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SEO Myth #7: As Long As I Provide Good Content, SEO will happen naturally

Hi there! This is our seventh post in our “SEO Myths That Need To Die In 2017” series.

If you want to check out our previous post, you can find it here: SEO Myth #6: Link Building is bad.

In theory "good" content creation is a good idea. Google wants to provide the best, most relevant content to its user, and so it’s algorithm naturally ranks “good” content higher. Produce good quality content and you’ll have more indexable topics that cover a wider range of user queries, and you’ll attract more links to your site. If you don’t produce any content at all, you don’t stand a chance of making meaningful SEO progress. In other words, if you don't play the game you can never win. If your material is weak or untrustworthy, you’ll similarly fail (or worse be flagged as spam). So let’s assume you’re diving into a strategy that produces “good” content regularly—why isn’t that enough to increase your rankings?

Content Exposure

If you create the best quality content, that's both optimized on the page and useful in its information, it's still not enough for Google to boost your rankings. As advanced as it is, Google still relies on the feedback of site visitors to rank the quality of content.  If those visitors can’t see your work, it will have no means upon which to judge your content’s quality. For that, you need content exposure.

This is one of the reasons Black Hat SEO has revolved around creating these backlinks in a sneaky and non-natural way. As a response to that, Google has refined its search algorithm in 2016 to make this effort less efficient going forward.

So How Do You Get People To See Your Content?

Instead of focusing on Black Hat link building, White Hat SEO focuses on link building efforts through other channels that promote visibility. This could mean disseminating your content for press and public relations, social media, offline marketing, word of mouth,  and email marketing.

Creating "good" content is only one cog in the machine that makes up an SEO strategy. One cog on its own will not make the machine run.

So go and create "good" content, but make sure you spend the same amount of effort giving it the exposure it deserves.

 

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