By Mia Harrison
Ranking on the first page of Google is something almost every business wants to achieve. A first page ranking for the right keyword gives your website an opportunity to see an increase in relevant traffic which usually leads to an increase in business.
Regularly publishing content is one of many ways to get into Google’s metaphorical ‘good books’ in terms of search engine optimization and ranking factors.
Creating good quality content for your website is one of many ways to help increase your positioning on the SERP. The Google bots will be made aware of your high-quality content because of its low bounce rate — if you have a great article, people will want to stay and read it!
A low bounce rate allows the bots to assume your content has been useful to past users and will send it further up the rankings to allow it to help more of their searchers with the same query/need.
We are going to look at what to be aware of when curating your content to help achieve SEO-friendly copy that Google favors!
Content Length
The length of your content is a majorly important factor in terms of your on-page SEO. As expected, different pages on your website will have content of different lengths. For example, the homepage of your website is unlikely to contain 800+ well-written words but an article you have published most likely will have.
In 2017, SEMRush conducted research into the length of content and how the different lengths fared on the search engine results page. They found that content ranking in the top three of the SERP for a specific term had an average of 750 words or more, whereas content in the top 20 and below were using 500 words or less. A 45% different between the two.
When thought of like this, search marketers presume that to rank at the top of the results page content would ideally need to be 750 words or more.
But, you know your content better than anyone else. If your piece is short but informative, don’t fill it with nonsense to reach a certain character count. This could work against you.
Uniqueness
Online there can be a mass amount of duplicate content, covering the same points with almost the same wording. This alone can make it harder to rank as there already too much competition.
Google doesn’t want to show content that would mean their first two to five results would be practically identical. Behind the scenes, the bots try to filter this content out to stop the results being so similar.
Try to create content that isn’t already online, research what people are searching but have difficulty finding and write about that! Even writing an article that has been covered before in your own way with a different twist can allow you to rank higher up the SERP if you are looking at it with a new perspective.
A mixture of quality long-form content with a unique twist on it can be a great start for getting your pages to rank closer to the top spot.
Keywords
Keywords should be an important part of anyone’s mission to increase positioning on the results page. They allow the Google crawlers to understand the intent of your content.
The key places to include your keywords include;
- Page title
- Page description
- Body text
- H1 tag
- URL
- Alt tag
Searches use keywords in every query they type into the search engines, they use these keywords to help find a solution to their problem.
You may think it is obvious which keywords your target audience will be using to find your business on Google but this can be misleading. There are many tools online to help you conduct your keyword research.
SEMRush and Google Keyword Planner allow you to simply search for the keyword you have in mind and will bring up a selection of related keywords and their average search volume, competition and ranking difficulty. Both these tools are available for free.
Structure
The way you structure your content, whether it be a blog post or page description, can have a surprising impact on the user reading it.
Are you likely to sit and read a block of text with little to no paragraph breaks? Seeing text layout in bulk can put your readers off before they have even begun!
Try to use short sentences and short paragraphs to keep your readers interested! This makes it easier for the reader to skim through your content and find the sections that will help them.
Make sure you break up your content with subheadings. Users can easily find the information they are looking for when the text is broken up this way. Subheadings are also another clever place to add in your keywords.
Finally, help break your text up even more with the use of bullet points. Avoiding writing list out into a long sentence and place them into a bulleted list instead to make reading more appealing.
And many more…
So there you have it. The top things that we keep in mind when curating content for our website. This is in no way an extensive list as great content creation takes in to account many many factors!
Content marketing is a strategy used by many businesses and a one that has proven to be extremely successful. Try implementing this it into your marketing strategy and see what difference it makes for your business.
Let us know what other factors are important for you in your content creation in the comments!
