Creating high-quality, engaging content for your audience is the most important aspect of good search engine optimization (SEO). Without high-impact content that offers value to your audience, search engines will likely ignore your website or blog. At the very least, your competitors will likely outrank you in organic search results.
Here are the steps to create high-quality, informative, and relevant content for your target audience.
Find a topic related to your niche
The first step in creating engaging, SEO-friendly content is to select a good topic related to your niche to write about. That’s because if you want to rank high in search engine results, you need to write about a topic that your target audience cares deeply about. Otherwise, your audience will ignore you, regardless of your search engine rankings. Here are a few quick ways to find topics related to your niche:
- Google Trends
- Social media trending topics
- Wikipedia
- Quora or other question-and-answer sites
- Google searches about your niche
Identify target keywords from your topic
Once you select a topic to write about, you need to choose some target keywords related to your topic. The Google Keyword Planner tool is an excellent keyword research tool – and it’s free to use! You can find out the monthly search volume for prospective keywords, as well as their competitiveness.
In addition to Google’s Keyword Planner, there are other free and paid keyword research tools available too. Good keyword research will give you a lot of insights into how to create good content for your audience.
Make a content outline that matches the search intent of your target audience
One of the keys to making your content SEO-friendly is to create content that matches the search intent of your target audience. For example, let’s say that you are in the personal finance niche – and you are writing about the topic of credit cards for consumers with bad credit. Therefore, the focus of your content should be on consumers with poor credit who are searching for credit cards that they qualify for.
As mentioned, good keyword research is critical to better understanding your audience – especially when it comes to their search engine queries.
Create comprehensive content about your topic
Google dislikes thin content, like articles and blog posts under 300 words. That’s because Google wants to serve its users well by providing them with comprehensive content that fully covers a given topic. Otherwise, users won’t be satisfied with their search results. Therefore, you need to understand your topic well enough to write extensively on it.
Ideally, your articles and blog posts should be at least 500 words.
Create plagiarism-free content
Publishing duplicate content is a quick way to earn an SEO penalty and possibly a lifetime ban from Google. Grammarly offers a free plagiarism checker that you can use to check the uniqueness of your articles and blog posts to ensure that you are only publishing original content.
Include your keywords naturally throughout your text
When it comes to placing your keywords in your content, they should appear naturally throughout your text. In other words, you don’t want to use the same keywords and phrases over and over just to try to rank well in Google search results. Doing so will likely earn you an SEO penalty for what’s known as keyword stuffing.
A good SEO rule of thumb is that your target keyword or phrase should make up around two-to-three percent of your text. Use variations of your keywords and search phrases to avoid keyword stuffing.
Optimize title tag for higher click-through rates
Whether you are writing an article or blog post, your goal is to entice your target audience to click on your content to read it. That’s why you need to optimize your title for higher clicks. You can do that by creating a catchy title that sounds interesting to your audience. Your title should clearly explain the subject matter of your content, as well as contain relevant keywords related to it.
Your title tag should be no more than 60 to 70 characters in length so that it will be fully displayed in Google search results.
Enhance your content with high-quality images
You can make your content more SEO-friendly by adding high-quality images. For instance, let’s say you are writing a 2500-word blog post. That’s a lot of text for users to read online. Many users might find that much text monotonous and stop reading it before they finish.
However, by adding relevant images, videos, and graphics, you can make your content much more interesting and engaging to your audience. Your articles and blog posts will also be more SEO-friendly to search engines.
Ensure your content is well-written
Spelling and grammar mistakes can also cost you a lot of SEO “points” with Google as well. That’s because poorly written text is less readable. Therefore, it doesn’t hurt to scan your content for any grammatical errors or spelling mistakes that you might have overlooked. In short, don’t make the mistake of thinking that publishing just any-old content is good for SEO. Instead, you must create great content with good SEO in mind. Make sure that you know your audience, understand their needs, and are able to provide an informative answer to the question that they are searching for online.
