As a reader, when you read a piece of “quality content,” you know it immediately. But how does Google’s algorithm determine what is quality and what isn’t? After all, it’s just a computer looking at your website to determine quality.
A lot of marketers will tell you that you just need to write long-form content. Turns out, that’s not exactly true. Writing longer content for the sake of length isn’t going to help you rank.
It’s really about content depth. Example of content depth:
If you search for “what is SEO,” you’ll something like the following:
- Position 1 discusses SEO topics: A, C, D, E, F
- Position 2 discusses SEO topics: A, B, F
- Position 3 discusses SEO topics: C, D, F
- Position 4 discusses SEO topics: A, E, F
See what we’re getting at here? Position 1 is the article that explained the most about SEO. It might not necessarily be the longest, it just explained more about SEO than the other results.
The good news is that you don’t need to write brand new blogs to increase your content depth. You can take your existing content and edit it to explain more. Here’s how:
- Identify content worth optimizing — Find the content you’re already ranking for, and determine if that keyword is truly important for your business to rank for.
- Evaluate your existing piece — Compare this piece to the other blogs that rank higher than yours. What do they have that you’re missing? It might be things you’re not thinking of, like media assets.
- Rewrite the piece — Take what you know about your industry, and what the blog is missing compared to competitors and rewrite it to add those pieces in.
- Update the content — DO NOT change the URL, but do change the publish date.
- Fetch as Google — A little-known trick: you can actually force Google to instantly re-crawl your updated post, rather than waiting for Google to find it.
- Check your results — Hop into an incognito browser and see if your updates have made any changes. This could take a few days.
If you wanna see how well this tactic works for the author of this blog, you know what to do
