You Can No Longer Settle For ‘Good’ Content

Internet marketing has seen drastic changes in the last several years. Rand Fishkin from Moz explains the level of content you should shoot for to achieve positive SEO results.

‘Good’ doesn’t get you very far anymore. A ‘good’ candidate for a job will always be outdone be a ‘great’ one. A ‘good’ baseball player may do well, but he’ll never make it to the professional level. And a ‘good’ website may win the approval of your mother, but it won’t land number one on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

We’ve discussed in previous posts that content is king when it comes to SEO. As important as things like metadata and crawl-friendly sites are, your website will still rank low if it doesn’t display the information that your audience is searching for.

So how do you come up with content that exceeds good and becomes great? The answer lies in figuring out what others are doing and creating content that matches your audience even better than the competition.

Rand Fishkin is an SEO expert. As founder and former CEO of Moz.com he knows his way around the web. Moz has been around since 2004, which means Fishkin has seen how the correlation between SEO and content has changed over many years.

Check out the following video in which Fishkin explains exactly why “good unique content needs to die” (his words, not mine):

Our Takeaways:

1. Anyone can come up with ‘good’ content. Fishkin makes it very clear that lots of people think they can produce content as good as what’s already on the SERP. Settling for content that is as good as existing content will never put you at the top of any search engine. You have to be a step higher; you have to shoot for the best content.
2. The field is overgrown. Content marketing has exploded meaning expectations have shot through the roof. Fishkin says that as a result of the rise of content marketing, user expectations have gone crazy. Expectations must be raised to accommodate your audience’s wants and needs.
3. Understand your audience. Discussion around content marketing always seems to come back to this point: write content that is catered to your target audience. What kinds of questions will they be asking on a search engine? What level of detail will they be expecting? Do they prefer visual content over written? Make sure you provide answers to the questions your audience is asking.
4. Do your research. There is no way of succeeding online if you don’t know what your competition is up to. The great thing about the internet is that it’s not that hard to find out. When researching other websites, be critical. Fishkin says that when looking at other sites, he commonly asks himself “What’s missing?”. By determining this, he figures out strengths and weaknesses.
5. Strive for perfection. Do you recall in Remember the Titans when Coach Boone tells his team: “We will be perfect in every aspect of the game. Perfection!”. Well, this is similar to creating ‘10x quality content’ (as put by Fishkin). If you dedicate an hour to your content then you’ll likely produce poor quality. When you dedicate an entire week to creating ‘super-power’ level content, you reach the top of an SERP. (*spoiler alert*) Coach Boone’s team did achieve a perfect football season, but only because they put in the time and effort necessary to be better than the rest. You can do the same for your content!

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