Website Content Creation
Human-Readable Content IS SEO Content
Depending on whom you ask, creating content – that is, blog posts, services pages, press releases, and such – with Google in mind can be an extremely important thing to do or a terrible thing to do.
Those who would call it important are likely thinking along the lines of using your website content to show Google that your page (and your company and website) are relevant to certain keywords. If you create your content in a way that makes it easy for Google to read, you have a better chance of showing up in search results when someone searches for what your page discusses.
On the other hand, the critics of SEO-focused content creation would argue that by creating content “for Google,” you’re sacrificing the actual informational value and natural readability for a real live human. Compare these two short paragraphs:
Example 1: “Looking for men’s basketball sneakers? We have the best men’s basketball sneakers from Nike, Adidas, Puma, And1, and other top men’s basketball sneakers brands.”
Example 2: “Looking for an advantage on the court? Check out our selection of men’s kicks, including the freshest styles from Nike and others. Get ready to break some ankles!”
Both examples are approximately the same length. Both deliver the same basic message. But
Example 1 sounds unnatural, with that same keyword phrase (“men’s basketball sneakers” forced into the text three separate times, along with the SEO-favorite term “best” and a number of specific brand names. Will Google know what your page is about? Yes, it’s pretty obvious. Will someone be excited to read it? Meh.
Example 2 is much more natural sounding. A human looking for men’s basketball sneakers will read it and understand it, and likely they will be confident it was another human, not a robot, who wrote it. But what happens to your SEO when you’re not maximizing the use of specific words and phrases people might be searching for on Google?
In the earlier days of SEO, this was a real concern. Google (and other search engines) really did give preferential treatment to content that more closely matched the exact searches people were doing. That’s where this whole trend shown in Example 1 started. Fortunately, the logic and technology behind the algorithms has evolved.
Without getting into the SEO jargon and acronyms like EAT, NLP, and BERT (feel free to ask for more info), Google & co. are much, much better at figuring out what content is about even if it uses different wording than what the user searches. In fact, it’s in Google’s best interest to serve its users the content most likely to provide the information they’re seeking, so if your naturally worded blog post does a better job of that than someone else’s robo-nonsense, you’ll rank better — on that specific factor anyway.
There are still a lot of other considerations when it comes to optimizing your website and content. Highway One Marketing believes in making your website experience ideal for your users first, and then giving Google some extra hints and information when and where it’s effective and won’t sacrifice quality.