Key Takeaways
Google's Danny Sullivan advocates "People-First Content" for long-term success in content creation.
People who make content are warned not to only use tools that show trending keyword searches.
Good content that helps the readers and is easy to understand is most important for successful content creation. It does not matter where the content ideas came from.
In a recent Twitter interaction, Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, addressed the practice of using trending keyword tools to generate content. He emphasized the importance of creating “People first content”.
Many people who create content online only focus on using popular search words that are "trending" or getting a lot of searches at that time.
They use special tools that tell them what words people are searching for the most. Then they try to make content using those popular words, hoping many people will view it.
Sullivan warned that only making content focused on trending keyword searches is not a good long-term plan. Just stuffing your content with popular words is not enough.
Instead, Sullivan said the key is to make quality content that truly helps the readers understand the topic. The most important thing is putting the needs of the readers first when creating content.
For content to be successful long-term, Sullivan said it needs to:
Be structured and organized in a clear, easy-to-follow way
Provide a smooth, simple experience for the users
Offer helpful value by fully answering what the reader wants to know
If your content meets those standards of high quality, helpfulness, and ease of use, then it has a good chance of success. The exact source of where the initial content ideas came from does not matter as much.
To show what he means, Sullivan responded to someone asking if taking popular answers from the website Reddit and turning them into articles would work well.
Sullivan said whether that approach works depends entirely on whether the resulting articles truly are high quality, well-structured, and valuable for the reader.
If so, then it could be successful. But if not, it won't matter that the ideas originally came from Reddit.
Here is the tweet with the response:
