Content is SEO. More specifically, it’s one side of the SEO relationship. One core function of search engines is to connect users with the information they’re looking for. That information might be a product listing, a review, a news story, an image, or a video.

The other core function of search engines is to retain users.

Search engines retain users by ensuring their confidence and trust in the displayed results. Over time, they build expectations that using their platform is a safe, streamlined experience that quickly leads users to what they want.

SEO success depends on being found by your target audience for what they are looking for and consistently providing a satisfying user experience based on the context of the queries they type into search engines.

Search Is Built On Content

The core function of search engines is to help users find information. Search engines first discover webpages, they parse and render and they then add them to an index. When a user inputs a query, search engines retrieve relevant webpages in the index and then “rank” them.

Search engines need to know what pages are about and what they contain in order to serve them to the right users. In concept, they do this quite simply: They examine the content. The real process behind this is complicated, executed by automated algorithms and evaluated with human feedback.

Google constantly adjusts and updates it algorithms with the goal of ensuring the most relevant content is served to searchers.

This relationship between searchers, search engines, and websites, has come to define the internet experience for most users. Unless you know the exact URL of the website you intend to visit, you need must find it via a third party. That could be social media, a search engine, or even discovering the website offline and then typing it in. This is called a “referral,” and Google sends 64% of all website referrals in the U.S. Microsoft and Bing send the next largest amount of referrals, followed by YouTube.

Getting discovered by people who don’t already know you depends on search engines, and search engines depend on content.

The SEO Value Of Content

Google has said it prioritizes user satisfaction.

It’s confirmed that user behavior signals impact ranking.

At this point, whether this relationship is causal or correlative doesn’t matter. You must prioritize user experience and satisfaction because it’s a key indicator of SEO success.

Written language is still the primary way users interact with search engines and how algorithms understand websites. Google algorithms can interpret audio and videos, but written text is core to SEO functionality.

Enticing clicks and engaging users through content that satisfies their queries is the baseline of SEO. If your pages can’t do that, you won’t have success.

High-quality content and user experiences aren’t just important for SEO; they’re prerequisites.

This is true for all advertising and branding. Entire industries and careers are built on the skills to refine the right messaging and put it in front of the right people.

Evidence For The SEO Value Of Content

Google highlights the importance of content in its “SEO fundamentals” documentation. It advises that Google’s algorithms look for “helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people,” and provides details about how to self-assess high-quality content.

• Content, and how well it matches a user’s needs, is one of the core positive and negative factors in Google’s ranking systems. It updates systems to reduce content it deems to be unhelpful and prioritize content it deems to be helpful.
• In fact, Google’s analysis of the content may determine whether a page enters the index at all to become eligible to rank. If you work hard to provide a good experience and serve the needs of your users, search engines have more reason to surface your content and may do so more often.
• A 2024 study in partnership between WLDM, ClickStream, and SurferSEO suggests that the quality of your coverage on a topic is highly correlated with rankings.

Content And User Behavior

Recent developments in the SEO industry, such as the Google leak, continue to highlight the value of both content and user experience.

Google values user satisfaction to determine the effectiveness and quality of webpages and does seem to use behavioral analysis in ranking websites. It also focuses on the user intent of queries and whether a specific intent is served by a particular resource.

The satisfaction of your users is, if not directly responsible for SEO performance, highly correlated with it.

Many factors affect user experience and satisfaction. Website loading speed and other performance metrics are part of it. Intrusive elements of the page on the experience are another.

Content, however, is one of the primary determiners of a “good” or “bad” experience.

• Does the user find what they’re looking for? How long does it take?
• Is the content accurate and complete?
• Is the content trustworthy and authoritative?

The answers to these questions reflect whether the user has a good or bad experience with your content, and this determines their behavior. Bad experiences tend to result in the user leaving without engaging with your website, while good experiences tend to result in the user spending more time on the page or taking action.

This makes content critical not only to your SEO efforts on search engines but also to your website’s performance metrics. Serving the right content to the right users in the right way impacts whether they become leads, convert, or come back later.

Leaning into quality and experience is a win all around. Good experiences lead to desirable behaviors. These behaviors are strong indications of the quality of your website and content. They lead to positive outcomes for your business and are correlated with successful SEO.

What Kinds Of Content Do You Need?

Successful content looks different for each goal you have and the different specific queries you’re targeting.

Text is still the basis of online content when it comes to search. Videos are massively popular. YouTube is the second-most popular search engine in the world. However, in terms of referrals, it only sends 3.5% of referral traffic to the web in the U.S. In addition, videos have titles, and these days, most have automated transcripts. These text elements are critical for discovery.

