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We have often heard of this saying: content is king. However, when it came to operations online, even a couple of years back, you had websites with web content packed with keywords grabbing the top slots on SERP results. This was almost unfair to all those websites that had genuinely good content but was not being able to hike up their ranks. This kind of unfair level field was proving to be disastrous for online SEO. More companies were interested in content farming with high keyword densities rather than relying on excellent content.
Then came Google’s Panda and ground realities changed. The dichotomy between SEO results and what web content pundits preached got blurred and finally erased. There was no conflict of interest in the quality of content and the SERP verdict. With the Panda algorithm, Google finally crowned content as the undisputed king! With quality content, you now have to power to beat other websites with perhaps better link building network and other SEO advantages. On-page content is now the final decider on which website makes it to the top of the SERP heap and which ones fall by the wayside.
Long-tail keywords and their use in content is another winner. The advantage of using long-tail keywords is that it enriches the content as well, along with the keyword quotient. Long-tail keywords can be used more naturally and to borrow an often-used word of SEO experts, organically. From an SEO point of view, long-tail keywords have less competition and therefore, your content has better chances of being indexed in these relatively easier SEO battlefields. What it also means is that this is another victory of content over pitched battles between high-ranking keywords parsed from Google Adwords by overzealous online companies.
With long-tail keywords focussing on brand names, it has been noted that a website of the brand’s franchise owner ranked higher than the official website of the brand itself! Moreover, the CTR (click through rate for the uninitiated) was also higher on the franchise website. A casual analysis revealed a barely covered truth: the franchise website had a far superior website in terms of content! Lesson learnt: no matter what your ranking is on the SERP scale now, brush up and fix your content end and you will soon head to the better side of the SEO pool.
