When Growing Your Brand, Remember Content is For Users, Not Google

Forbes contributor Neil Patel has an interesting piece up about dominating content marketing in 2015. In it, he takes readers through seven key strategies for employing blog posts, features, articles, and other forms of content for the purpose of building a stronger personal or professional brand. One of Patel’s keener points has to do with search engine optimization (SEO):

“Content is for users. It’s not for search engines or crawlers. It’s all about the users. Before you make a single keystroke of content, make sure that you really know your potential customers — their identity, preferences, interests, and journey. Once you know who you’re marketing at, then you can create content for them. The content that emerges from this knowledge will be far more relevant.”

There was once a time when you could populate your site with buzzword-saturated blog posts that would get eaten up by the major search engines. Patel explains that Google has developed its algorithm to such a sophisticated and specific degree that it now actively ignores content written for SEO while valuing content that better engages with its readers. The longer a user stays on your page, the more engaged the search engine assumes he/she is. Thus, the new secret to SEO is simply to create content that people want to read. Ridiculous concept, huh?

Check out Patel’s full piece (which I think is well worth the read) and let us know what you think.