There has been a lot of change in SEO over the past few years. If you’ve been around SEO for very long, you know that there has been an emphasis on creating quality content lately. To help make sure that content performs well; here are ten SEO tips to keep in mind.
Keywords vs. Intent
The practice of keyword stuffing is long gone and so is the practice of keeping a certain keyword density. No longer do we need to try incorporating our keyword into titles, headings, body copy, links, and descriptions. The practice now is to group keywords into buckets of intent.
There are three types of intent keywords: navigational, informational and transactional. Of these, transactional keywords (buying keywords) are considered to be high intent keywords, while navigational (searches for a particular website) and informational (searches for information about a particular topic) keywords are considered to be low intent.
Understanding your visitor’s intent and then crafting content with the proper intent keywords will help increase your conversions.
Titles, Headlines and Descriptions
While it is important to match your content to a visitor’s intent, keywords are still going to play an important role in your content’s titles, headlines and descriptions. These two, intent and keywords, work together. The keywords should help drive a visitor towards a particular action. While it’s great to rank high in the search results, getting the customer to your website is only half the battle. You want the visitor to take some particular action once you have them on the site.
Content Classification
Is the piece of content you are creating informational or transactional? Content should be created with a classification in mind and then the content should be mapped out as to what path you want the visitor to take. You may bring the visitor to the site with informational content, but you will want to then move them to more transactional content.
Quality Score
If you have read Google’s manual, Google’s Quality Ratings Guidelines, you may be familiar with the acronym EAT (Expertise, Authority and Trust). In order to create quality content, you must keep this acronym in mind. These factors not only help maintain quality content, but a quality image for your brand and your site.
Content Presentation
You may have quality content, but it will not matter if it is presented poorly. How your site looks and the impression it gives your visitors is very important as well. Special care needs to be taken in the selection of fonts, colors, headlines, and the use of whitespace. Design elements are vitally important as to how well your content will be received by your site’s visitors. This includes how the content will look when viewed on different devices, such as a smart phone or tablet.
Bite-Sized Content
Nobody really likes to just scroll through an endless page of words. Whenever possible, break your content into bite-sized, easily sharable bits of information. Make use of images, quotes, and bullets to break the information up and keep the reader interested.
Content Promotion
Creating great content is only half the battle. You need to get eyes on the content as well. After creating your content, you need to reach out to influencers in your market and promote your content. You want to get others to start sharing your content on social media. You may even want to use paid advertising to increase the traffic to your content.
Remarketing
A lot of your traffic to an article will come after its initial publication and promotion. It never hurts to use paid advertising to push traffic to older content, especially if there is an opportunity for the reader to sign up for a newsletter or download a free piece of content and for you to add another subscriber to your list.
Measurement
You need to know how your content is working for you. It’s great to get the page views or social shares for an article, but how is that article helping to build your brand, building customer loyalty, bringing visitors back to your site, or increasing visitor engagement?
Repurposing
If a particular piece of content has been very successful, repurpose that content to create a slideshow, a video, podcasts, webinars, white papers, or other forms of content.
Creating quality content is a vital part of SEO today and these ten tips should help you create that content. While every business and website is different, these tips should help in the content creation process.