The clue is in the title, good content isn’t enough for Google, yet millions of businesses don’t realise it.
The Google Core Update in August 2024 placed even greater emphasis on the importance of high-quality and original content. Google even said they’d be looking to increase the visibility of such content published by smaller creators. However, the statement is misleading. Good content isn’t enough for Google if you don’t address something that millions of websites suffer from – your website structure.
The house analogy for websites
I’ve published several blogs to give guidance on the type of content Google wants to see. You could deploy the techniques and increase your website visibility and rankings. Unfortunately, you could also find that very little changes. It wouldn’t be because I’d given you poor advice (although you’d expect me to say that).
I’ve mentioned an analogy related to wasted content in the past. It is apt now. You can build the most impressive house in the world, but if you don’t build paths and roads to it, with adequate signage, nobody is ever going to see it. More importantly though, you need strong foundations for any house.
Defining website content
I’d like to define ‘content’ now. When I write about content, I’m not just referring to blog posts. Nor am I only talking about primary pages on a website, such as your About Us page. Content can be anything from blogs to service pages and, often ignored, product pages. It is, ultimately, everything on your website.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that businesses don’t recognise this. They often see content as being a blog post, or paragraphs on a page that describes one of their services. Ultimately, content is everything you have on your website. It all needs the same care and attention.
Surprisingly, to me at least, the amount of time put into content of different types varies enormously.
Product content
Products are one of the best examples of this. I see countless examples of products created with an image, a reasonably basic title, and a one-line description.
Yes, you’ll see some sites with brilliantly curated descriptions, but they’re not the norm. Products appear to suffer from what I call the CBB syndrome – Can’t Be Bothered.
I understand why this happens, particularly when the staff member inputting the products wants to get a job done quickly. They bang the products in and that’s that. They might have time pressures or be unaware of the need to think about their audience and how the product will be found.
The common product problem
This is even more the case if the product is available elsewhere. It isn’t unusual to find hundreds of products online from major brands where the retailer has used the same description on the product page. Nike or Adidas running shoes are a great example, sold through thousands of websites.
There is often no differentiating factor whatsoever. Actually, there is, and it comes down to the purpose of this blog – it is the way the product information is presented to Google.
Website foundations for SEO
The point is that even if you followed every step of best practice, curated the most incredible original and high-quality content on Earth, if your website structure and foundations aren’t solid, you could be wasting your time.
I say “could” because there is a chance that exceptional, or every heavily shared, content will surface and rank well. Google puts a lot of emphasis on the sharing and backlinking to pages, but you’d still not be receiving the amount of visibility you could be if the website isn’t structured as well as it might be, or the content isn’t presented in the way Google prefers.
Modern website platforms
Website platforms have changed beyond recognition from 10 years ago. If you’re running an e-commerce site, you’re probably using one of the big platforms. Shopify, Adobe Commerce (Magento), WordPress (via Woocommerce), Umbraco, Wix, PrestaShop and others now make the process of getting your e-commerce site online very easy.
They also bring a lot of structure that could have previously been a major sticking point.
Platform themes and SEO structure
However, there’s a perception trap in using those platforms. They will present your product pages in a very structured way to Google and other search engines. It is a structure that is probably far better than ever before. Alas, that doesn’t mean it is perfect, far from it.
They rely on themes for their design and many of those themes create issues that a business is unaware of.
SEO issues with platform themes
Then you to add in the ability for businesses, or their web designers, to amend and add to those themes. When this is done, you’d be astonished how many SEO issues can be introduced.
I use the same example every time I speak about this – the Dawn theme on Shopify. This is one of the most used themes on the planet, especially since it replaced Shopify’s original Debut theme.
It makes a mess of presenting the H1 field to Google, marking the site logo as a H1 tag. It then applies a H1 tag to any other Title field you add as a section.
If you don’t understand what that means, it equates to something that Google gets confused by and changes the view it takes on your content. It reduces the potential visibility of the page. It is, frankly, a farce. There is a way to get over the issue, but most businesses are unaware of the problem. If you’re interested, and use Shopify and the Dawn theme, have a look at my blog about Shopify header tag changes.
WordPress themes and SEO
This is one of probably millions of issues on major platforms, across tens of thousands of themes, and that’s just taking e-commerce sites into account. WordPress is no different and that powers 40% of the websites on the internet.
