The era of search engine optimization has created entire industries that revolve around the goal of attracting more attention and traffic to websites. It can be very easy to become infatuated with the aesthetic and technical considerations of SEO, as search engines continue to demand more and more from us in terms of optimization standards and routines. Great content has increasingly become a prerequisite in order for SEO to have value, but many fail to realize just how important said content is to performance. There are many instances in which quality content can be its own SEO package. Below, we’ll talk about how great content can in many ways generate its own traffic without any additional engagement.

The Web is Living

In years past, it was necessary to customize various elements of a website in order to ensure that it was properly indexed and documented. From keywords that helped search engines determine what your site was about, to web crawling techniques that ensured search engines could find you in the first place, there was a lot of basic technical coordination. Today, however, many of these considerations are either automatic or lessened. Pinging search engines with tons of indicators is less necessary than ever, as search engines can easily find most websites due to the built-in SEO compliance in most content management systems like WordPress. Additionally, the use of concepts such as RSS feeds, pings and contextual understanding of content by search engines helps make the web seem almost alive.

Content Connects

Search engines do an excellent job of indexing content and displaying it in relevant searches. Because of this, additional optimizations are sometimes unnecessary. With search engines now more capable than ever before of determining user intent, it is very easy for quality content creators to ensure that their offerings will be found in search. Keyword optimization still remains a topic of conversation among those seeking to optimize SEO, but literally dozens of different short-tail and long-tail keyword combinations can be generated from just one piece of quality content. Pinging search engines with content that aims to please and successfully informs will provide much more benefit than all of the finer tweaks of SEO combined.

Content Spreads and Inspires

Once you have created and published enough quality content, you will begin to observe that overall traffic levels continue to increase with time. This not only has to do with search engines providing more traffic via more SERPs, but it also relates to other blogs and websites – as well as social media – producing links and quotes to and of your content. Those valuable backlinks and mentions via blogs and social media help to drive additional traffic to your website in ways that search engines might never provide. Quality content can be the best way to ensure that your traffic sources are diverse enough to survive even the worst of downgrades during a Google algorithm change. In many respects, content creation seeks to fulfill a goal of brand immortality: a dynamic in which no one source can make or break your overall reach. Quality content helps to guarantee that people are finding your content from multiple sources.