What is SEO Content Creation? No matter what products or services you sell, in the end, you’re simply in the business of helping people.
You’re a problem solver.
You help people overcome their challenges and move on to bigger and better things. And to do that well, you need to position your products and services as the leading solutions time and again.
So, what better way to do that than through SEO content?
When novel, complex, or just plain frustrating problems arise, people typically scour the web for an answer. Their queries are a shot in the dark, sent loose in hopes of hitting on the ideal solution the first time around.
If you can create content around those queries, or keywords, your company can effectively roll out the red carpet and guide people through the rest of the buyer’s journey.
Want to make that happen? Here’s what you need to know about using SEO content creation to your advantage.
Why Is SEO So Important For Business?
The most effective businesses have web content that attracts an organic audience, and, in almost every case, this comes down to whether the content has effective SEO.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. In simple terms, when someone uses a search engine like Google to search for information, you want your content to be as easy for them to locate as possible.
This can be achieved through paid search, where the business pays to have its webpage featured at the top of the list of results. But this requires financial investment and has less impressive results than organic search does.
Rather than spending money, you can instead follow a few basic principles to make sure that content is optimized and brings in as much organic traffic as possible.
SEO Main Concepts
Keywords are the backbone of successful SEO. The first step to content creation should always be keyword research. You can conduct this research on your own, or task your writers with taking care of it for you. Either way, it’s important to understand how SEO keywords work.
The best keywords have established search volume. In other words, they should be terms that people are already using when conducting searches. Using these words will automatically direct more qualified traffic toward your page.
When developing a list of keywords, ask yourself about the central goal of your business. What service or product do you offer customers? The answer to that question helps to establish the various kinds of keywords that should be included in your content.
- Primary keywords are the main topic that a potential customer would be expected to use in a search. For example, if you operate a specialty cheese shop, your primary keywords would likely be cheese and specialty cheese.
- Secondary keywords shouldn’t be overlooked. These are complementary terms that take into account the subtopics that customers may use.
- Long-tail secondary keywords include longer phrases. For example, a potential customer might use the phrase “where to buy specialty cheese”. Although short secondary keywords are crucial, having a good mix of both long-tail and short-terms is ideal.
What happens when you use great keywords?
When a user searches for a term, Google generates the search engine results page (SERP). The goal is to ensure that your business appears in a high position on this page. Studies have shown that more than 25% of people click on the first organic search result, and very few look past the first page.
In short, if your content doesn’t have a high ranking, you miss out on an enormous pool of potential customers.
The ability of your content to rank depends in large part on whether it’s correctly optimized for search intent. Search intent refers to what someone is trying to accomplish when they use a search engine. Google interprets the user’s search intent so that the results shown are best aligned with that goal.
SEO Best Practices For Content Creation
Enhancing your content creation with effective SEO practices is essential for driving organic traffic and boosting your online visibility. To simplify this process and ensure your content shines, consider the following best practices:
Tailoring Content-Length and Structure
Acknowledging the short attention spans of online readers is crucial. Lengthy paragraphs can discourage engagement, causing readers to lose interest quickly. Instead, opt for concise paragraphs that captivate your audience from the outset. Break up your content with subheadings, enabling effortless scanning and navigation. Additionally, employ bullet points and lists to enhance readability and comprehension.
Harnessing the Power of Multimedia
Engaging your audience requires more than just text. Incorporating multimedia elements such as graphics, videos, tables, and photos can invigorate your content, making it visually appealing and easy to digest. These elements not only captivate readers but also convey complex information effectively. Furthermore, including backlinks to reliable sources enhances your content’s credibility and offers readers valuable resources for further exploration.
Strategic Keyword Integration
Keywords remain a cornerstone of SEO success. While compiling a list of relevant terms is a crucial step, their seamless integration is equally vital. Avoid the pitfalls of keyword stuffing, a practice that once undermined content quality. Instead, use keywords naturally and strategically within your content. Aim for grammatically correct and contextually relevant placements, emphasizing their inclusion in titles, subheadings, and the article’s introduction.
Optimizing Page Speed and Mobile Friendliness
In the digital era, user experience plays a pivotal role in SEO. Slow-loading pages and non-responsive designs can deter visitors and harm your search engine ranking. Prioritize optimizing your website’s performance, ensuring swift page load times and seamless navigation across various devices. Mobile-friendliness is particularly crucial, as Google prioritizes mobile-responsive sites, enhancing user satisfaction and engagement.
Crafting Compelling Meta Descriptions and Titles
Your content’s meta description and title are your first impression on search engine users. Craft compelling and concise meta descriptions that provide a glimpse of what your content offers, enticing users to click through. Equally important, create attention-grabbing titles that accurately reflect your content’s essence. Incorporate relevant keywords naturally while maintaining a captivating and informative tone.
Consistent and Quality Content Updates
Search engines value fresh and updated content. Regularly revisit and update your existing content to reflect the latest industry trends, insights, and developments. This demonstrates your website’s authority and commitment to delivering relevant information to your audience. Consistency in producing high-quality, informative content reinforces your brand’s credibility and encourages user engagement.
By adhering to these SEO best practices, you can optimize your content’s appeal to both readers and search engines, ultimately elevating your ranking, driving more qualified traffic to your website, and fostering lasting audience engagement.
Best Types of Content for Search Engine Optimization
To start your SEO content creation journey, you’ll want to first focus on creating a high-quality website.
Your homepage and supplementary pages should all have quality content infused with relevant keywords.
You can add even more great content to your site after that by setting up a blog. Plan to update your blog regularly to keep relevant content flowing across the internet landscape.
Use landing pages to share even more of your content, like:
- eBooks
- Guides
- Checklists
- Webinars
- Slideshows
- Infographics
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Directories
Beyond that, add a resource page with FAQs, product demos, tutorials, troubleshooting, and the like.
By creating all that content, you can help your customers complete the buyer’s journey and feel satisfied with their purchases.
How to Develop and SEO Content Strategy
Fantastic content that’s a smash hit with its target audience is far from an accident. It’s the direct result of careful planning and implementation of a complete SEO content strategy. Here’s a closer look at how you can put such a strategy together for yourself.
Establish Your Goals
You can’t make plans to work toward your goals until you know what those goals are, so start there. What are you hoping to accomplish by putting together a new content strategy?
Do you want to increase your readership, raise your sales number, boost traffic to your service pages, or something else entirely? Answers to questions like these will help you decide which content types to focus on— out of the gate.
- Boost your organic traffic and attract new readers by focusing on meaty, long-form content that digs into topics important to your readership
- Drive your sales numbers up by concentrating on your product pages, category pages, and landing pages
- Help current customers get more out of their purchases or encourage them to consider additional purchases by going for helpful blog posts that focus on those topics
Know Your Audience
Think back to the last time you discovered a branded blog that grabbed your attention and wouldn’t let go. The content was likely helpful, entertaining, and useful. And it probably felt as if it were written just for you, too.
That’s what happens when a content strategist knows their audience, so it’s time to make sure you know yours. Brainstorming a set of buyer personas can be helpful in this regard – semi-fictional profiles that represent real people and make it easier to get into your readers’ heads.
Figure out which major demographic groups your regular readers fall into, and create a persona to fit each one. Then, consider what types of content each persona would be out there looking to consume (e.g., videos, case studies, or how-to guides).
Brainstorm a Content Creation Plan
At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of who your target audience is and what they’re out there looking for via Google or social media. You should have a tentative idea of what content types they’d most like to see from you, as well.
The next step is to put together a content creation calendar that will help you:
- Determine which types of content to publish and when
- Establish a regular publishing schedule that will help your audience know when to expect new content from you
- Get all members of your content creation team (including writers, editors, and social media marketers) on the same page
Choose an interface that you know works well for you (like Google Calendar, to name just one example) and share the calendar with your whole team. Give yourself plenty of time to complete new pieces, so you don’t have to worry about content gaps.
Review Your Progress Regularly
Once you’ve got an initial version of your content strategy in place and have put it into practice, be sure to track your results and stay in the know as far as your site analytics.
