Why Content For SEO Has Been King Since 1995

There is a little secret about SEO that almost everyone knows but almost no one truly realizes. Quality content is and has always been the #1 factor in gaining rank online.  So many people in life want a shortcut to everything.  96% of the people in the world expect or look for a shortcut, this includes ranking for keywords in the SEO industry.

So many people try to cheat by building link-building schemes, link pyramids, spun content, spam tactics, clicking on competitors’ paid ads, and copying other sites’ content. Buying into cheap link building and content creation ‘packages’ from overseas.  When you really look at it, it’s almost comical. The amount of time that people and even most SEO ‘professionals’ spend trying to ‘cheat’ the system, in that time they could have been gaining real rank, learning real new information, and doing real research, instead of spending their time learning how to be better cheaters.

Cheaters in the end will almost always get busted. Investing in a scheme or cheap service might run the chance of immediate results but it ends up in long-term failure.

SEO Has Never Changed, People Have

Jill Whalen, one of my personal SEO heroes, wrote a guide over 15 years ago about SEO, talking about how content is king. That guide is still 100% true and accurate today. Real SEO has never changed. The only thing that changes is the efforts and tactics people have developed to cheat the system and the effort Google and Bing have developed to prevent it.

The true giants of their industries have withstood the ages because they provide ‘quality content’. Not a bunch of fluff overstuffed with keywords whose sole purpose and intention is to get those keywords ranked to shove a service or product in someone’s face. Stuff like that doesn’t get ranked these days.

In 2013 Google Busted Most Of The SEO Cheaters

In 2013 when Google came out with the Penguin update, the update that took out 80% of the SEO companies on the internet (who were all cheating, usually due to SEnuke, an automatic program that cost about $300 a month and got results in weeks and the SEO company could charge 10 times that amount), no SEO person wanted to go through the grueling effort (but actually very rewarding) of doing real SEO research and writing.

Only 4-6% Of SEO Companies Actually Provide Real Value

To this day, I would say only about 4-6% of SEO companies actually provide real value for the cost, for their customers. Some successful SEO companies rely on numbers and luck instead of skill. If they get 100 new customers and 90 drop out in the first 3 months because they got nothing from it, and 10 stays, the SEO company wouldn’t flinch since it was all automated anyway, it was 90% profit and the 10 that stayed are likely staying because ‘business just happened to be good and they assume the SEO is working’ or the automatic system got lucky with these 10.

Doing Real SEO Research & Writing Is Barely Profitable

Real SEO research and writing quality content are not profitable enough for a company to do a truly good job.  Big SEO companies have to pay for the building lease, the sales person’s commission, supplies, phones, electricity, the owner’s own salary, accounting, etc… at the end of the day, only 10% of the customers’ money is actually going toward the service, and that service is usually from some guy making $13 who could or might be just an intern with minimal training.

Some “SEO” companies will simply create a Google map listing or do some basic SEO re-writing of a few titles in the website, maybe some content editing, and because of that you get ranked well in some small city under 45,000 population, and the customer is happy enough with that to just keep paying the SEO bill every month, even though no work is being done for up to years. That’s wrong, in my opinion.

There Can Be Only One #1

There is only one #1 spot in Google search results. If you think paying some company in India $300 a month, or using some cheap service like web.com or yellowpages.com, is going to get you there, you’re definitely wrong. The market is getting steeper by the day.  First-page real estate for keywords is getting saturated and finding a quality company to do real content that actually educates, interests, and entertains readers, as well as being optimized intelligently for good keywords… is now rare.