What Is Great Content – The Gas Station Analogy

SEO is nothing more than great content which is organized and structured for easy consumption.

So let’s look into these three items:

content, organization/structure, consumption

What is great content?

This is a very objective question, but I think in terms of this post we’ll stick to what I believe the search engines consider great.

Since search engines cannot read and comprehend text they must rely on other elements to signify quality. Some examples of this could be:

Images
Links
Infographics
Comments
Freshness
Site topic
Frequency
Language
Passion

I’m sure some of you may think why did I add passion if search engines can’t read or comprehend but how could they possibly sense passion.

I think of passion in terms of measuring how well the site meets certain criteria in the way that it names images, titles, links, categories and an overall respect for the visitor in getting the answer to what they looked for.

There probably isn’t much need to go into each of those above examples since doing so may take away from the intent for having engaged dialogue between comments about what they mean. Since giving them a definition may or may not help you, I’d rather hear if you agree with the list.

Let’s look at the organization and structure.

When people visit your site from a search query the visitor was either invited or just happened to be driving by.

Let’s look at each one independently.

Design Websites Like Gas Stations

A new website without an invitation is like a storefront without a name or windows. Its sitting out in the middle of the desert with no roads leading to it, or any indication that somebody is in it.

On the contrary, a storefront out in the desert that has a big sign next to the road with numbers on it like $3.29 could predictably house something you are in need of. Regardless, it takes only a fraction of a second to know what it is and what you can get from it.

Having these identifiable features allows for a pretty predictable experience should you stop. So what I’m getting at here is the gas station is something we see every day in our mind is not have to wonder or determine its purpose.

In addition, gas stations don’t need to seek out their customers because you either need it or you don’t and there’s not much between.

The Internet for example is like a highway with a billion stores along side of it. In the early days of the Internet we relied on others to give us directions, and directories served as maps.

Today we use search engines to find destinations but care little about the path that leads to it. These paths have no explanation other than our brain giving us an impulse that we then act on. The problem with that is that our brains are traveling at speeds that nothing can match.

It’s been known that the human brain contains unexplainable power and resource yet we seek ways to find out how that is.

Structure of Content

If we were to know how our brains were structured to the degree that we knew everything about how they function then we would create everything to follow that structure. The reason being it requires virtually zero effort to understand the gas station, yet the Internet contains exactly the opposite.

Every day we go on the Internet to find information, and instantly we find it. Anything that enters our mind whether we know about it or not we can instantly find.

This has been extraordinarily useful but we’ve underestimated the value of it being structured and have relied on search because there is no structure.

Our minds have become accustomed to search and its infinite path that has no destination. This is why structure of the website is so important that we bring order and purpose to it.

If there was something that actually seem to function like a human brain it could be a search engine. We simply have no understanding of how they classify or organize information, store information, index information we just know it’s there. The brain seems to be just as mysterious as search engines.

So when we land on a website we desperately wish it to be structured. If we land on a website and resort to search than we are likely predicting our answer will be found. For this to be true, we would have to be in a website with tons of content. If your website is not full of content then you must have it structured.

Consumption of Content

As we navigate our searches for information we are presented with a page of choices. We know that if we select one of them we are going to get something entirely unique than what we would’ve gotten should we have selected a different one.

We usually select and consume content that matches almost identically to our queries. We look for words that are similar to the ones that we’ve entered expecting to find out answers. Searching for a SEO tips might have a ton of results which may prompt us to redefine the query to the SEO title tips. If we see a page of results that contain the Seo title examples, SEO title suggestions, SEO title ideas, a SEO title tricks, we could click on any of these but the one that had our query in the description tag would get the click.

This is likely due to the fact we have found not only our answer but an extension related to our answer that could give us an even deeper understanding of what we’re looking for and potentially new ways to search for.

So if we understand how we crave information and guidance from relevant terms we can develop a content that fits with the processes that we consume it.

What we just went over was an in-depth look into the three elements of what might represent remarkable content in the way that our brains in the search engines might consider to be accurate. The next step is to figure out how we can utilize this information in order to ensure our content has these needed elements.

You can read our next post which covers the actual steps we use to create it and most importantly structure it into specific collections so that when someone sees your website it’s like seeing something as simple as a gas station so that when they come in it’s for a purpose. But when they leave, they leave with something that they intended to receive by stopping by.