That isn’t to say videos and images aren’t popular. Video, especially “shorts” style videos, is an increasingly popular medium. Cisco reported that video made up 82% of all internet traffic in 2022. So you absolutely shoulder consider images and video as part of your content strategy to best serve your audiences and customers.

Both can enhance text-based webpages and stand on their own on social platforms.

But for SEO, it’s critical to remember that Google search sends the most referral traffic to other websites. Text content is still the core of a good SEO strategy. Multi-modal AI algorithms are getting very good at translating information between various forms of media, but text content remains critical for several reasons:

• Plain text has high accessibility. Screen readers can access it, and it can be resized easily.
• Text is the easiest way for both people and algorithms to analyze semantic connections between ideas and entities.
• Text doesn’t depend on device performance like videos and images might.
• Text hyperlinks are very powerful SEO tools because they convey direct meaning along with the link.
• It’s easier to skim through text than video.

Text content is still dominant for SEO. But you should not ignore other content. Images, for example, make for strong link building assets because they’re attractive and easily sharable. Accompanying text with images and video accommodates a variety of user preferences and can help capture attention when plain text might not.

Like everything else, it’s down to what best serves users in any given situation.

SEO Content: Serving Users Since Search Was A Thing

Search engines match content to the needs of users.

Content is one-third of this relationship: user – search engine – information.

You need content to perform SEO, and any digital marketing activity successfully.

The difficulty comes from serving that perfect content for the perfect situation.

So read “How To Create High-Quality Content” next.

Read More:

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

This post was sponsored by Moz. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

The scope of modern keyword strategy is expansive and crosses many disciplines. As Google leans further into user experience and user signals as part of its ranking algorithms, research, execution, and testing must become more interwoven and refined.

If your keyword strategy is underperforming and you’re struggling to drive traffic, rankings, or even onsite conversions, your keyword strategy could be missing critical components.

The following is a look at common mistakes and how to address them. You’ll see screenshots and examples of how you can solve keyword strategy issues and improve workflows during the keyword research stage using the premium keyword research features in Moz Pro, but you can get started free with  Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool.

Mistake #1: Failing To Target Intent

You can’t just pick a keyword you want to rank for and move straight into writing a page. What you want to target is the first part of a complex equation, of which the user is the most important part.

Intent can be expressed as a set of questions:

• Why is the user searching for the query?
• What does the user expect to find?
• What do search engines deliver to meet this intent?

You must answer these questions to build content that fits neatly between the expectations of searchers and the search engines. Whether you’re a beginner in keyword research or you’re a professional SEO who wants to brush up on the fundamentals, you must understand the relationship between queries and search intent. Content that does not satisfy intent will result in a poor user experience, which leads to negative engagement signals, which will hurt your ability to rank.

You must understand the relationship between queries and search intent. Content that does not satisfy intent will result in a poor user experience, which leads to negative engagement signals.

If enough of your content is misaligned with user intent, it could impact your entire site, as you won’t be seen as trustworthy or authoritative.

If individual pages or your keyword strategy as a whole is underperforming, this is one of the first things you should audit because a mismatch between search intent and your content will kill those pages, whether they’re old or new.

You also need to keep in mind that intent changes. This can be due to one-off events, seasonal changes, or algorithm updates.

Here are some examples of intent:

• Purchase intent: the user is actively looking for a product to buy.
• Comparison intent: the user is shopping around and comparing products.
• Informational or educational intent: The user wants to learn something.

Intents can be quite complicated, and you’ll need to rely on your own audience research to get granular. But a tool can help speed up the process by showing you the general intent of a keyword and what is currently ranking on the SERP.

Explore by Keyword in Moz Pro makes it easy to see keyword intent at a glance for individual keywords and a whole batch of keyword suggestions. Let’s look at the keyword [best convertible car seat].

You can probably already guess the intent, and the tool confirms that it’s a commercial intent keyword. This means users are looking to compare products and features to find the best suited for them. Remember, this is based on the results in the SERPs, so it’s giving you some more intel into what Google expects a user’s intent to be, which we’ll discuss more in a bit.

Screenshot of Moz Pro

As you go through the research process, you can use a combination of factors such as Difficulty and intent to discover related keywords worth pursuing to bolster your strategy.

Mistake #2: Not Conducting Competitor And On-SERP Research

When you’re in the weeds of data tables and strategy, it’s easy to forget one of the most simple and critical rules in SEO.

Most of the information you need is on the SERP.

When you evaluate the SERP of a given keyword, you can gain a lot of information with the right approach. But you’re going to need to get good at reading between the lines.

You can use the existing pages on a SERP to understand how well the query is being satisfied and what competitors are and are not doing. If the SERP has many high-quality pages, you can learn a lot from the strategies your competitors use. If there are pages that you consider low-quality, based on your knowledge of the subject matter, then you’ve identified an opportunity.

