As the saying goes, content is king, but adding any old content to your site won’t work. Your content needs to be somewhat keyword focussed but at the same time, it must be informative and useful to the people you would like to it to speak to.
In this quick guide on how to optimise content for best SEO outcome, we’ll go through some ideas, and we’ll show you examples of how your content should look how to construct your content and what to include so you can ensure your content marketing will be a success.
Write A Killer Headline
All blogs, pages and stories have a title. Potential customers want to be spoken to, and often they have a problem that needs to be solved. Realising their problem and solving their lack of knowledge with the content on your site will be your key to success.
Plan your content by first writing a title/headline for your content. This can double up as your page title too. Killer titles make people click, so make sure to do your research. If you are struggling to come up with a good title or headline, you should take a look at the following two websites:
Use Answer The Public
A great place to find headlines for your content. Simply type your keyword into the search tab and click search, once the page reloads with your results, scroll down and you will see various suggestions that you could write a blog about.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to utilise this freemium website to improve your content titles:
Step 1 – Enter your keyword and click search
Step 2 – Choose a question from the results
If you struggle to read a mind map, select data next to the world visualisation to get a generated list of each of the questions.
Use A Headline Generator
If you can’t quite grasp Answer The Public you could try using Title Generator. Simply type in your keyword, profession, service or offer you may have on as your keyword and the generator will provide you with a list of headlines that you can choose from. Make sure you choose headlines that you can write good quality content about and that people will be drawn to.
Step 1 – Enter your keyword and click search. We used the word content in the Headline Generator and got the following results:
Step 2 – Choose Your Headline – Only choose relevant headlines that make sense and are appealing.
Here is a list of our results, as you can see we could get some pretty good content related headlines from this. It’s a really great too, especially when you have writer’s block or you aren’t as creatively minded as say, a professional copywriter.
Answer Audience Questions
Answering your audience’s questions is an excellent way of generating more traffic to your site and ranking in search engines for keywords that your competitors aren’t necessarily ranking for.
To decode your potential customer’s search terms you need to perform some market research. This way, you’ll be able to generate high-quality content that matches your users’ questions and also provide them with the answers they are searching for with relevant information.
Keyword research would be an excellent place to start and then follow this by checking your competitor’s keywords.
Creating high-quality articles that respond to questions from readers can help you build credibility and create recognition in your industry. Quality content can also help you rank higher in search engines so that when users search, you will be there to answer the question they searched for.
Whether users find you through Google or another route, valuable content that helps demonstrate your expertise and authority to your audience will encourage readers to choose your service over others who are less open and less informative about what they do.
Speak To People Not Search Engines
How you come across in your copy will affect the reader in one of two ways. They’ll either continue reading, or they’ll click away from your site.
Use everyday words that all readers can understand. If you’re worried your content is too formal or you aren’t sure if you’re doing it right then, you could try using the Hemmingway Editor.
The editor allows you to see what schooling grade would be able to read your content. For the everyday consumer, content that is grade 9 and below is considered good and readable. Ernest Hemingway’s writing is believed to be between 4th and 6th grade in terms of readability – any grade between grades 4 and 8 is considered excellent.
Write in your speaking voice; don’t use unnecessary industry jargon that the customer might not understand and keep things simple. You don’t want to confuse your readers: they have issues that need solving, they need you to get to the point!
To address your audiences keyworded questions, anything you say in your blog should be focussed on this topic. Using a basic introduction structure, explain and build on the key points and conclude to summarise and tie it all together at the end.
Keep the content fresh, try not to bore the brains off your people (like I’m doing now with all this SEO stuff) and add in some personality, let your readers know your human and not written by paraphrasing bot.
Edit and Proof Your Content
Never publish your content without first editing or proofreading it, as any apparent errors will harm the credibility of your brand. A resource like Grammarly can help you search for errors in spelling and grammar, or you can employ a professional to lend a hand.
Typos can be hard to find, but we all “maakr” them!
It can be helpful to go through your copy a few times just to make sure you’ve picked up on all of the typos and spelling mistakes in your text. Like our purposely placed example above.
If you’d rather us write, publish and optimise your content for you, why not get in touch! Our team of expert copywriters and SEO experts are on hand to help you get to where you need to be.
