Apologies for the attention-grabbing title. Couldn’t resist. Everyone knows that people like content, right? And that Google makes sweet, dribbly love to sites with good content. You can’t sneeze without spraying a “content expert” who’ll tell you all about the importance of killer copywriting for ranking.

I alluded the other day to a site I was looking at that is pretty much content free, poorly structured, lacking any real volume or quality in backlinks yet still ranking for some ace keywords bringing in a shedload of targeted traffic and big sales numbers.

Today I was looking at their primary competitor – a massively well known name who rank for any number of insanely competitive one/two word phrases. And guess what? No content, poor structure… etc etc etc.

So content is dead and we should fire our copywriters and spend the money on wine, women and links, right?

But wait! Who ever said $content =$text?

What both these sites have in common is presentation. Their market is all about visuals. So the sites are entirely geared up towards photography. One of them uses video to display its products in a really innovative way. None of this is really indexable stuff – aside from some alt attributes that repeat the product name from the heading tag – and yet if I wrote killer 2000 word post after killer 2000 word post on their product I’d probably never outrank them.

The reason? This stuff is really linkworthy.

It’s a really fast-moving market. Things come and go in the space of a few months and there’s a whole raft of people out there who live for the latest thing. As soon as something hits the shelf, they’re blogging about it to maintain their status as the hippest kid on the block. Where do they source their images? And where do they send their acolytes? Not to anywhere with anything as old-fashioned as words on it.

So content is really king. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that a copywriter is always the place to go for it.