When creating content for your website, whether it's a blog, article, or just in-page copy, it's important to keep your SEO strategy in mind. SEO is one of the critical aspects of online content, making it possible for people to find your content when searching on a search engine like Google. Curating your work from an SEO perspective helps to make each piece of copy useful and contribute to the overall goal of increasing web traffic, rankings, and engagement.
How SEO Works
When searching for a topic, a user types a word or phrase into the search bar (keywords), and results pop up in a particular order (or ranking). The results generated are what Google has indexed and determined were the highest-ranking authorities on the subject based on keywords, links, and useful content on the page. Marketers, like you, develop website or blog content ideas based on what they predict their target audience will be searching for on Google or another search engine. The more full and complete the content is, the more likely they are to rank for those topics or keywords for which their potential customers are searching. There are other factors that determine how high on a search engine results page your website content will rank. Those SEO attributes include:
- How competitive the focus keyword is in comparison to other content out there
- Inbound links to the page
- Relevant meta description, SEO title, alt text, and headers
- URL structure
- Size of images and speed of load time
- How secure the site is
- And many other factors
Choosing SEO Keywords
Google changed its algorithms to better determine what content is just "SEO fluff" and what content is actually helpful. Your content should sound natural and have information that isn't readily available on other competing sites. SEO content should sound human, not robotic or written to trick a Google algorithm. It's important to choose synonyms and related terms to the focus keywords in your content and organize your site while keeping SEO in mind. To do this, you can use topic clusters and pillar pages. You don't want pages with similar content to compete with one another. Instead, each page should be helping and furthering the knowledge of the subject.
Tip: Shorter keywords often have much higher search volume because of how people naturally search. When Google indexes a page, it skips over the "stop" or filler words that aren't relevant to a search term (such as “an,” “the,” “or,” and “of”). Avoid using stop words in important SEO areas like the blog title, URL, and focus keyword. However shorter keywords will also have much higher competition, so it’s important to keep in mind how realistic it is for you to rank high nationally for a short keyword with high search volume.
Measuring SEO
Google Analytics will help you find out what's attracting people to your site, and what is not, to help curate your content strategy. Though Google has blocked a lot of information related to the exact keywords you are ranking for, you can check your ranking for different keywords and see where your current web traffic is coming from. There are other tools such as Moz and SEMrush that can give you a good idea of how you are ranking for specific keywords. These tools can also help you understand how healthy your site is from an SEO perspective.
Surefire SEO Boost
It’s no surprise that blogging is extremely beneficial for SEO purposes. Blogging consistently creates new and refreshed content on your site on a regular basis. Marketers who begin blogging consistently for the first time see incredible results after three, six and nine months. Once your blog content begins to rank on Google, you can measure what keywords have been most effective in attracting traffic, and you can begin to see trends and use that data to optimize!
Pro Tip: Create a blog for your brand, then add useful and regular content that is keyword optimized, and you’ll become an authority on subjects relevant to your potential customers and achieve your SEO goals.
Curating your work from an SEO perspective helps every piece of content increase organic traffic and engagement. Google algorithms index copy, whether it's a blog post or a page, by scanning and ranking it based on keywords. These keywords help determine where the page will show up in the search results. Copy should always be useful or entertaining, not meant to fool the algorithm and boost SEO. The highest-ranking copy will have relevant keywords, unique information, appropriate links, and be organized in a way that is easy for both readers and Google to understand. Search engine optimization is an important tool for getting unpaid traffic to your site and becoming an authority on different subjects.
Looking to boost your organic traffic through SEO? Sign up for a 30-minute consultation with one of our SEO experts to get you started!
