Is Content Really King?

So is content King…? A phrase coined by Bill Gates in 1996 when Microsoft ruled the software world, Yahoo was the leading search engine out there and Google was but a mere thought in the eyes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

But here we are in 2013 and the world has hugely shifted from Microsoft to Apple and Yahoo to Google – so is content still King or are other techniques and practices better placed to help companies move up the organic listings?

Now that Google rules the roost in search engine land – if you’re not on Google you might as well not exist; terms such as ‘I need to Google that’ are now part of our everyday language and often, Bing and Yahoo are left in the dark.

So as Google dominates the search landscape arena and implements its many changes, such as devaluing various link building strategies throughout 2012, many SEOs have since jumped on the content strategy bandwagon.

This sounds sensible I hear you say, but this raises a whole host of questions that we then start to ask ourselves – what content should I create? Where should I post it? Who should I target?

Well, ‘communities’ have long been discussed and we in fact have a well-rounded community within our Facebook, Twitter, blog and forum discussions. So it is clear that having a content strategy is integral in today’s SEO practices as social signals and Google authorship start to affect rankings.

So yes, to this extent, content is in fact King – but can it live without a Queen? In other words can content alone survive in an SEO world? Well, it is a good question. One that has quite often got us thinking about our SEO strategy. With people jumping on the content bandwagon, there’s a danger of falling victim to spam, fake fans and followers and the process of ‘buying’ a community to help build a strategy ultimately defeats the point of it in the first place. Case and point here is when Facebook was recently exposed for the global phenomenon allegedly having 80% of its traffic sent from bots.

I guess what we believe is that yes, content is important, but perhaps ‘community’ is more important. Let’s not forget who we are speaking to, who is interested in our content? Are we saying things that people out in the real-world are going to want to enjoy, because if not – then really what is the point?