When it comes to content that resonates with search engines and audiences, creating SEO content that is both user-friendly as well as Google-friendly is crucial for a steady marketing campaign.
Whether you have some degree of experience in digital marketing, or you’ve just entered the market, a website is essential to showcase your presence. Your online business may not reach its maximum profit potential without a clear-cut content strategy.
In the simplest of terms, you need well-designed and perfectly published content to get what you need from search engines. It also means taking full advantage of SEO content basics to get the traffic you deserve and higher rankings. Let’s start with the basics;
What does SEO-friendly content mean?
SEO-friendly content is created with the intent of helping search engines like Google place it on top of results pages.
Although most of you think that Google-friendliness means it should be stuffed with keywords, it’s actually meant to help crawlers (Google bots) to find, understand, and connect your content to the topic you’re trying to cover.
Speaking of Google bots, every marketer looking to outrank their competitors or at least rank in the uppermost search engine results pages should know how Google finds and indexes content.
At this point, Google crawlers are critical for your ranking. They will scout the web, find web pages, and determine what results will appear on SERPs. So, if your web pages are interesting, optimised for keywords, and with flawless page navigation, they will have a higher crawl demand. Your web pages will be added to Google’s index more quickly, receive more traffic, and rank higher in search engine result pages.
Writing Google-optimised content
- Use EAT to Measure Your Content’s Quality
EAT or Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness is made up of the qualities that search engines like Google look for in content creators to ensure that their content is up to the mark.
In fact, the best way to ensure you’re meeting Google’s required standards is to write and leverage content that:
- Is helpful to your target audience
- It is created by digital content experts
- It comes from a reputable source
- It is regularly updated
The best way to do this is to have a custom-made content strategy, such as those tailored by specialised agencies like DPDK. From CMS websites to content, these creative agencies will ensure everything you publish meets and exceed Google’s set requirements and expectations.
- Site Architecture, Links and HTML Tags
Aside from content, the second most critical ranking factors are links, site structure (how your website is made), and HTML tags.
When Google’s bots crawl and index your website, they also look at non-content factors such as URL structure, inbound and outbound links, how fast it loads, how long people stay on it, and keyword usage in tags to understand what your site is about and how to rank your pages.
The internet needs great quality, value-driven content for everyone to see and use, and search engines ensure users only receive the best possible content from the websites.
Having adequate linking, site architecture, and HTML best practices within your website content makes it easier for Google to crawl and index your web pages/content. The faster and more precisely Google crawls and indexes your site pages, the faster you can increase rankings and traffic.
- Conduct Efficacious Competitor Analysis
In order to reach the uppermost position in the Google search result pages, it’s crucial that you keep on more competitive domains.
The better you understand your competitors’ SEO practices and content marketing, the more likely you are to create content that competes efficiently. You should be able to perform frequent content audits in order to compare best-performing keywords and strategies and determine what steps you can take to improve and outrank others.
However, conducting competitor analysis for content is no easy job, no matter how well-versed in the art of SEO you might be, but here’s where SEO tools enter the scene. Tools like SEMRush, BuzzSumo and Advanced Web Ranking make it easier to keep an eye on competing domains so you can determine their search strategy and establish the results of their tactics. More precisely, these tools can help increase online visibility and optimise websites through keyword research, backlinking suggestions, and regular reports on your competitor’s keyword strategy.
- Build a powerful editorial calendar
One of the reasons why an editorial calendar is important for your ranking is that it allows you to strategize your content.
When you have to draft great amounts of content – for your social media, blogs, email marketing campaigns and any other digital marketing strategies you’re using – it’s imperative that you plan and strategize your content. This will both save you time and help you get increasingly better results from your content.
Strategizing and planning your editorial calendar will help you:
- Plan your content according to your business and marketing objectives. For example, if you want to generate more leads with your content, you’d need to research your audience, what type of content they want and how to create that content. If you do this strategically, it will be much easier to satisfy search engines and improve your return on investment.
- You will have more time to research keywords for blog posts: this will help improve your Google optimization as you carefully plan your on-page SEO in advance.
- Plan your content to back your campaigns: when you launch new services/products or new features of your service or any other major change with your brand that requires attention, it’s always a good idea to strategize your content in advance in order to create a resonating campaign that gets results.
Last but not least, maintaining a consistent posting schedule will ensure that you’re publishing varied content in order to reach different shares of your target audience. This will help you meet your audience’s needs and Google’s through fresh and high-performing content.