Review your findings regularly, compare them to your goals and progress estimates, and adjust your ongoing approach accordingly. Pay special attention to your big successes, so you can plan follow-up content or approach similar concepts in the future.
Be sure to conduct regular rounds of keyword research, as well. Incorporate new target phrases into your content on an ongoing basis to ensure your continued success.
How to Find Keywords for Your Digital Content
If you want your web pages, blogs, and other works to rank where your customers will see them, you need to create content around the right keywords.
Finding those keywords is half of the battle, for sure. You don’t just need to know words and phrases relevant to your brand. You need to know which keywords give you a fighting chance to rank high on the SERPs.
When you’re just starting out, you have to choose keywords with a high volume and low difficulty. Otherwise, you’ll lose to websites with a higher domain authority every single time.
As your domain authority increases, you can target more and more difficult terms. But that’s likely a long way down the road.
Top Keyword Research Tools
So, how are you supposed to find the right terms? By using the top keyword research tools, of course, such as:
Some of the keyword research tools are free, like Google Keyword Planner. However, the drawback is that their data is not as complete or detailed.
If your budget doesn’t allow you to invest in a paid program, do what you can to make it work for now. Then, plan to upgrade in the future once your marketing efforts start to pay off.
No matter what program you use, export the list of keywords into a spreadsheet. Then, start digging through the terms to find the low-difficulty, high-volume ones relevant to your brand.
Top Ways to Infuse Your Content with Keywords
With all your relevant keywords in hand, it’s time to put them to work. Here’s how.
Choose One Per Page
Every single keyword needs its own page. If you try to optimize multiple pages for the same keyword, both your customers and the search engines will get confused.
Use a second spreadsheet to match your keywords to each piece of content you’ll post on the web. Then, mark them off as taken to keep casting a wider and wider net with your digital works.
Use Semantic Equivalents
You don’t want to overdo it with your target keyword. Just put it in the title, metadata, and then once or twice in the rest of the content.
After that, focus on naturally using semantic equivalents. If you’re writing about RC cars, like the Traxxas Rustler, other keywords you could use include radio-controlled cars, hobby-grade RCs, 1/10 scale RC, and RC stadium trucks.
To find these related words and phrases, you could just reflect on the search intent while thinking about similar terms. But it’s often easier to use an innovative tool, like BuzzSumo, to get the job done fast.
Never Compromise on Quality
Keywords are a must, but you cannot compromise on quality, or all your effort will be for nothing.
Quality content addresses the query better than all the other high-ranking pages for the target keyword.
A great layout, informative headers, and fantastic imagery serve as a great foundation for your content. So, definitely don’t skimp on the flair.
After that, you just need to make sure that each section is easy to understand and interesting enough to keep reading.
If not, your customers will hit the back button and – poof – disappear just as fast as they arrived.
How To Create a Winning Freelancer Team For Content Creation
Keep in mind that content marketing, or developing content to attract qualified visitors and convert them to clients, is guaranteed to fail if it’s low quality. As such, your content should always be interesting and well-written.
Hiring a strong group of talented freelancers can make or break your web content, and building the perfect team can be accomplished with a few basic steps.
- Start with a strategy. Make a plan for the topics you want to discuss and the schedule for releasing each piece of new content.
- Next, find the best writers to create your content. Look for freelancers who excel in not only clear and interesting writing but also in using SEO.
- Manage your team by communicating specific instructions. Think about fundamental requirements like word count, keywords, target audience, tone of voice, style, and subject. If you prefer, you can develop a specific outline for the writer to follow but try to stay flexible and allow for creativity.
- Include essential resources in a content brief, such as references you’d like writers to consider. However, there’s no requirement to conduct extensive research, as freelancers usually handle the bulk of the research independently.
- Provide a list of any competitors that should not be linked or mentioned in the content.
- Offer feedback to your team. Let the writers know when they’re doing well, and offer suggestions for improvement when needed.
Kickstart Your Content Creation Journey
Practice makes perfect. So, just push the worries aside and give SEO content creation a try.
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The platform combines the efficiency of AI-powered tools with the creativity of human writers who have the skills and experience you want as you work toward boosting your rankings.
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