Original Content: Quality Over Quantity
Content that can’t pass Panda is possibly the number one thing that we see killing rankings and eventually killing sites altogether. In this section we are going to be blunt, and probably destroy every idea you’ve ever had or been taught about writing content. To be a killer SEO, it means being able to adapt and change to stay ahead of Google’s whims and updates. If you can’t get old ways of doing things out of your head, and you can’t follow tested instructions because they don’t match up with what you’ve always done, you probably want to find a different job.
It doesn’t matter what you think of your own content. Just like you think your content is completely original and brilliant, that chick with the butterfly tramp-stamp thinks she’s original too.
From a SEO perspective, it isn’t original unless it can pass a Panda Copy/Paste Test. This means that cheaply outsourcing writing articles, writing just to fill space, and having a huge website are all out of the game. You cannot skimp on writing quality content anymore. Panda analyzes each and every paragraph it can find.
To keep content original, make it short, sweet, and to the point. There is no need for an article over 800 words, and our top ranking sites never go above 600 now. If you have that much to say about something, save it to use later. Break it up into multiple posts. Make it easy on yourself. Remember that at some point in this business you will end up with a subject that you have to write about time and time again. Making the articles shorter leaves you with room to spread things out and keeps you away from Panda penalties.
A method we adapted that is beneficial to us is writing from perspectives. For example, if you are promoting Viagra, you can write articles from the male perspective, from the female perspective, from a doctor’s perspective, a skeptic’s perspective, a warning perspective, a “miracle” perspective, an employee of the company who was skeptical of the product until they tried it’s perspective, etc. Get creative. This is real marketing anyway. RCS all the way.
Most SEOs think “I need content, let me outsource it.” They write a job description, “10 unique articles about Viagra. Must pass Copyscape.” They get their 10 unique articles, and all pass Copyscape. But all of the articles are essentially rewritten Wikipedia, WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and other random sources. These cheap outsourcers write like your site is an encyclopedia. Your awful encyclopedia-ish website won’t get an original content credit from Google.
Newsflash: Google is smarter than you.
The same is true for news-ish sites. Posting stories like a journalist, without actually being journalistic or having that authority of a large news site, will result in Panda penalties. You can’t take a feed and tell an outsourcer to write about it and make it original. Most outsourcers will write about it like factual reporters. At the very least, they need to have a perspective and an angle to make it unique. How else can they possibly say anything new about that story? They’re just copying everyone else, which is duplicate content as far as Panda is concerned.
I have an e-commerce site, what can I do with products?
Does it compete with Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc.? Are you using product data feeds or manufacturer descriptions? You have to stop. We heard that Walmart has a team of 40 people that write content full-time. How are you going to compete with that? Even if they have awful content, they have the authority to take the original content source for it in most cases.
If you have a specialty area (like some members of this forum) that you resell for, you need to use your expertise of those products. The most classic thing to do is target reviews.
For example, you have a store selling car audio products because you actually know that industry inside-out. You first must determine what you want to rank for – where the actual money terms are. This should be decided by PPC testing. Let’s assume that generic keywords like “car audio” are awful for conversion, that people are actually looking for specific brands or models. We’ll use “Pioneer Car Audio” and specifically, “Pioneer fh-x700bt” which receives 4,400 searches per month.
Your structure should be laid out as such:
YourCarAudioSite.com
The dream keyword that won’t make you much money but gives you a lot of traffic is the target, car audio.
YourCarAudioSite.com/Pioneer-Car-Audio/
You will do a ton of link building here, and give this page the authority. Write an article from your expert perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of Pioneer, maybe give it a review, and write about how quickly customer service responds to requests, etc. Don’t just post information you can Google. Do some real research. Call the company. Find out what the knock-offs are like. Find out when new products are released, how often they’re released, etc. Do some original things about the brand that nobody else has.
YourCarAudioSite.com/Pioneer-Car-Audio/fh-x700bt/
Treat this as a real review. If you can make a video of the product, do it. Do NOT paste the product specifications that anyone can just Google. By this point the customer probably knows what the specs are anyway. If you want product specs, create a /info/ page, and block Google from /info/ or noindex it. Talk about why this unit is something you wouldn’t want. Talk about how it works with iPhone, Android, and Windows phones. Pretend you are writing for a magazine doing a feature on a product. That is what it takes to have original content.
Do a small bit of link building to this page. If you built the /Pioneer-Car-Audio/ page up, this one should take very few links to rank well. And this is how you approach your campaigns, you create very few pages, focus on Hummingbird, get about a dozen links per page and you keep building. Doing this you will start to dominate and start to rank for some killer keywords and traffic will start building to the point where you get that “ramp” graph of your traffic that looks like a rocket ship taking off.