Helping Site Rank & Generate Sales for over 16 years
Whether you want to hear it or not… content is still king.
You should now be very familiar with this concept as it is a phrase many marketers have been using for the last couple of years. Even though it isn’t a new concept however, many marketers and online businesses are still struggling to master this fine art.
I will help you get your content right so that you can benefit from its many factors such as boosting SEO results and complimenting other areas of your online marketing.
Wow what a question to answer! This question really deserves a blog post all of its own however I do want to cover off some areas before I go ahead into how content can help. When you search for something on a search engine like Google, a list of relevant search results will appear. SEO (search engine optimisation) is what organises the order of those search results. Online businesses do SEO in order to try and get their website to the number 1 spot of those search results. Here are a few basic steps to what is involved:
This is really breaking it down in simple terms so I will go into it in more detail now.
Words can be a very powerful thing and can drive engagement. If you produce content that is valuable then your audience will go crazy for it and keep coming back for more information, ideas and help. The more you are creating valuable content, the more of an audience you will build and the more engagement you will receive.
Valuable content means no keyword stuffing (I’ll go into this later), no duplicate content and nothing that is of low-quality. Here are examples of high quality content and low quality content:
High Quality
Low Quality
Notice how the high quality examples reach out to businesses pain points and offer solutions that businesses will genuinely find useful. Now notice how the low quality examples are talking about themselves or pushing sales; neither of which will trigger any emotions from the reader.
Did you know that 66% of all organic clicks go to the top three search results¹?
In order to achieve the majority of clicks, you need to get your website to the top three in the search results page. To do this, you will need to be clever with your keyword research by targeting relevant long-tail keywords rather the broader keywords.
Once you have achieved a top three position with these can you then move onto targeting broader keywords. Here are few examples of long-tail keywords as well broader keywords:
Long-Tail Keywords
Broader Keywords
Once you have chosen your target long-tail keywords, you will then use them to base your content around and starting building authority for them.
A lot of online businesses still talk about keyword density and aim to get a certain number of keywords into their content. This is the wrong approach to take and can be very dangerous as if it leads to keyword stuffing, your SEO results could actually drop or you could be penalised.
When writing about a relevant topic, your target keywords should naturally find their way into the content themselves. Never force any keywords into the content, especially if it doesn’t read right. This will be picked up by search engine bots and have a negative effect on your rankings.
Search engines such as Google absolutely love fresh content, the more you feed them fresh content to crawl… the better for you. However don’t publish any old rubbish; this will only be beneficial to your SEO rankings if your content is of value like I spoke about earlier.
Google actually has something called Query Deserved Freshness which will display fresh content above all else for search terms that are currently trending. This could a be a quick win opportunity for you to get your content into the top 3 search results if you find a relevant trending search term.
Google made a statement that “there’s always more information out there” and encourages websites, bloggers and journalists to link to relevant information whether it be internal or external links. This improves the user experience which is what Google wants to achieve. There are three different types of links you need to build for each blog post you do:
Links Coming In:
By having others link to your content either from their website or social media, shows search engines that your content is useful and people recommend reading it. This will help build your authority for that topic and keyword.
Links Going Out:
Linking out to other websites and blogs from the content on your website shows search engines that you have the users best interests by helping them find the information they are trying to gather.
Internal Links:
You also want to link to other relevant pieces of content from your blog to again show search engines that the user can continue their quest for information on your own website.
Hopefully you have more of an idea as to why content helps improve SEO rankings and how to make it work for your own website. Here are a few reminders to take away:
I'm Paul Gordon an SEO freelancer who has spent the last 16 years helping businesses expand and grow through effective SEO strategies.
