HOW TO CREATE SEO-OPTIMIZED CONTENT TO IMPROVE YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a buzzword. It’s often discussed as a mysterious magic bullet that takes place behind the scenes via URL tinkering, metadata, and costly keyword tools. However, the heart and soul of good SEO don’t take place behind the scenes — it happens right within your website’s content.

Quality, SEO-optimized content is both simples to create and critical to the search engine success of a blog, e-commerce store, or any other profit-minded online enterprise. If you’re looking to give your website an edge over the competition, here are a few easy-to-follow SEO tips for incorporating into your content.

SEO: An Art Form

Before diving into the nitty-gritty details, it’s important to point out that SEO is an art form. Sure, it revolves around strategies and statistics, but good SEO is quite artistic when you boil things down.

No hard and fast rules dictate what proper SEO should look like. In fact, every SEO expert has a different “secret sauce” that they’ll emphatically inform you is the answer to your problems.

However, the continually developing search engine algorithms make it very difficult to pin down a specific way to formalise the search engine optimisation of a website.

This creates an element of unpredictability that gives SEO a very artistic feeling. In the same way that a masterpiece can be painted with either acrylics or watercolours and still be equally impressive, good SEO can take on various forms and still be highly effective.

With that said, the strategies suggested below are aimed at informing you, the humble website owner, on the various elements that search engines currently care about as they crawl your site and look for ways to understand just what your content is all about. While all of these things matter on one level or another, the specific degree of their importance and impact can vary depending on how Google is currently measuring and quantifying its data.

From a practical perspective, it’s absolutely critical that you set up Google Analytics or another form of data-tracking software to measure the results of your efforts. If you find that prioritising keywords in your titles and URLs makes a significant difference in a blog post’s traffic, adopt it more heavily into your strategy. If you find that including a keyword a certain percentage of the time has no measurable results, ditch that tactic.

To put it simply, if you approach your SEO strategy as an adaptable art form rather than a strictly rigid formula, you’re much more likely to find success as you go.

Alright, on to the fun stuff. Here are some top considerations for properly SEO-optimized content in the online world.

Set Your Priorities

It’s important to start things off by setting your priorities — especially when finding the balance between focusing on your readers and the search engines. As you sort out your SEO strategy, it’s easy to over-prioritise your optimisation tactics over the quality of the content itself. After all, won’t that lead to more traffic?

In the past, the answer was a resounding yes. Ethics aside, if you stuffed a page with keywords, you could show up at the top of a search with no problem — to the dismay of the readers who clicked on your post expecting some quality content when they arrived on your page.

However, Google’s algorithm has become much more refined over time. Those who want to rank higher must prioritise the reader first and the search engines second.

In addition, make sure you’re following all of the online legal requirements depending on where you live. Suppose your site is breaking the rules (knowingly or otherwise). In that case, the consequences of flagging for creating illegal content can undo any SEO momentum you’ve made instantly.

Create One-of-a-Kind Content

One of the most important ways to focus on the human element as you optimise your content is by making it unique. Resist the urge to rehash basic or obvious information. Never plagiarise other sources. Don’t promise one thing with an alluring, clickbaity title and discuss something else.

Instead, aim for each piece of content to be as unique as possible. Fashion each article into a one-of-a-kind source of data, knowledge, or opinions. Provide genuine value to the reader and satisfy search intent. Your content should answer the question intended by the search inquiry or keyword it’s tailored to.

Go For Length When You Can

While many sites have found tremendous success with shorter articles, there’s something to be said about the connection between lengthy posts and SEO.

When a topic naturally lends itself towards a “deep dive” article, writing a longer piece of content often will lead to a higher SERP ranking. This can come from a variety of factors, including:

• The chance to include a keyword more often.
• More opportunities for quality links.
• Longer dwell time on the page.
• The ability to be more comprehensive and thorough in covering a subject.

All these elements can contribute to a higher SEO ranking for the content itself and your website as a whole.

Identify Keywords

According to SEO guru Brian Dean, while keywords are an old-school SEO tactic, they still make a dent in your optimisation efforts. When creating content, it’s essential to take the time to identify a keyword or keyword phrase that the article or post is centred on. For instance, a blog post about how to build a chicken coop would likely focus on the keyword “chicken coop”, or if it was concentrated on inner-city chicken owners, perhaps “urban chicken coop.”

Once you’ve identified your primary keyword, it’s worth trying to include it naturally in your article title and text, preferably in the first 100 to 150 words of the piece. In addition, try to incorporate it into an H2 and throughout the post whenever it naturally fits. However, don’t feel the need to keyword stuff. According to Dean, he once used a keyword just 6 times in a highly-ranked 32,000-word post.

Include Links

Links are essential to quality SEO content. You want to include a smattering of internal links (links to other pages on your website) as well as external links (links to other high authority, relevant pages outside of your site).

In both cases, you want to ensure that you’re selecting quality links. For instance, when choosing internal links, look for high-performing related pages on your site to link a new piece of content to something that already has momentum. Regarding external content, look for areas with higher authority, such as .gov or .edu top-level domains or pages that are authorities in their own right within the niche you’re targetting with your content.

Think About Flow

Once again, if you’re looking to satisfy the reader first, you must consider the flow of your content. One critical key to online content is publishing skimmable content. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, only 20% of the content on the average web page is actually read.

With that in mind, make ample use of headers, short paragraphs, bold font, and bullet points to break up your text and help draw the reader’s eye down the page.

In addition, make sure to vary the types of content included in your post. Add in videos and infographics, embed tweets, or other images to help break up the text and encourage the reader to engage with your content.

Podcasts are another great way to build your SEO power, mainly if you include transcripts of each podcast to help search engines understand what the audio contains.

While you don’t need to include every one of these options, it’s essential to find the ones that fit into your site’s style and voice and then integrate them consistently.

Consider Your Reader’s Access Points

Mobile optimisation has become a life-and-death factor for a website. Regardless of the kind of content you are producing, you must make sure that, along with diversifying your solid content strategy, you also cover all of your bases when it comes to different devices visitors may use to access your site.

Mobile traffic has officially surpassed desktop internet usage. A site that doesn’t work well on a smartphone or tablet will likely lead to a higher bounce rate, less dwell time, and a general decrease in search engine rankings.

Create Your Personalised SEO Marketing Strategy

While there are countless facets and considerations when it comes to crafting a quality SEO strategy, these are some of the most essential elements to start with:

• Prioritise human readers first and search engines second.
• Create unique, valuable, one-of-a-kind content.
• Write longer content when naturally possible.
• Identify keywords and include them in important places and in reasonable quantities.
• Include quality internal and external links.
• Consider the flow and skimmable aspects of your content.
• Make sure you’re mobile-optimised.

You can incorporate these SEO concepts into your marketing strategy. In that case, you’ll be able to produce optimised content for your readers and search engines.

This will allow your marketing collateral to appear higher in the SERPs while simultaneously satisfying search intent and naturally bolstering your brand’s reputation, all of which are critical elements to a successful marketing strategy.