As digital marketers we get taught very early on that a good marketer who wants their brand and site to succeed should view all campaigns, content and digital assets with an SEO eye. And yet, website owners regularly express frustration about their well-optimized site’s inability to rank, despite facing minimal competition. So why doesn’t good SEO always equal high rankings?

While good content is still important for your site, it is not longer enough to compete for the best spots on Google’s rankings. These days, for Google to rank your site highly, you need to establish both relevance (i.e., addressing the subject of a user’s query) and authority (i.e., proving that your site is trustworthy). Having written content is usually best as it allows you to do both – relevance for different keywords and phrases, while also building the trustworthiness of your site. If your content is ‘good enough’ it will attract inbound backlinks, which are major indicators of authority.

One of the biggest contributing factors to why content alone is no longer enough to rank well, is the fact that the very nature of content is changing. For today’s consumers, written content is often an afterthought — they want images, videos, podcasts, audio content and other mediums to consume. This means that marketers need to  diversify the types of content they’re creating to appeal to a broader audience.

Achieving good rankings is also becoming more challenging due to the sheer volume of competition. It is estimated that around 252,000 new websites are created every day worldwide. That’s 175 new websites every minute! Hence why Google regularly releases updated algorithms as it is becoming more and more challenging to keep search results as relevant and authoritative as possible for the user – which ultimately has always been Googe’s mantra.

So, if you are an ambitious digital marketer and want to get any advantage in such a hotly contested environment, “good” content simply isn’t enough. You need truly exceptional content — some of the best in the industry — or some alternative strategy to avoid or surpass the competition, such as building better, more authoritative links, or targeting a niche audience segment that’s neglected by your top competitors. There are specific things you can do to get ahead of your competition, such as building links deliberately, spending more time and energy on the structure of your site, the UX quality and its technical performance, and by focusing on quality not quantity.

Remember your AdMarula team is only an email away if you need help to boost your site’s performance.

Happy selling!

The Publisher Management Team