As a WordPress developer specializing in SEO, there’s one question I hear more often than any other: “How can I get more people to visit my website?”

When talking about website traffic from an SEO perspective, we are referring to organic traffic. There are other kinds of web traffic, but organic traffic — visitors to your site who were site sent by a search engine — is traffic we can improve using a group of techniques known broadly as search engine optimization or SEO.

SEO is a long-term, continuous process of making one’s website more attractive to Google and the other search engines so that it might place higher in search results. Higher placement in search results equates to more visitors, which equates to more leads, greater brand awareness, and potentially more revenues. SEO optimization includes researching and employing keywords, optimizing titles, improving your site’s performance, and so on.

There is one SEO activity, however, that stands out as producing the most bang for your buck in terms of SEO, and that is creating content. To be fair, content is less an SEO strategy or technique than it is a prerequisite, but many website owners will dive into SEO with very little content on their site, meaning the SEO has nothing to work with and is a wasted effort. For that reason I include content creation as the first and most important step in an SEO strategy.

The easiest way to create valuable, high-quality content, especially in WordPress, is to write a blog.

As a new website owner, a blog may not have even been on your radar, let alone your website plan. I get it. I know this advice sounds outdated. Blogging was trendy about 20 years ago and may no longer be hip or fashionable.

Trending or not, however, content is still king. People go on the internet to find information or answer a question. Content is how you can provide that to them. Your web content can consist of videos if you’re a vlogger, or a portfolio if you’re an artist/photographer, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be called a blog (a consultant might call that section of their site “Case Studies” for instance). For most people, however, the best way to create content is by writing and publishing stories in the Blog section of your website, which WordPress makes extremely easy.

Technical SEO methods can be undertaken without a lot of content, or concurrent with creating content, but you will need to make content a top and ongoing priority. SEO is in service to the content, and all the SEO in the world won’t matter if there isn’t content for Google and other search engines to recommend when people search for your chosen keywords.

• Keywords are created from content.
• Content inspires backlinks.
• Content drives user engagement.
• Fresh content = frequent indexing.
• Content builds expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T). E-A-T is the framework Google invented to evaluate the quality of web pages.

When we talk about technical SEO — page and image optimization, keyword targeting, backlinks, and the user experience (UX) — content is the common thread tying everything together. It is the clay that technical SEO transforms into a sculpture. To convince search engines of your website’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness for a given topic or keyword, you will need an ample supply of clay.

While there are many types of content—videos, infographics, podcasts, to name a few—blogging remains one of the most accessible and effective formats for SEO. Blogs offer a unique blend of flexibility, scalability, and effectiveness. Here’s why blogging is the form of content that works best with SEO:

• It encourages long-form, in-depth content.
• It provides a natural framework for linking.
• It is a great way to build community.
• It is versatile and can be repurposed and used across platforms. A single blog post can be part of a series on your website, republished to other websites, excerpted or quoted in other stories, form the basis for a YouTube video or inspire an infographic, or be used as a chapter in a self-published book.

A lot of content is preferable to only a little content, but in the fight between quality and quantity, quality wins, so spend extra time making your content stand out.

Quality content has the following characteristics:

• It solves a problem or answers a question. This goes to user intent, which is almost always to solve a problem or answer a question.
• It is well researched and thorough. Comprehensive answers are favored by search engines.
• It is engaging and easy to read. Short paragraphs, use of all the different formatting options, the important information front loaded in the story.
• It is unique or different. Strive for writing that is from a fresh perspective or that offers new insights on an old topic.

While other aspects of SEO, such as technical optimization and mobile responsiveness, are important, they only serve to support the foundation that quality content creates. By investing time and resources into blogging, and then using an SEO strategy to get that content noticed by Google, you’ll prepare your website for success.