Content is SEO. More specifically, it’s one side of the SEO relationship. One core function of search engines is to connect users with the information they’re looking for. That information might be a product listing, a review, a news story, an image, or a video.
The other core function of search engines is to retain users.
Search engines retain users by ensuring their confidence and trust in the displayed results. Over time, they build expectations that using their platform is a safe, streamlined experience that quickly leads users to what they want.
SEO success depends on being found by your target audience for what they are looking for and consistently providing a satisfying user experience based on the context of the queries they type into search engines.
Search Is Built On Content
The core function of search engines is to help users find information. Search engines first discover webpages, they parse and render and they then add them to an index. When a user inputs a query, search engines retrieve relevant webpages in the index and then “rank” them.
Search engines need to know what pages are about and what they contain in order to serve them to the right users. In concept, they do this quite simply: They examine the content. The real process behind this is complicated, executed by automated algorithms and evaluated with human feedback.
Google constantly adjusts and updates it algorithms with the goal of ensuring the most relevant content is served to searchers.
This relationship between searchers, search engines, and websites, has come to define the internet experience for most users. Unless you know the exact URL of the website you intend to visit, you need must find it via a third party. That could be social media, a search engine, or even discovering the website offline and then typing it in. This is called a “referral,” and Google sends 64% of all website referrals in the U.S. Microsoft and Bing send the next largest amount of referrals, followed by YouTube.
Getting discovered by people who don’t already know you depends on search engines, and search engines depend on content.