5 tips for creating content that will improve your SEO
If you want to reach your ideal customers through Google, you’re going to need to focus on your SEO.
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. This facet of digital marketing involves using a number of techniques that can help you to beat your competitors on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs), so it’s a worthy investment.
As part of your search engine optimisation strategy, it’s important that you concentrate on creating high-quality and optimized content that positions your company as an expert in its field. This will give you more chances to target keywords you want to rank for, show off your knowledge so Google’s more inclined to trust you, and generally give your target customers more reasons to visit your website.
Here, we’re going to provide you with our top blog writing and content marketing tips that will help you climb those SERPs and get the results you want. Read on to learn more.
Publish content other website owners will link to
If you want to get the best SEO results and climb the rankings for queries related to what you do or sell, you need to spend some time building backlinks. This involves convincing other relevant and authoritative websites to link back to your business in their own content. Essentially, Google will see these backlinks as a vote of confidence for your company and will feel more comfortable about the idea of promoting your website to its users.
There are a number of link building techniques you can use, but one of the most effective and least labor-intensive options is to consistently publish content on your website that people will naturally want to link to in their own writing. If you do this successfully, you won’t need to do a lot of outreach and you’ll be far more likely to attract links organically with no further effort.
There are a number of content types that tend to attract more backlinks than others. For instance, the results of original research tend to generate a lot of links, because people will be likely to use your findings to back up a point they’re trying to make in their content. Infographics are also particularly link-worthy because they’re engaging, genuinely helpful, and great for spicing up a wordy piece of content.
Free tools are fantastic assets for building organic backlinks, too, because they provide a lot of value without someone having to make a financial commitment. Plus, they’re typically designed to address common pain points your ideal customers might be having, so other publishers and businesses related to what you do may be interested in sharing them.
To give you some inspiration, let’s take a look at one company that has effective free tools that are likely to attract high-quality backlinks.
FreshBooks, a cloud accounting software provider, offers free invoice templates that a lot of money and business-based websites may be interested in linking to.
Because FreshBooks’ target audience is primarily made up of small business owners and freelancers, these assets make total sense for the company. They’re genuinely useful, solve a problem a lot of their ideal clients might be having, and are easy to access. If a blogger, journalist, or marketer is creating their own piece of content that would be enhanced by a link to some helpful invoice templates, they’ll be likely to throw FreshBooks a link, which will benefit both their audience and the accounting software company.
Consider what kinds of tools your audience could genuinely benefit from, and then consider whether other publishers will be likely to link to them. Once you come up with an idea that both your audience and other site owners will love, you’ll be on to a winner. The backlinks your assets attract will do wonders for your rankings.
Address common customer questions with your content
Answering common questions with your content can be great for your SEO, as it will help you to reach more people who are researching what you do or sell. Plus, if you do a great job of answering someone’s query, they’ll be far more likely to trust and buy from you down the line.
There are a few techniques you can use to identify the questions you should be aiming to answer with your content. For instance, keyword research is very important when it comes to search engine optimisation, and it involves using a specialist tool to find out what your target customers are regularly typing into search engines. There are even question keyword research tools, like AnswerThePublic, that are designed to help you work out what queries your customers need the answers to.
Visit your preferred keyword research tool and input words or phrases related to the work that you do. Then, look out for any relevant questions it would make sense for you to answer on your site. These could come from people who are at the beginning, the middle, or near the end of their buying journey. Then, once you’ve created a list of questions, start creating high-quality content that provides all of the information the people asking these questions will need.
To give you an idea of what this kind of content might look like, let’s take a look at a couple of examples from businesses that already use this tactic well.
RMIT Online provides courses that students can study completely online. Some of these courses help pupils to pursue a career in data science, so they’ve created a guide to answer a very common question people thinking about enrolling in this course might have.
As you can see, they’ve put together a detailed blog post that answers the question of whether we’re actually facing an oversupply of data scientists. Prospective students won’t want to go down a path with very few job prospects, so it makes sense that they would want to learn more about the industry before committing. This piece of content is designed to put their concerns to rest and give website visitors a realistic idea of what trying to get a job in this sector is actually like.
If, like RMIT Online, you know there are common questions your customers will want to get the answers to before investing in your products or services, make sure you address them with some high-quality content. This way, when your ideal audience is typing these questions into Google, you’ll be far more likely to catch their attention and gain their trust.
