Are you passing up easy possibilities to increase the SEO of your content? Keep track of these seven SEO improvements.
Every marketer will tell you that developing high-quality content is difficult, and obtaining page views, shares, and conversions is much more difficult.
However, valuable, entertaining, and easy-to-find material is essential for effective digital strategy — so where do we begin?
In this arena, defining high-quality is largely about balancing two things: the art of writing itself and the approach to efficiency.
Before publishing any material for your company’s website, it should be viewed via an SEO lens.
Using a search lens in conjunction with your content strategy helps to guarantee that the material you develop not only supports the customer journey (the beginning point for your content strategy), but also provides cost efficiencies.
How?
Focusing on SEO from the start may help you get higher Google Adwords rankings. This leads in reduced cost-per-click (CPC) rates for sponsored search marketing, for example, and cost reductions are something the C-suite always appreciates.
In this post, we’ll discuss seven strategies to help you get the most out of your content.
Ensure Excellent Content and Structure
It is all about preparing to ensure quality content.
Do your homework beforehand.
Consider what your consumer wants to know and where you are in the process (the expert who can provide them value). Determine what you want to communicate, as well as where, when, and how your consumers will interact, and then lay out your strategy.
An editorial calendar is a terrific tool to become and remain organised. Pivots will be required in the present consumer market due to the rapid shift, but that is no excuse not to prepare.
Once you’ve created a content schedule, you’ll want to set your authors up for success.
A useful common practise to take is to create detailed content briefs that define the user intent or enquiry you’re attempting to solve.
Process, backed up by clear and defined roles and duties, is also vital here.
Subject matter specialists are not often writers; writers may be terrific editors, but self-editing is difficult. In short, make sure you have a publishing strategy in place that allows your employees to perform what they do best.
Information comes in various forms, and providing content in a number of formats can allow you to reach a larger audience.
Check out this post for 100 different forms of content you may write (with examples).
Aside from format, your structure should be basic and intuitive; an introduction, followed by a body (containing the primary material), and a conclusion sets the norm.
Consider the news approach to content: Say what you’re going to speak (introduction), then tell it (body), and then say what you said (conclusion).
Show Your Layout Some Love
You’ve thought about structure, but have you addressed the visual experience?
Visual diversity is an important component of high-quality communications across platforms and channels.
From text style and whitespace utilisation to headers, paragraphs, and pictures, consider your customer’s visual experience.
Cleanly formatted graphs and headers assist readers skim through information, and the usage of subheadings throughout will further ease navigation for your reader.
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A decent clean layout will support the intuitive structure you’ve previously designed.
But, no matter how much you like the appearance of a new phrase on a new line, a sentence does not equal a paragraph! Each paragraph should address a particular concept or issue, keeping things succinct and connecting out for more on the topic whenever possible (more on links later!).
From an image standpoint, the recommendation is straightforward: use them.
A picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps a bar chart, a graph, a process diagram, a statement of exceptional relevance given attention via varying font size and script… You get the idea.
In brief, utilise visuals to assist clarify issues and to break up text-heavy information.
Make careful to optimise any photographs you utilise. Here are a few basic pointers:
Include alternative text: Alt text not only improves accessibility for consumers who use assistive screen readers, but it also helps search engines recognise material on your website.
Apply logic to your picture filenames: Image filenames should be understandable and straightforward. They may also be used as alt text.
Size does matter: You want to make your site basic and nimble so that your pages load fast. Keep your photos at 500 KB and page sizes under 5 MB.
Optimize Properly
Of course, images aren’t the only aspect of your website that need optimization.
The previously defined structure and layout allow for a plethora of optimization possibilities and the appropriate types.
Google issued the Panda update in 2011 with the goal of removing black hat SEO practises.
That’s a lengthy tale. Click through for a description of why, what we know about the algorithm, and a detailed history.
However, the short explanation is that black hat SEO strategies try to enhance a site’s or page’s position in search engines by breaching search engine restrictions (think dirty tricks like invisible text for a simple example).
There’s no need to be tricky when it comes to the correct forms of optimization.
You’re on the correct road if you concentrate on optimising your site information (think site title, site description, page descriptions, and page and title forms).
You want to keep things simple and straightforward. Fifty to 300 characters should convey a meaningful, accessible explanation of the site’s content and each of the pages using basic and relevant phrases.
Length is another important issue for SEO, and not only inside your site’s information sections.
Google like lengthier content, but remember that your consumer should be at the core of your approach, so consider their demands and go from there.
We’d recommend a minimum of 300 words for a subject, which may easily be expanded to a 1,000-word piece. What you don’t want is anything that is so lengthy that it drives readers away.
Nobody wants to read 2,000 words of keyword-stuffed padding (and, once again, Google will not reward you). Your material should be valuable to the reader and appropriate for your objective.
Use the Correct Keywords and Topical Alliance
Do your research on keywords.
SEO insights are the finest real-time depiction of your customer’s voice, thus keyword research is essential before you begin writing.
Users search for a variety of reasons.
You may improve your search results by understanding what phrases your audience is looking for and the purpose behind their search.
You should utilise a combination of long-tail keywords and head phrases.
Long-tail keywords meet searcher intent while having a low search volume, low competition, and good conversion.
Head terms, on the other hand, are prominent search phrases that reflect a wide subject.
