positioning perspective).

When you're planning what your content has to accomplish, and where it's going to go, don't forget to strategize the message, context and perspective.

What's important to grasp is that when business people go to the web, they're going there to accomplish something: research for information is the primary activity. By keeping the needs of the audience top of mind, we'll all create more interesting and actionable material.

And understanding the different kinds of information, needed at different times by your audience - you'll come to see the gazillions of opportunities for creating useful and engaging content that keeps your audience coming back to your website and moving through their buy cycle from research to purchase.

There's plenty of bland, meaningless content on the web, and lots of filler content too. We don't need to add to the general mess and clutter.

By remembering to write authentic content for people, you will be keeping in mind that people come first and SEO planning needs to come second. Although findability is key to having a strong website presence, findability without perspective and context makes your content worthless.