It relies on themes too, and they’re often littered with elements that Google would prefer to be delivered differently.
The cumulative effect of SEO
I haven’t even got started on website hosting. Again, I’ve blogged about this in the past – it matters to SEO. The blog was SEO and Web Hosting.
Google recently mentioned that businesses and website owners shouldn’t get too wrapped up in what it calls Core Web Vitals. To those outside of the world of web and SEO, that means a set on basic metrics such as your website page loading speed, how accessible it is (text size, font colours, etc) and several other factors. I find Google’s statement to be rather disingenuous.
I understand why they tell people not to lose sleep about Core Web Vitals, but the fact is that they’re one of hundreds of factors that have a cumulative impact on your website visibility – so you should pay attention to them.
Unfortunately, when Google tell people not to be too concerned about something, it tends to lead to the ‘something’ being completely ignored (when that isn’t their intention and I wish they’d rephrase how they comment at times).
Plugins, apps and SEO
Then we come to one of my pet favourites – plugins or apps. These are the fuel of so many websites today, adding essential or useful features to websites at the click of a button behind the scenes.
I’ll give an example – an app on WordPress that lets you format a contact form, introducing nicer design features and customisable fields. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of websites use this type of app and they’re very useful.
Again, they can introduce problems in how Google reads your site. The goal of the developer of the app wasn’t to think about your SEO, it was to give you as many neat features as they could in order for you to install the app and upgrade to their “Premium’ version, paying them a fee to do so.
Businesses or web designers install this type of app on a page and give no real thought to what it might have done to their SEO.
An example in this case is that it has probably slowed the page load time down for a start, and that might not be a big problem on a Contact page. But, what if the website puts the form on all the product pages too?
You’d be surprised how many companies do this, because they want to encourage interaction. A form on product pages is a Call To Action and potentially a useful addition from UX/UI (User Experience/User Interface) perspective. Do that across 50, 100 or 500 products and I can assure you the implications are far larger than you might anticipate.
It isn’t the only issue that apps and plugins can generate from an SEO perspective, there are many others.
Google won’t penalise all SEO issues
Google will ignore a lot of issues. Even some of those mentioned above aren’t going to cripple your visibility and rankings.
The key is that you’ll come across a phrase in SEO that you should treat very seriously – cumulative effect. SEO is the cumulative effect of hundreds of factors.
That’s why understanding your website foundation, structure, and how all these elements are presented to Google is critical. Bit by bit, piece by piece, poor structure, layout and presentation of content to Google will reduce your chances of the optimum visibility your content might otherwise get.
Established websites and cumulative issues
The older a website is, and the longer it has had content created without addressing any structural issues, the worse the issues can get. Imagine having an e-commerce site that has functioned for 3 years with thousands of products added, then removed (but still indexed), new products added, etc. Google has indexed all of those products and has a view of your website based on them. If the website has structural issues, the cumulative effect and view Google has won’t be great.
This applies to blog articles – what if you’ve written hundreds of blogs over the years, each with a poor format and containing the same repeated errors? Google has, almost certainly, not given the visibility to those blogs that you could have otherwise had.
Wider scope of SEO implications
Your website domain authority could be lower than it otherwise would have been. The backlinks to your site might be less than they could have been, because the blogs haven’t been seen or linked to by the volume of people they could have reached. The implications of poor structure are far reaching.
Identifying and repairing SEO issues
An SEO audit can identify issues. I have audited sites that have had upwards of 1 million issues. You might sneer or laugh at that figure and think I’m saying it for effect, but it is a genuine case. Sites of 200,000+ issues are commonplace. Some of these problems might be small elements and repairing one part of a site could alleviate 100,000 of them – but the fact is that you need to know they’re there in the first instance.
The reason I offer an SEO repair service is because not everyone wants to engage in a monthly retained SEO service. It can resolve huge issues for businesses. That said, monthly retained SEO services (and I don’t mean just from me, this isn’t a PR stunt!), are the more reliable method of ensuring your site doesn’t build up large amounts of structural problems.
Feedback
I’m open to comments and feedback on the blogs I write. I’ll always try to respond and welcome different opinions and insights.
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