Content is king. You’ve heard us mention that many times before, and we’re not the only ones banging this drum. It really is true that the best way to reach potential customers online is to focus on high-quality content. But not everyone understands what that actually means.

The content that most affects consumers isn’t focused on high-performing keywords. Rather, it’s a far more holistic approach that centers on topics your potential customers are interested in, not just posts and articles that occasionally weave in particular keywords.

There’s a lot of data you can research to understand the difference between topic-focused content and keyword-focused content, but that’s not the purpose of this newsletter. We try to cover things in more user-friendly language, giving you actionable content you can actually employ. All of which happens to conform perfectly to our point: Deliver useful information to your potential customers, not just shallow content that happens to include seemingly useful keywords.

Google and the other big search engines keep getting better at interpreting what content is actually useful and what content exists only to deliver keywords, and keywords keep becoming less powerful in how that content is interpreted.

That doesn’t mean you should avoid using keywords that are specific to your industry. Use them when they should be used, as natural, organic aspects of your blog post, product description, category description, etc. But don’t bend over backwards to squeeze them in where they don’t belong.

Again, the specifics can get rather technical, but modern algorithms are better than ever at understanding when and where certain keywords should appear in content, along with what related terms are likely to appear in close proximity to those keywords.

What that means in plain English: If you try to stuff the keyword “quantum physics” several times into an article about baking chocolate chip cookies, the algorithms know that term doesn’t belong there, and they accordingly will give the article virtually no weight for that term.

That’s an extreme example, but the algorithms also understand much subtler uses of keywords vs. context. Here’s the bottom line: It’s not about optimizing keywords for search engines. It’s about optimizing the search experience for the user.

Your content needs to be focused on providing highly useful information a human searcher would be looking for when considering your product and service.

Don’t build your websites/landing pages for single keywords. Don’t build them for search engines. Focus on topics related to your website/content/niche/product and try to write the best content for these topics and subtopics.

When you create comprehensive, useful content that uses semantically closely related terms, you get the search rankings juice you want, you attract leads interested in what you’re selling, and you improve conversions. Your Ring Ring Marketing can help you understand exactly what type of content will deliver the best results for you.