So, to properly research SERPs, you need a few skills:

• Understanding of design and UX to identify suboptimal user experiences or understand why some pages may be outperforming.
• A deep understanding of the subject matter covered by the keyword so that you can identify which pages provide trustworthy, high-quality information.
• Knowledge of the user intent behind a query so that you can match the intent with the experience that the ranking pages deliver.

From there, you can evaluate the quality of the pages and choose where to focus your efforts. If you’re lacking information or you can’t find a good angle of attack, then start looking at similar SERPs for related keywords or related intents. If you can find a SERP with sufficiently different results but related search intent, you can compare and contrast.

Going back to our research related to [best convertible car seat], let’s take a look at the SERP. We can do it right inside Moz’s tool:

Screenshot from Moz Pro

Yikes! This is going to be a tough one. We’ve got Reddit and Wirecutter on there.

Luckily, there are options. Using the “questions” tab in the “keyword suggestions” tool, you can discover questions that searchers ask relatively frequently. Some of them may have the potential for a related keyword strategy.

Screenshot from Moz Pro

Even though the head term will be difficult to rank for, you can see a lot of “informational” intent related to this search. This is an opportunity to build trust with highly motivated consumers.

Mistake #3: Not Organizing Your Research

If you do keyword research intermittently or only at the beginning of campaigns, you might be missing important opportunities to refine your strategies.

Keyword research needs to be checked and refined as your strategy changes and the SERPs get updated.

It’s critical that you set yourself up for success when you begin a new campaign or strategy. You don’t want to do a ton of work and leave it in a disorganized state because, eventually, you will need to update your pages and reassess the strategy behind them. You can save yourself a lot of time by preparing for this eventuality and setting up a strategy that’s easy to jump back into.

Building keyword groups and lists help you understand how pages fit into the broader categorization of your website. It’s also a good idea to use a tool that tracks your progress so that when you return to strategy, you can see the past performance of pages at a glance.

With Keyword Lists in Moz Pro you can to upload your own sheet file or build a list by typing it out. Once the list is in the system, you get a ton of insights about the keywords both individually and in aggregate, as you can see from the screenshot of the sample list below.

Screenshot from Moz Pro

Mistake #4: Not Building Entity And Topic Maps

The way you organize information is critical at two levels.

The first is on the page. How you present information, in what order, and in what format is critical to the experience of a page. If you can match this well with intent, you’ll provide users with a good experience and improve conversion rates.

The other level is site-wide. You must build a content and keyword strategy around topics and entities. This is how you build a content library that’s friendly to both users and advanced search algorithms. Building entity maps correctly helps you compete in an AI-heavy environment because you’re speaking the language of AI algorithms that work by connecting entities together through context.

Building these maps of context between topics also helps you to build a robust strategy and discover opportunities your competitors may have missed. Every page you add to a broader topic is an opportunity to reinforce your authority, succeed in a unique SERP, and transfer that SEO power to your other pages through internal linking.

Moz’s “similar SERPs” tool comes in handy here. With Moz Pro, search by keyword and filter by Similar SERPs. Tada! By analyzing the top-ranking pages for your target keyword you’ll see other keywords those competing URLs ranked for. With this list of new keywords, you can identify opportunities to strategically expand your content based on that topical analysis. It’s a great way to see where there’s overlap in SERPs.

Screenshot from Moz Pro

Screenshot from Moz Pro

So stop missing out on opportunities your competitors are capitalizing on. With the advanced keyword research features in Moz Pro you can streamline your research process, enabling deeper keyword analysis and smarter strategies. Prioritize intent, enhance user experience, increase conversions, and rank for the queries you need.

Stop missing out on traffic! Unlock the power of Keyword Explorer with over 500 million traffic-driving keywords.

Start your free trial today and fix your keyword strategy for real results.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Moz. Used with permission.

In-Post Image: Images by Moz. Used with permission.

For some years now (ever since Google Merchant Center was introduced in 2010), ecommerce advertisers have been working with product feeds.

It’s historically been a complex and often fragile process, but thanks to the introduction of Google Merchant Center Next, we have some new tools at our fingertips.

Here’s a look at how things are changing with Next.

The History Of Google Merchant Center

Back in the very beginning, we remember having to download CSV files from the website with all product information, and embarking on a long process of cleaning up and formatting the data so that it could be manually uploaded into Google Merchant Center (GMC).

In the early days, before policies became more strict, you could even use Merchant Center to advertise anything from repair services to round-the-world gap year vacations!

But in time, GMC became far more sophisticated (and also more restricted). Along with increased restrictions came the ease of use. Uploading data became much easier and more stable.

Eventually, plugins and connectors began doing most of the job for you, then platforms like Shopify got native integrations, and now with the advent of Google Merchant Center Next, you almost don’t need feeds at all!

