Designer Marketing Tips – The Role of Content in Online Marketing

In a previous post, we mentioned that the customer for whom Google is working is NOT you and your business or website. Their customer is the consumer who is searching for you – or your competitor. This begs the question of what exactly Google is looking for to satisfy the needs of their customer and, even further, the role of content in online marketing.To quote the folks at Google:“Understanding the meaning of your search is crucial to returning good answers. So, to find pages with relevant information, our first step is to analyze what the words in your search query mean. We build language models to try to decipher what strings of words we should look up in the index.”Yeah, that’s as clear as mud, right?To make it as simple as possible, let’s think of it like this: Google’s goal is to offer a choice of websites that offer the highest quality information possible in answer to a search query.To accomplish this, they use what they’ve decided to label “synonymous search”. In other words, if you type a search for “How to change a light bulb”, the algorithm will also search for websites that tell you how to replace or exchange a light bulb.Google will also look for the most timely version of the information available, with a clear and succinct explanation for swapping a burned-out bulb.Quality Content is Critical to Your SEO StrategyContent marketing is a marketing strategy that revolves around the creation, publication, and distribution of content to a target audience in order to bring new traffic (and therefore new customers) to your business.Quality content writing is the most important part of your SEO. With quality, SEO-friendly formatting is very important because the Google algorithm looks for important words (keywords) at particular places on your web page or blog post.In other words, you can no longer simply stick the phrase “change a light bulb” in your content over and over again in the hope that Google will rank your site higher than your competitor’s. You must offer a better reason for them to rank your site higher, such as a better explanation of how to change that light bulb.Plus, as light bulbs and lighting fixtures evolve, you must continue to offer high-quality content that reflects and includes those changes. You can also offer a step up in the quality of your content, by adding “how to safely change a light bulb”.While search algorithms are constantly changing, there will always be basic SEO strategies that work for you and your website because finding quality content is, and always will be, the goal of search. This means that the role of content in online marketing will always be important to your ongoing success.Looking for more interior design marketing tips, trends, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today. And, if you need help developing or improving your SEO strategy, we can refer you to our favorite SEO Strategist!