Content plays a vital role in making your website a success.
It can be any content, informational, promotional, or entertaining. But one thing is inevitable, whatever kind of content you use or business you are in, your ultimate purpose is to achieve success.
And in the case of an online business, it is to get your website to rank high on the search engine result pages. This can be achieved by the SEO best practices for creating content.
Today, we will discuss SEO content creation tips for your enterprise. Although many SEO practices can be used to create content that ranks, we will talk about the best and the universal ones.
Let's make content the real king of your website!
Here are the seven most effective and universally adopted SEO content creation tips that you can use for your website.
While optimizing your content for SEO, making it keyword-rich is the first thing that typically comes to mind. Keywords are the specific phrases that people search on the web.
For example, the auto-complete suggestions provided by Google are keyword phrases people use to search.
And when Google can find those phrases in your content, it establishes its relevance. This improves the chances of your content ranking higher on the SERPs, thus increasing the traffic and conversions.
Different keywords can target local audiences, industry-specific people, topical issues, etc. We can use short, long, short, long-term, product-specific, customer-specific, area-specific, topic-specific, and intent-specific keywords.
Here, remember stuffing these keywords will do more harm than good, specifically when used irrelevantly.
The best example of the perfect use of keywords to gain authority is Hubspot, known for its 'inbound marketing.'
Make sure you use your keywords purposefully and with the correct intent. This will help Google to identify the relevance of your content.
Google loves and values original content! A lot of information is available about any topic, which helps add a unique element to yours.
It differentiates it from all of them and marks it as 'high quality.' This also keeps it relevant to attract traffic to your site and gives you the advantage of presenting yourself as the industry expert.
If you provide the same information as everyone else, the visitor will immediately be compelled to explore another site. So, use tools like Quetext, Copyscape, or others to ensure that your content is plagiarism free.
You improve your credibility and establish authority by providing unique and fresh content. This also allows you to gain more social mentions, thus improving your visibility.
For example, Apple uses its content to ensure that it adds value to people's lives despite being an electronics company. It is done by creating unique and heart-touching content.
Always include your point of view about the topic you are writing about on your website. This will make your content unique and showcase your understanding.
While creating content for your website, you can optimize it for SEO by adding relevant links. These can be internal links linked to your content- or external links associated with other relevant content available on the web.
The screenshot below shows how to add relevant links to content.
This promotes a rich customer experience where they can find all the relevant information through your content only.
Here, understand that there is no thumb rule to link your content. But one thing you should consider is not using many links in your content, as it may put you at the risk of increased bounce rates.
Use proper anchor texts for linking your content to keep the relevance intact. It also makes it convenient for the users to keep their expectations set when they click on it.
Sometimes more than creating a whole new piece of content, it is wiser to use existing content with different formats.
Repurposing content contributes tremendously to improving your SEO and content marketing efforts. It also saves a lot of your valuable time in finding new topics. Moreover, it allows you to make the most of any content.
For example, a blog post can be repurposed as an infographic so people can share it more conveniently.
Or your visitors would want more information about a topic not covered in your blog post, where a downloadable e-book or guide will be of great help. It will allow you to tap an extensive range of people.
The screenshot below shows an example of a blog repurposed into a downloadable e-book.
It also gives you a new link, thus improving your credibility from a search engine's point of view.
Content Marketing Institute is a brilliant example of doing this where it converts relevant blog posts into downloadable e-books in exchange for visitors' mail IDs.
Always choose the content that has performed well in the past. This will increase its chances of being liked and shared across the web by providing a fresh experience.
Don't you love it when you come across a colorful piece of content rather than just a black and white chunky paragraph of words! We all do, and it helps us retain the information for longer.
Visuals and graphics capture the attention and ensure that the content is interpreted correctly.
The below screenshot shows content explained with an image that users could easily understand.
Visuals reduce the bounce rates and keep the visitors on your website for a comparatively longer time. Moreover, images and other visual content are relatively easier and preferable to share on social and personal accounts.
One of the best examples of websites that promote visual content has to be Pinterest for the fantastic user experience it provides.
Use proper alt texts to ensure search engines crawl and index these content formats and make them rank, which they otherwise cannot even read.
No matter how engaging your content is, if your headline does not attract people, they will likely never click on it.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, a web copy is judged by its cover! So, it becomes vital for your website to create headlines and topics that grab attention.
Take a look at the below screenshot showing an example of a catchy headline that grabs user attention.
This will make your potential customers stop scrolling and make search engines understand its relevance. Your headlines should define the expectations from the piece of content that will follow.
"On average, five times as many people read the headline as the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar."
—David Ogilvy
Marketingprofs is a brilliant example of a website that uses attention-grabbing, click-worthy, relevant headlines for its articles that compels visitors to see what is inside.
Always use specific numbers in your headlines wherever possible, as they tremendously increase the chances of getting clicked.
Meta descriptions are short summaries for the search engines to understand the purpose and intent of your content. See the screenshot below showing meta descriptions that convey the context of the content to the users.
The maximum limit of these is 160 characters, including spaces. The second thing the searchers look for is understanding what to expect from the content right after the headline.
So, these impact your organic traffic. It is best to include relevant keywords here that justify the significance of your content.
Meta descriptions work as the supporting element for all your SEO efforts. It is not technically essential to have a meta description, but at the same time, having it works as a guide for Google while looking for relevant content across the web.
Tesla is one of the leading examples of using brilliant meta descriptions for its website that tells all about it in just one line. No confusion at all!
Use unique descriptions for every page because it is not your whole website crawled and indexed as one by Google. Each page's relevance is considered individually.
Here is a Bonus Tip to keep your SEO content creation game strong!
'Never Forget To Monitor Your Performance'
After using all the SEO practices in your content, you can ensure the ranking and click-through rates. But at the same time, you should not forget that it is not a one-time thing.
You must know whether or not all the hard work has paid off! This can be done by monitoring your performance and not using those practices that are not contributing to your success.
Read: Top Off-page SEO Techniques
Brice has been handling marketing projects for more than 12 years and he is providing consulting services on SEO, Social Media and PPC. He has a huge expertise in working at large corporations including Accenture Interactive & PwC Digital Services.
Brice has been handling marketing projects for more than 12 years and he is providing consulting services on SEO, Social Media and PPC. He has a huge expertise in working at large corporations including Accenture Interactive & PwC Digital Services.
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