Common Complaints About GMC

For most of the past 14 years of Merchant Center history, you’ve likely heard a few bits of common wisdom repeated ad nauseam:

Optimize your shopping feeds inside of GMC! Keep your Google categories accurately assigned inside of GMC! Add your metadata inside of GMC! Fill out all the boxes in GMC!

The world is slowly changing, and now, with GMC Next, you don’t have to make these changes within the GMC interface.

The changes need to happen on the website. While feeds won’t totally go away overnight (and neither will the need to optimize products), Google Merchant Center Next is ushering in a new feed-less era.

Announced at Google Marketing Live 2023, Merchant Center Next actually hasn’t taken hold as rapidly as expected. Even over a year after its announcement, most but not all of our client accounts have shifted over.

GMC Next started rolling out for new users first, but Google has stated the full rollout should be completed sometime in 2024. Whether this is the actual date is yet to be seen.

What Is Google Merchant Center Next?

The core differentiator with Merchant Center Next is the simplification of website verification and the automatic population of product feeds from your website. This means that Google will scrape product information, pricing, imagery, and more directly from your site.

Additionally, it has integrated a new feature called Product Studio that allows you to use AI to update or change your product images and offers more comprehensive performance insights.

Many marketers had a negative gut reaction to the announcement of Next, but our entire team at Discosloth was actually pretty excited about this development.

Feed management (and especially the involvement of any third-party integrations, connectors, and tools) has always been a bit clunky, so the removal of any friction is a welcome feature.

While you can still use Shopify to upload your product data, many people have found it to be more difficult with some products not being uploaded properly. As it turns out, feeds have technically gone away, but in a way, they have actually just been renamed to Data Sources.

Screenshot from Google Merchant Center Next, August 2024

It appears that product feeds, as we know them, might be going away.

This doesn’t mean that product data management will become obsolete; rather, it indicates a shift in how this data is handled within the Merchant Center Next ecosystem.

The Mindset Change

I ultimately think that removing feeds is a fantastic approach because it shifts the mindset of marketers. Rather than focusing on incremental metadata optimization on hidden feeds, it will instead encourage advertisers to update & improve the actual listings on the actual site.

Rather than just making sure endless attributes are filled out in the backend, it means that the actual website and associated metadata will need to be correctly optimized. This eliminates double work and conflicting data.

When the website itself is the primary focus, it has positive effects on performance for all channels, like organic or social – not just paid.

While many paid marketers have been focused only on optimizing products and images within the Merchant Center, without paying any attention to the website listings, now may be the time to change that approach.

Thanks to this, the website owners may start seeing a better overall conversion rate for the entire website, across all channels.

This is a great step in the right direction. Contrary to what many naysayers think about the onset of AI and generative automation, I’m a fan of taking away the grunt work from marketing and handing it all to the robots.

A more automated approach to feed management will undoubtedly grant us a lot more bandwidth to make actual strategy and content decisions on the products themselves.

While we’ve been seeing more comprehensive data on product performance appearing in Google Merchant Center over the last few years, now may be the time to dig a little bit deeper.

While GA4 has widely become useless for advanced data analysis, the new GMC Next allows us to see website traffic for both paid and organic traffic from product listings, review competition and visibility, and get better data on the best-selling products and new trends.

Perhaps the feature I like the most: comparing the prices of your stock-keeping units (SKUs) vs. competitors. This is the kind of data that has been classically underused.

Instead of a misguided focus on inserting our favorite keywords into descriptions, we can finally focus on the quality and competitiveness of your products.

Screenshot from Google Merchant Center Next, August 2024

Taking Merchant Center Beyond Optimization

Performance Max and Demand Gen campaign types have given us some new tools and strategies to use in ecommerce advertising, but it’s become harder to see granular data on where your ads are appearing, detailed performance metrics, and perhaps most notably, which keyword terms & specific audiences these campaigns are appearing for.

Many advertisers are afraid that Google Merchant Center Next may be on a similar path of removing even more granular data and making it even harder for advertisers to be specific in our ad targeting.

But so far, most of the early complaints people had when Next was introduced have already been fixed. We got access back to supplemental feeds, we can now make bulk changes (even though it’s not as easy as it used to be) and we can once again appeal any incorrectly disapproved products.

Of course SKUs and product feeds need to be optimized, but this shouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary.

Optimizing this should be an assumed baseline for any ecommerce storefront.

Merchant Center Next, as we’ve found, is most effectively used for tactics far beyond what the old Merchant Center offered. Some of the most important tactics we now use include things like getting insights on specific SKUs to make sure you always hold in inventory, and diving deep into competitive visibility and pricing in order to massively increase sales.

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Featured Image: N Universe/Shutterstock