What is considered SEO-friendly content in 2022? This concept has changed a lot since SEO started.
Have you been keeping up?
How much content do we need for Google to “like” our pages?
Whatever you do, don’t create “fluff” content, says Google’s John Mueller on Twitter, so Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas, and Ann Smarty, IMN’s analyst got together to discuss SEO content optimization in 2022 and also talk about “fluff” content:
We also discuss the article: Google: Fluff Content Hard For Search Engines To Understand & Maybe Rank
What is fluff content?
That is not an easy question. As far as we understand, “fluff” content is text one creates in order to better optimize a page for Google without taking the actual web user into consideration.
In other words, fluff content is content that doesn’t meet search intent and exists mainly to reach a higher word count.
Fluff content exists because at some point SEOs started consolidating their websites and creating those “ultimate” guides which are thousands words long.
There were a series of SEO studies showing that long-form content ranks higher, and SEOs went overboard adding lots of – often irrelevant – content to product pages and category pages that we now see in 2002.
How much content should be on a web page?
Your content needs to be as long as it needs to be to satisfy a certain user intent.
For example, if you are optimizing a product page selling blue widgets, “history of blue widgets” would be fluff content.
Providing useful information helping a user to make up their minds and buy blue widgets is useful content.
There’s no one single rule that you could use to optimize your pages.
As long as you prioritize your target customer and provide useful (and hopefully unique) information, you are good.
How about link building content?
In rare cases you can combine content that targets customers and content that targets links. But it is very rare. In most cases, you will have to create content specifically to get our site linked to.
Whether you target niche experts, journalists or college professors, that link building content needs to keep that target audience in mind.
Conclusion
Content should serve a purpose, and that purpose shouldn’t be “for Google to crawl.” As long as your content serves a customer or a publisher (who can link to it) and it does a good job, don’t think about word count and if that content is enough.
Watch the video: SEO Content Optimization in 2022 with Jim and Ann
