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Creating winning SEO content is a crucial aspect of online marketing and website optimization. It involves crafting high-quality content that meets both the needs of your audience and search engine algorithms. It is important to create SEO-optimised content because it provides value to your audience while making it easily discoverable through search engines.
To create content that will help with SEO, here are a few tips from our experts at POLARIS:
Focus on user targeting
Understanding your target audience will help you craft content that resonates with them and addresses their needs. You can do this in a number of ways, but you always need to start by defining who your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are, and what their informational need is. These are also sometimes called buyer personas or prospects. Understand what your audience is searching for, and the desired information they need to satisfy their search. ICPs might search with keywords, sentences, or questions. You need to learn about them, their need, and business challenge so that you can then provide information to assist them.
Target topics and keywords
Identify keywords and phrases that your target audience is using to search for your product or services. Choose relevant keywords and incorporate them naturally into your content. This will enable your content to organically appear on search engine result pages. At POLARIS, we are often asked about what our process is for keyword research, and what is the best practice approach to integrating keywords within content. Our recommendation is always to produce content naturally, by starting with a content outline that has been prepared with user intent and relevant keyword data in mind. By producing content with a pre-determined outline first, you’re more likely to target particular topics and subsequent keywords, achieving content that performs with a specific objective in mind. Without following this process, your content might not perform as well.
Use different formats for content production
Different people learn in different ways, and digitally, as users, we consume content of different formats at different times and situations. For example, it’s easy to consume written content anywhere, but video content is shorter and more engaging, so highly suitable when on the move. Use a variety of content formats to convey your message to your target audience. Think about where your ICP is likely situated, the time of day, and best format to communicate with them in, and produce content accordingly. Adding images and videos to your content can also help break up long text and make it more visually appealing. Ensure that you optimize these media files by compressing them, using descriptive file names, and adding alt tags.
Ensure your SEO content is quickly accessible and digestible
Your content needs to load instantly and be easy to digest too. This means that not only does the format of how you produce your content matters, but so does the layout of the page template you’re publishing content in, the font used to produce the content, and the positioning of elements of your content alongside each other. All of these User Experience (UX) factors can have an impact on the accessibility of your content, and as a result, how easy your content is to consume. Evaluate the content after you have draft published it to look at it as a user and determine its effectiveness.
Remember the Flesch algorithm when producing written content
Search engines evaluate how easily readable your content is, and often use a scoring method called Flesch-Kincaid. In summary, any content you produce should be easily readable by a 5- to 8-year-old child. This means short sentences, easy-to-read words, and bullet points too. If your sentences become too long or you use words that are hard to read, you’ve lost points. It’s that simple. Research on the Flesch-Kincaid principles, or if you’re publishing in a WordPress website setup YOAST and use that tool to help evaluate your content for readability. This will help you to ensure you produce content that search engines actually like and are happy to output within their results.
Optimise for featured snippets
Featured snippets are displayed at the top of the search results and can help improve visibility. The best result in SEO is now a position ZERO result. At POLARIS we achieve this result for clients often, and it’s because we evaluate a clients target search landscape, see what competitors have produced to provide information for a particular search query, and then determine how our content can offer the user an even better experience. By doing this, and applying schema markup, we are providing high value content to search engines that they can read in a format they understand, and as a result output as a featured snippet. Do the same and you can increase the CTR of your websites content in a huge way.
Use internal and external linking amongst content you publish
Linking to other relevant content, whether it’s on your own website or another, will add credibility to your content. High-quality backlinks from reputable websites can help increase the visibility of your website in search engine results pages, and search engines like this. It’s a really clear way to communicate that you are looking to help the user by sharing the best resources online, even if you haven’t produced them. Another benefit by linking to other resources that you have published within your own website is that you increase the signals you provide to search engines of the importance of destinations in your site (signposting the way to resources) and the relevant keyword queries that you choose as anchor text when linking. All of these signals help search engines understand the nature of your content and how it can help users in their pursuit of information.
Keep your content up to date
Regularly updating your content can help ensure that it remains relevant and improves its SEO ranking. You might produce content that is evergreen in its nature, meaning it will always be relevant, but it needs to evolve slightly every so often. Keep content updated and don’t be shy to put a time and data stamp on it. This helps search engines know when you last published your content and that you care as a webmaster.
Creating winning SEO content is a combination of conducting thorough research, understanding your target audience, and optimising your content for both the audience and search engines. Follow these steps to ensure improved website visibility, website traffic and ultimately online sales and/or conversions.
If you are about to embark on a website migration project, and would like to find out more about our website migration or SEO services please get in touch for a discussion about your project. Send us an email at info@polarisagency.co.uk