Venngage, a graphic design and infographic-making platform, aims to catch people even earlier in their buying journey with a piece of content that explains what an infographic is. Someone who is asking this question on search engines may not need the company’s service just yet but, by answering this simple question on their website, Venngage will attract the right people, educate them, earn their trust, and potentially win their business in the long run.
Is there a very simple question you could answer in your content to attract people who are only just finding out about what you do? The earlier you catch people in their buying journey, the less likely they’ll be to look at your competitors. So, using this tactic to reach the right people through the SERPs can be a very fruitful tactic.
Show off your knowledge to boost your site’s E-A-T
E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It’s a metric Google has been paying a lot of attention to over the last few years. The search engine likes to promote businesses that regularly show off their E-A-T, because it only likes to send people to websites that are guaranteed to be sharing helpful and accurate information.
Consistently showing off your knowledge through content can be great for your E-A-T, as it gives you a chance to demonstrate just how much you know about your products, services, or industry in general.
When it comes to deciding what kinds of topics to cover with your E-A-T-boosting content, consider what kinds of subjects you know inside and out. What do you do better than anyone else, and what kinds of topics can you explore in more depth than others in your sector?
Let’s take a look at one company that consistently publishers expert content to showcase its knowledge and boost its SEO.
The Tinker Law Firm PLLC, a law firm that specializes in medical malpractice and birth injury cases, regularly populates its blog with expert content to help its audience better understand these areas of the law. There are lots of different posts that answer common questions, explore certain types of cases, and provide advice for people who may be looking for legal advice.
Not only does this benefit the company’s target audience, but it will also show search engines that the people behind the website truly understand their industry and areas of specialization. This will therefore mean websites like Google feel more comfortable recommending the website to people, improving their rankings and helping them to reach more potential customers.
Take a leaf out of The Tinker Law Firm’s book and try to consistently create expert content that demonstrates your knowledge and skills. It will help you to win the trust of both search engines and your ideal customers, boosting your SEO and making you more sales.
Allow keyword research to inform your strategy
As we’ve previously mentioned, conducting keyword research is an important element of any good search engine optimisation strategy, and it’s important that you allow this to inform your content plans. So, before you write a single article, use a specialist tool to carry out some keyword research to see what the people you’re trying to reach want to know more about.
You can use the likes of Moz’s Keyword Explorer or SEMrush to enter words and phrases related to what you sell or do. You’ll then be presented with a long list of related terms, along with their monthly search volumes, which indicate how many people are typing these phrases into Google each month. Just remember that you should reserve any commercial keywords that indicate buyer intent for your product or services pages, so you need to keep an eye out for informational and question keywords that show someone is doing their research and looking for content instead.
Once you’ve made a note of any informational keywords you would like to use to inform your content strategy, look for any trends or phrases that are related. Then, consider whether you could group them together to create longer and more comprehensive guides. You can target more than one keyword with each piece of content — in fact, to get the most out of your work, it’s encouraged.
Also, when it comes to actually incorporating your keywords into each piece of content, you’ll want to ensure everything still reads naturally. The last thing you want to do is stuff so many awkward phrases into your writing that nobody actually wants to read it. So, focus on finding the right balance between ensuring your content is optimized and engaging.
Search for content gaps your competitors have left
Finally, one of the reasons why you’ll want to create SEO-friendly content is to beat out the competition and attract more customers. So, another way you can spot which topics you need to cover is by checking out your competitors’ blogs to see what they haven’t written about yet.
To get the best results, you’ll want to ensure that your content is the best out there, so you need to be producing more high-quality blog posts than anyone else. This means, as well as looking for any subjects you could be the first to cover, you should look for topics that have already been written about but that you can expand upon. After all, if Google sees that you know more about a specific subject than the owners of similar businesses, it will be more inclined to recommend your website.
Regularly check the websites of other businesses in your niche to see what is being published and spot any holes in everyone else’s content strategies. If you can fill them, you’re sure to get ahead of the crowd.
Summary
We live in an increasingly digital world, so investing in your online marketing is paramount. And SEO is incredibly important if you want to climb the SERPs, beat the competition, and reach more of your ideal customers.
We’ve provided you with our top tips for creating content that will improve your search engine rankings, so take these on board and it won’t be long before you start to see a lot more people finding your website.
Author bio & headshot:
Adam Steele is COO and co-founder of Loganix, which is an SEO fulfillment partner for digital marketing agencies and professionals. The company provides the SEO services that businesses need to grow and achieve their goals. If you enjoyed this article, you can find more SEO guides and templates on the Loganix blog.
