A Case for Content Marketing: The Google Reason

A Case for Content Marketing: The Google Reason:
I attended the Google Women Entrepreneurial and Tech Clinic that had been organized by Google Kenya. The company sought to teach and sensitise the rising female entrepreneurs on its products and how the women could utilise Google products to build, communicate, collaborate and grow their businesses.
As the presentations went on, I kept wondering how Google is influencing and affecting how businesses are changing their marketing activities to fit in the Google mode.
Google over the years has tweaked and updated its search, indexing and ranking to reflect on the changing trends that skew in favour to the consumers.
How do businesses take advantage of such changes to maximize and expose their products and services at a grand scale?
Once upon a time…
For those who have been online longer will remember the era of black hat, shady link baiting, spammy links and commenting, and a plethora of ethical and unethical tactics that were used to appear top in SERPs. Every search conducted presented content from various content farms that churned out keyword heavy articles forcing searchers to wade through the SERPs to find relevant news. It was indeed frustrating to be presented with such poor results.
This was not only annoying to the searchers, but unfair to businesses that dedicated resources in creating valuable content to its readers.
…new beginnings
This fairy-tale story was short-lived as Google sought to weed out tonnes of useless content and present its users with relevant content that met their ‘Googling’ needs. These updates affect SEO, content serving and ranking ultimately affecting the bottom-line.
I guess you are asking; how do these changes from the world’s largest search engine affect your online marketing efforts?
Google Caffeine

Source: Google Image

Previously, it took sometime for new content posted on a website or blog to appear in the search results. This meant, heavily keyword pages and blogs always appeared in the magical top ten. It didn’t matter if the content was relevant or mindless boggle; the fact is that it took Google sometimes to index and update its ranking.
In 2010, Google updated this oversight in its indexing policy and launched caffeine that was 50% faster and fresher in displaying content much sooner after it was published.
Lesson: In Google’s words, “Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish”. This means that website owners need to produce newer, fresher content often enabling their websites to be indexed frequently. Are you updating your website frequently?
Google Panda
In Feruary 2011, Google updated its search algorithm to weed out poor, weak articles/content from the top of the SERPs and display content that was relevant to searchers. With Panda update, it forced web owners to come up with fresh, relevant content to display to its target audiences. Google sought to reward high-quality sites by offering them a slot in the top of the search results. Well, as you guessed it, the low-quality sites we pushed at the bottom of the search results.
Lesson: It not just enough to produce content that Caffeine will index faster, but the content needs to be original, relevant, compelling and engaging to your readers.
Click here for a Panda infographic.
Google Social Search
The unprecedented explosion of social media and networks cannot be underestimated. Sooner than later, updates from these sites were bound to appear on SERPs.
First introduced in 2009 and revamped in early 2011, Google sought to pull what your social connection were updating, blogging and tweeting about. In Google’s view, they hoped to aggregate such results into one place.
Lesson: Create content that is sharable across the web. Remember to endeavour and make your content viral; seek to recruit an army of fans, followers and circles to share your content. In this case, quantity is good, quality is better and engagement is best.
Search, Plus Your World
Rolled out early this year, this update is a turbo charged Google Social Search update that seeks not only understand what and how of content but also the relationships revolving around people sharing content.
From the Google blog, the search giant has introduced three new features in its revamped turbo charge social search to include;

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in auto-complete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Read more

Lesson: Let your digital advocates help you spread the gospel according to your business. Give them easy methods and means of sharing your content across the web.
Above-the-fold (Page Layout) Algorithm
Ever landed on a web page from Google, only to find acres of ads at the top forcing you to scroll all the way down to find content? Well, pop the champagne as Google’s recent update seeks to penalizes such web pages that have an affinity for placing annoying ads above the fold.
Please note that Google understands these types of ads perform better but their bone of contention are those sites that cram their site with huge blocks of ads. They actually acknowledge pages with a normal degree of such ads will not be affected. Website owners will need to be strategic on how they place ads above the fold.
Lesson: Having relevant ads above-the-fold is not bad, but seek to offer friendlier user experience. Don’t make your readers red in the face as they search for that piece of content.
Over-SEO’d Content
Google is set to roll out an update in the near future to its algorithm on overly SEO’d blogs and websites. This means it will further stamp out keyword ridden content that is written for search, and reward content that is driven and produced by what people want.
Lesson: Remember to write for your readers, portraying your messages in a humanly voice. Just imagine you are talking with your reader face-to-face.

Takeaway
One takeaway from the clinic was from Joe Mucheru, Regional Lead Sub-Saharan Africa at Google during his opening remarks. According to him, if you want to work online, “Content is the way to go” summing up with 4 Be;

1. Be Found
2. Be Relevant
3. Be Accountable
4. Be Engaging

From the updates stated above, it’s clear that, if marketers and web owners want to WIN in the online space, then, content marketing is the best option.
Have the updates affected your website’s rankings? Share with us.