Going back to our prior optimization remarks, employing concentrated keywords in conjunction with simple substitutions and related phrases is an easy victory.
Search engine algorithms evaluate the subject of your material by detecting its keywords, connected synonyms, and related phrases (recalling Panda here – it’s simply about ensuring that the stuff you’ve created has genuine value).
Consider this more of an ingredient list than a recipe. Your ingredient list may have all of the search keywords you want, but it will not get dinner produced without accompanying directions, while your step-by-step recipe is the material that delivers genuine value to the reader, providing much-needed context.
Check out Google’s tips on how to utilise keywords effectively.
And if you’re seeking for additional information about search intent, we’ve got you covered.
A brief reminder: Search intent is all about concentrating on the why (informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional).
So, by initially doing broad keyword research and then attempting to understand how the content you’re creating will meet the demands of your users, you’ll be better positioned to maximise value (both for your customer and your Adword budget).
Understanding intent and combining it with other keyword variables such as search volume, CPC, and difficulty will allow you to offer up the correct content at the right time.
How?
Take notice of the characteristics of search engine results pages (SERPs) by term, and then match your content to compete with the best.
Master the Art of Meta Description Copywriting
Meta descriptions, which appear on SERPs below the page title, do not directly effect results, but they are an important part of maximising click-through rates.
Make sure yours are entertaining and appropriately explain the stuff on your page. Treat your meta descriptions as copy, just as you would ad text.
A well-written meta description will attract your readers to click on your listing above others that may not be as fascinating, enhancing click-through rates.
To be clear, well-written content is always vital, and having it perfect across the board (that is, throughout your whole website and each of its pages) is the aim.
But, for rapid victories, optimising meta descriptions (which should be between 156 and 165 characters long) is a requirement.
Furthermore, a site-wide review may be a terrific opportunity to exercise your writing and editing skills while also guaranteeing a consistent brand identity and tone throughout your site.
Check out this post for a more in-depth look at meta descriptions, why they’re essential, and how to approach them effectively, as well as some winning instances.
Keep these seven pointers in mind:
- Know what your competition are doing.
- Create a journey for your consumer.
- Use your brand’s voice.
- Incorporate the appropriate keywords.
- Profit from current trends.
- Target particular intentions.
- Refresh your copy.
Confirm Your Relevance
We’ve previously touched on relevance when discussing keywords and synonyms, as well as search intent, but let’s go a little further.
After all, doing so has the ability to boost our reputation as an expert in our industry, and hence the source and top search hit.
To go back to fundamentals, let’s agree that search engines examine web content to determine if a certain page includes information that would be useful to a user based on that user’s search term.
When we utilise that basic statement as the foundation for the use case, we must put ourselves in the shoes of our consumers and their requirements.
A search engine must evaluate a user’s search word based on some important parameters in order to perform effectively.
As a result, relevance becomes situational, and your optimization objectives should be as well.
The short explanation is that you can’t be everything to everyone.
Google publicly shares major ranking elements, which include the meaning of the query (think intent, derived through language modelling), content quality and usability, as well as context and environment.
The details (don’t get us started on the issues of SEO), but in general, think about your content and its relevancy in the same manner you’d like your search results to adapt to your own demands.
Be your own artificial intelligence. To optimise your ROI, assess the environment and then lean towards the areas where you are most relevant.
Ranking systems are meant to filter through all accessible material and offer up the most relevant to the searcher; as such, they are comprised of a number of algorithms.
In addition to searching the phrases in your search query, ranking algorithms will examine source expertise and geographical location, for example.
As a fundamental relevance criteria, location information gives a fantastic opportunity for specialised companies with exceptional content to optimise ROI.
By establishing a site as a reliable source within a certain radius, a credible thought leader in their space with the right blog content (read timely in nature and regularly providing thoughtful commentary on trending topics), an organisation can focus content development dollars on a targeted area with the goal of local brand awareness with demonstrable impacts, leveraging click-through as a key performance indicator.
Take Advantage of Your Links
Let’s start by agreeing that it is feasible to do well in SERPs without using backlinks; even Google’s John Mueller thinks so.
That out of the way, let’s agree that Domain Authority (which forecasts how likely a website is to rank in SERPs) is influenced by the credibility supplied to your content by other reputable sources connecting to it.
SEO tools such as Moz and Ahrefs may be used to determine your Domain Authority.
We’ve spoken about external boosters, but don’t overlook the value of internal linkages.
Ahrefs has you covered here as well, with internal backlinks reporting providing a gauge of your internal linking activities.
Internal links on your site should be optimised.
It makes sense, not just from an SEO standpoint, but also from a client experience one, since a well-structured site will allow your customer to click around your site in accordance with their information hunger.
Conclusion
Great content is essential to an ever-expanding range of client experience initiatives.
From broad marketing tactics to specific client acquisition and public relations plans, to search across industries and specialisations, outstanding content plays a part in any business’s digital strategy.
To get better ranks for your content, you must examine every aspect of SEO.
You’re losing out if you’re simply concerned about body copy.
While the setup may seem time-consuming, an investment in SEO optimization — actually understanding your target and delivering appropriately – is well worth it.
Aside from the fact that smart planning yields better customer-centric content, you can be certain that thinking about SEO optimization will add value to your digital budget.
Following tried-and-tested SEO strategies, your fresh (and updated) content may eventually show on the first page of your soon-to-be newest customers’ search.