Can we talk about the 'content is king' mantra in SEO?

I heard a speaker at a virtual meetup say 'content is king' is an excuse for bad technical work, and honestly, after fixing a site's crawl budget last week, I think he had a point. Has anyone else seen a site rank better just from fixing basic issues, not just writing more?

4 comments

4 Comments

evan_campbell93mo ago

Fix the basics first, but that doesn't mean content is just an excuse. It's all one big job, right?

adam4141mo ago

Hold up, 40%? Just from broken links and a sitemap? That's wild, I'm honestly having a hard time wrapping my head around that number. Ngl it makes me wonder how many other sites out there are sitting on a goldmine of traffic they can't even access because the basics are that busted. It's not even that complicated to fix a sitemap, it's like basic housekeeping. But I guess that's the point, people get so caught up in writing posts they forget to check if the pipes are leaking. Makes you think about all the work that goes into fixing stuff nobody ever sees or thanks you for.

robin8963mo ago

Watching people chase shiny new content while their site is held together with digital duct tape is always a treat. It's like adding a fancy new coat of paint to a car with no engine. Sure, the blog post is great, but Google's little bots can't even find it to read it. That traffic jump Murray mentioned doesn't surprise me at all. The basics aren't sexy, but they're the floor, and you can't put furniture in a house with no floor.

murray.pat3mo ago

Absolutely. Saw a client's traffic jump 40% just by fixing a bunch of broken internal links and cleaning up their sitemap. The new blog posts they were pushing did nothing until the site was actually crawlable.