SEO Content Revolution Question

[OOMDODigital]

I was wondering if articles written about questions people are asking will help my website rank better.

For example let's say I wrote an article answering the query, "What Hair Dye Does Angela Merkel Use?" or, "Is Hillary Clinton Thinking of Running for President," and they rank well on google, and in turn they get viewed a lot by searchers because it answers their queries. Would this help my website as whole start ranking better?

Thanks!

[TomRayner]

Hi there

Everything that Google has told us so far indicates that Analytics stat, such as click through rates, time on site, bounce rate etc. do not have an affect on organic rankings.  Here is the video on the topic from a (bald-headed) Matt Cutts.

Now, you should always take those videos with a pinch of salt, but I inclined to believe that views/time on site etc. do not fundamentally improve your chances of ranking.

However, those kind of articles you are writing about - informational, relevant, contextual articles - are exactly the kind of content that can rank for core terms.  I have on multiple occasions seen websites rank for a term, let's say "blue widgets", by producing a landing page with the title "what are blue widgets" and then information about it.  If you throw in the proposed changes in the hummingbird update, you'd expect content like this to do even better.

So, getting pages on your site with a lot of views will not fundamentally "improve" your domain's SEO, as it were.  But writing content like the kind you mentioned is a great way to improve your SEO anyway.

Hope these links help.

[ProductPearson]

We do this all the time on SearchBuzz. It doesn't always work, and you will find other sites ranking above you even if they only have one word in them related to the question, but then their whole site is filled with other related content. I am of course competing against the tabloids and major news sites, so it rarely works but when it does.. oh boy is the traffic good...

[OOMDODigital]

Thanks for your help guys!

[KaneJamison]

In the past, page titles, structured as questions have done reasonably well since they were often close to the query typed by many users.

In the future, however, I'd expect to see the following 2 broad changes:

• Knowledge graph answers to more popular and basic questions (meaning it's not worth much time to create these types of pages).
• Hummingbird changes to how queries are answered. From what I've read it appears that part of Hummingbird was about better analyzing the structure and meaning of queries, rather than simply matching keywords. To me that would suggest that the page types you're talking about will be less and less valuable.

Because of that, I wouldn't dedicate as much time to these types of content as I would have a couple years ago. Harder questions or Q&A type content will always have it's place, however.

Getting back to your question of "Would [having pages ranked that get lots of views] help my website as whole start ranking better?", I'd say yes, but not simply because the pages are ranking. It's more likely that they'd attract some links and social shares for the site (assuming they're decent quality pages), which would provide more benefit. That said, I'd only spend time on content that's closely matched with the topic of the rest of your site - creating these random pages won't add much benefit if they're not related to the rest of the site.