If you were alive and conscious throughout the 80s, you undoubtedly remember the famous series of ads that Wendy's ran asking "Where's the beef?" If you missed them, the ads featured a gaggle of older women examining a hamburger that appears to be 90% bun, with one finally getting frustrated and asking the obvious question.
When I look at the state of some company's content strategy, that's exactly what I find myself asking all too often: Where's the beef? Where's the content? It seems like too many companies are focused on quantity rather than quality, and that's not good. It's not good for their own SEO, and it's not good for the industry as a whole.
Content Strategy: How Bad Content Hurts You
It's an open secret in the world of content marketing that it's simple to fill your website with fluff.
There are freelance writers out there - mostly of dubious quality - who will churn out blog posts for less than 1c a word, but you're getting what you pay for. There are "autospinning" services that will take a single article and, through thesaurus replacements, turn it into hundreds of articles which all have the exact same content. Some SEO firms even market their ability to create hundreds of pages for you in record time.
The thing is, if you fill your site in this way, you're filling it with content that no one will want to read. This is ultimately self-defeating because the entire purpose of content marketing is to put up content that's useful, interesting, and will make people want to investigate your products further.
Sure, maybe you'll briefly increase your pageviews or your search engine results ranking, but without good content, no one will actually hang around long enough to make a purchase. Without that, getting an ROI on your Internet marketing is virtually impossible.
Content Strategy: How Bad Content Hurts Everyone
The other problem with these fluffy, beef-deficient sites is that they fundamentally hurt Google and the other search engines by reducing their utility value. It's an accepted tenant of content marketing that people use search engines to find information. Someone searches for "best dog food for dobermans" and, hopefully, finds an article that answers their questions and perhaps leads to them buying dog food from that site.
However, what happens when most of the top links for a search go to worthless content? What happens when clever HTML scripting tricks Google into providing results that don't even relate to the subject matter?
In short, how bad does the signal-to-noise ratio have to get before users start looking for information elsewhere?
Well, I don't know offhand, and I'm not aware of any research into it, but it would be something worth studying. Commonsense logic says such a point must exist, and ultimately, the more the web is filled up with contentless websites, the closer we edge towards it. Perhaps we should call it the "Peak Search" problem.
After all, just think: when is the last time you found an article on EzineArticles or a similar article submission site that was actually useful and relevant? Yet these articles are increasingly showing up towards the top of results, despite Google's best efforts to place an emphasis on quality content.
Be a Good Search Citizen
In short, all I'm asking for here is to think about the ramifications of your content strategy. Bad content hurts everyone, with very little (if any) personal gain, whereas high-quality content helps everyone, yourself included.
Don't make people look at Google and ask "Where's the beef?" Give them the beef they want.
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can create profitable marketing strategies for your company. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides businesses with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
