If you want to increase your traffic, organic search visibility, or/and keyword rankings, you have to focus on good content and SEO; you cannot have one without the other. Writing high-quality content without paying any attention to SEO won’t rank your page as high as it deserves. As you can see, the primary importance of content for SEO is that it improves your search visibility and increases organic traffic.
So, by understanding the relationship between content and SEO (how content affects SEO, how to improve SEO content), you can render more organic traffic to your business through search engines.
The importance of content for SEO.
The reason why content is essential for SEO is that it makes search engine optimization easier to do. If it weren’t for good content writing, search engines wouldn’t have enough information to index your pages properly and help them rank well. So, let’s find out how these two are related and how content affects SEO.
What is SEO content?
With SEO content, we mean specific content that has been well optimized for Google or other search engines. That’s because good SEO content is written in a particular way to significantly improve the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and help you drive more traffic to your site. Not to forget that another purpose of SEO content is to increase awareness, leads, and sales.
As you probably know, SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of taking steps to help a specific website or piece of content rank higher on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other search engines. SEO can be optimized in 2 ways: through on-page or off-site methods, and they are referred to as “on-page SEO” and “off-page SEO,” respectively.
The term content itself is referred to the actual word/media used on a website that your visitors interact with. Content can consist of text, images, videos, tables, charts, and interactive media and has a single purpose: satisfying the searcher’s intent.
So, the SEO content combination refers to any content created to attract search engine traffic and satisfy visitors’ needs. These two terms (SEO and content) work together to generate more awareness, leads, and sales for your business.
But how does content affect SEO?
As we mentioned above, content affects SEO by making both on-page and off-page optimization easier to do. You will understand how important the quality of your content on SEO results is. Good content makes it more straightforward, and bad content makes it harder for a website to optimize for search engines or even get external links on the web page. So basically, content affects SEO in every aspect to search engine optimization.
If you are struggling with getting a higher ranking and SEO is taking so long to work, this is most likely happening due to your content’s bad quality. The quality of your content should be genuinely good, and that will help your content rank on first page of the search engines.
It is easier to improve the content with on-page optimization methods when you have good content (outlined properly and written well). To add more, good content gives you different opportunities to place your target keywords in the right places to get higher rankings on the search engines.
Plus, good content serves the needs of your visitors and, in this way, improves the quality and trust of the web page. A reliable and trustworthy page with good content and SEO makes getting external links from high-authority, local websites are more accessible. More high-quality links you get to your page, the higher it will rank in the search engines. To get more organic visibility, keyword rankings, and traffic, you need to improve your SEO content.
How to can you improve your SEO content (step-by-step-guide)?
Ten ways how to improve your SEO content:
- Focus on your right SEO keywords
- Improve on-page SEO
- Go deeper with your content
- Format your SEO content well
- Improve your content readability
- Target featured snippets
- Do original research
- Be more credible
- Add more visuals
- Improve your page speed
- Focus on the right SEO keywords
Generally speaking, every content page should focus on a specific set of keywords as the goal is to match the SEO content to the user intent. Therefore, you need to pick keywords relevant that will fit that intent.
For example: if you are writing commercial content on the “ten best microwaves,” you need to focus on the keywords that match this content, such as “best microwaves,” “best microwave brands,” “best rates microwaves,” and so on. Make sure also to structure that content, including rating and review information and even images of the products.
Improve on-page SEO
On-page SEO is the most manageable aspect of search engine optimization for content, and it delivers faster results for keyword rankings than off-page SEO. Here are three stuff you can do to improve your on-page SEO metrics instantly:
- Improve the title tag – add your target keyword to the meta title field, the closer to the beginning, the better.
- Rewrite the URL –make the URL for the page the best match phrase for your main target keyword. Note: use hyphens (-) in between the words.
- Optimize the H1 tag – put your target keyword in the H1 tag (like you did in the title tag improvement tip)
Go deeper with your content
Creating content that goes deep into a specific topic makes the on-page SEO easier to do, and you will rank for many more keywords. In addition, the on-page SEO process gets easier as you have many more opportunities to put a target keyword in the right places on the web page.
When writing content, keep in mind that it is essential to go further than surface-level ideas. For example, if you want to boost search results for a specific target keyword, you must write ultimate guides for your topic. You can write long-form articles (1500 words or more), explore the subject matter in many aspects, and add various visuals/videos to the content.
Format your SEO content well
A suitably formatted page has higher possibilities to rank in search engines, and it can improve reader retention. Unfortunately, people’s common mistake with SEO content is that they don’t structure the HTML elements correctly. This means that they are not correctly using H2s, H3s, and other list elements and are not formatting the page correctly for the readers.
If you want Google to crawl and maximize the SEO value of your content, use H2s for the main topic headings on the page and H3s for the sub-topics under each H2 heading. Another thing you should know is to format your SEO content well because the order and unordered lists should go under H3 tags.
Improve your content readability
The main reason Google (or other search engines) rewards content with good readability is its ability to satisfy the users. Good readability is essential if you want to get on the front page of Google search results. Also, it can make a user stay longer on your page and even share it with other people. The individual elements that a user encounters while visiting your web page can signal Google that the content is highly relevant to the search query.
Here is what you can do to be more readable for your readers and SEO:
- Your content should be well organized and clear to understand.
- Clarify your content go in-depth on each topic.
- Use simple language to be understandable for everyone instead of technical jargon.
Target featured snippets
Featured snippets are the most useful and relevant way to get on the front page of Google search results. That’s because featured snippets are the informational content on Google search engine results pages.
Featured snippets offer you greater visibility to searchers and boost your brand recognition. They give customers a quick answer to their search query because they appear when users enter informational search queries. You have to organize your content to target featured snippets as they can help you draw traffic and expand your reach. Another trick for snagging featured snippets is using the power of Google to write content on a web page and then get higher Google rankings.
The entire SEO secrets guide:
Do original research
When you write SEO-optimized content based on original research, other sites in your industry can use it as a reference. As a result, SEO-optimized content is a good link magnet to other sites, and it can better serve your visitor’s needs.
As you can imagine, people hate to read the same content repeatedly on different sites. That’s why original research can help your content stand out from the competition and satisfy your readers. You can include new statistics and studies in your content and specialize it. This strategy will lead to higher authority backlinks and more sources for free site traffic.
Be more credible
A practical and straightforward way to improve the credibility of a piece of SEO content is to add facts to the web page and then back them up with cited links. Providing supporting facts, data, and resources in your SEO-optimized content is the best you can do to improve the credibility of your content. It is essential to be trustworthy with your content in your readers’ eyes as they come across your page.
Add more visuals
According to some statistics, articles with images get 94% more total views, whereas videos on a page can increase conversions by 80% (or more). In addition, you need to know that adding more images on a web page gives you higher opportunities to optimize for additional keywords.
Note: You can put target keywords into the ALT tags or image filenames of the images used on the page to improve the on-page optimization for a piece of SEO content.
Improve your page speed
Based on previous studies, page speeds play a significant role in ranking sites – the quicker your page loads, the more advanced it ranks in Google search results. Even Google stated that speed is a fundamental factor for Google Search and Ad performance. Therefore, you have to put extra effort into optimizing page loading time and improving the overall page speed for your SEO content. In this way, it will be simpler for your site to rank for highly competitive keywords.
Note: Use Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool to find your current page speed scores.
As you discovered in this article, there is a solid and beneficial relationship between SEO and content. Understanding the importance of content for SEO and using the right strategy will make you reach the page rankings you have always wanted.
