Is the Quality of Your Content Affecting Your Digital Marketing ROI? Scott Hirsch, CEO of Media Direct Explains

Scott O. Hirsch explains that Google is constantly tweaking and improving its algorithms, the quality of your content matters more than ever. The days of keyword stuffing are long over, warns Hirsch. It’s time to focus on providing consistent, accessible value to your customers, emphasizing user experience. Hirsch says that intelligent marketers are paying more attention to quality than quantity in 2021 and beyond.

Is Your Content Relevant? Scott Hirsch, CEO of Media Direct Explains

Relevancy is not just in the eye of the beholder–it’s also vital that you’re writing for SERP rankings, says Hirsch. In the past, “relevancy” meant making sure that specific keywords and LSI keywords appeared in your copy so Google could read and understand how to place it in the rankings. But with the latest BERT release (Google’s Bidirectional Coder Representations from Transformers), Google’s algorithms are now able to determine how natural the language is in your copy.

“In a lot of ways, this should be a relief for marketers,” says Scott Hirsch, CEO, and digital marketing pioneer. “Instead of following a mechanical process to ensure visibility, you can be more creative, more organic. You can start story-telling again!”

This move on Google’s part is designed to improve user experience and is resulting in a demand for higher-quality content across all brands and industries. To enhance your SERP rankings in this brave new world, try:

Original content – no duplicates!
Improving page load time
Focus on limiting Cumulative Layout Shift (by keeping content in a consistent location like a blog)

Improve Your Digital Marketing ROI

Marketing is a notoriously tricky expenditure in which to track your ROI. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half,” said department-store magnate John Wanamaker. And up until the past decade or so, that truism held up.

Luckily, digital marketing is changing that. With the analytics offered by Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, and other social media platforms, you can track and trace consumer behavior and interactions with your digital marketing efforts down to the second. You just have to ensure that you follow a comprehensive and cohesive strategy that encompasses all of your digital marketing efforts.

Use the available data to test your content’s quality and improve it consistently, advises Hirsch. See which pages people stay on the longest, which email campaigns garner the most clicks, and which blogs are the most popular. Then fine-tune your language and quality for user experience and watch those numbers soar!

It’s tempting just to crank out keyword-rich content on whatever subject you can. It’s often cheaper (in time and money) to use this strategy. But you must focus on quality if you want to reap the benefits long-term.

Google’s algorithms will only continue to refine and focus on user experience in the future, Adapt or lose out.