Content creation is king when ranking in the top spots for your targeted keywords. Creating high-quality and highly relevant content to share with your site’s visitors gives search engines like Google and Bing the fuel they need to recognize you as an authority. As a valued resource, you’ll be awarded an elevated ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). But beyond appeasing search engine crawlers, creating high-quality content should serve the interests of your target audience. The information they read should be engaging, informative, and useful. After all, consumers enter queries into search engines because they’re trying to find solutions to their problems. Writing SEO-friendly content can cover all the bases, satisfying search engine spiders, enticing visitors, and increasing website traffic.
What is SEO friendly Content?
SEO-friendly content is crafted to increase a brand’s online visibility. With strategic optimization, SEO-friendly content can properly align with search engine algorithms, enhance organic traffic, and boost rankings in SERPs. SEO-friendly content writing ensures relevant target keywords are seamlessly integrated for a user-friendly experience. Search engine crawlers love clear, quality information. The easier it is for them to index and categorize your content, the better chance it has of ranking high in SERPs. That means optimizing headers, creating a well-structured layout, and using meta tags to make the content more accessible and readable for consumers. Quality and accessibility are paramount. SEO-friendly content can utilize multimedia elements, integrate with social media platforms, and be designed for use with mobile devices. Adding internal and external links allows readers to find their way to even more valuable content, which only increases the credibility and relevance of the material to search engine crawlers. Ultimately, SEO-friendly content strikes a perfect balance between providing useful information and optimizing search engines for a positive user experience.
Why is SEO-friendly Content Important?
SEO-friendly content can set your brand apart from the competition, drive organic traffic to your site, and elevate your conversion rate. With the help of SEO-friendly content, the sky’s the limit. Here are seven outstanding benefits to creating SEO-friendly content:
Increases Website Traffic
An overwhelming majority of search engine traffic belongs to the first page of search engine results. Beyond that, the top three results enjoy the greatest volume of website traffic. SEO-friendly content can propel your enterprise near the top of SERPs, which will increase the volume of organic traffic to your site!
Gain a Competitive Edge
With a sea of competition in your market, SEO-friendly content is much more likely to stand out and entice a larger audience than regular content. You may have great products and services, but if consumers can’t find you, they can’t become customers.
Builds Community
Producing informative content will open the door to meaningful interactions and conversations with visitors. Whether you’re fielding questions or entertaining comments, you can become a trusted source for consumers, which can inspire them to become loyal, long-term customers of your products or services.
Boosts Brand Authority
When you have valuable content to share with consumers, authoritative websites may include a backlink to your brand in their own content. Getting the stamp of approval from a trusted source in the market can boost your brand’s authority and build trust and credibility among consumers.
Passes the Test of Time
If your content is well-written, updated over time, and complies with SEO, it can remain useful for your clients even months after publishing. This type of educational content is called evergreen content and comes in lots of forms, from “how to” pieces to tutorials or lists. You don’t need to write a Pulitzer-worthy piece for your content creation to be considered evergreen; you just need to produce valuable content that your visitors will find helpful in the future.
Gets Shares
Your visitors are more likely to share content that has an impact on them. So, by creating worth-sharing content, you are making your brand more visible and increasing traffic. SEO-friendly content invites users to spread the word about your brand on your behalf.
Saves Money
SEO-friendly content is an organic way to increase brand visibility. You don’t have to keep up with ongoing paid advertising expenditures to benefit from increased website traffic. Your SEO-friendly content can be the gift that keeps on giving.
Should I Create Content for Humans or for Search Engines?
With SEO-friendly content creation, you’re serving two masters: search engine crawlers and consumers. For content to get in front of consumers, you need to appease the gatekeepers of SERPs—search engine spiders. Creating SEO-friendly content will satisfy their requirements and enable you to interact with actual humans. Once you have consumers’ attention, you want to offer them quality content that will engage them with valuable, useful information.
5 Tips for Creating SEO-friendly Content
To create SEO-friendly content, you’ll need a strategy that honors the needs of human readers as well as search engine crawlers. Here are five tips for crafting exceptional, SEO-friendly content:
Know Your Audience
Before you start writing, you need to establish your target audience and what content they are interested in. After all, your audience must resonate with your content. In this case, analytics reports come in handy, as they are the closest we have come to reading peoples’ minds. Thanks to web analytics, you can better understand user behavior while also breaking down their demographics. For example, you’ll get insight into their age or gender, as well as their interests. These metrics, as well as the users’ bounce rate or average session duration, enable the creation of buyer personas. A buyer persona or a customer avatar represents your ideal customer. A compelling buyer persona will embody your customers’ characteristics as well as the pain points or challenges they face. So, buyer personas will help you understand what kind of content your audience will resonate with and how to market that content effectively.
Do Keyword Research
Keyword research is essential not only for understanding what people are searching for or what your competitors are ranking for but also for generating content ideas. Once you have established what keywords your business can rank for, you can start planning your content. So, it’s easier to use keywords as idea generators rather than write an article and try to fit them in after.
Other idea generators are sites like Reddit and Quora or digital places where your audience gathers, such as forums or Facebook groups. If you want to gain more insight into what generates engagement, search your main keyword and see what related searches generate the most views and comments. It has become a common 21st-century fact that using the right keywords will increase your website’s visibility and performance. So, you should treat keyword research as a necessity rather than an option.
Switch Up Your Content
Did you know that a majority of American consumers prefer videos to learn about services or products? Recording a podcast or a video is more challenging than writing an article, but it will also be worth it. Mixing up your content will differentiate you from your competitors. Besides, it will also make targeting different audiences easier as you produce content that matches various preferences. So, including video in your content strategy will have a long-lasting impact on users.
Write Compelling & Informative Titles
Title tags will inform both users and search engines about your content. Besides, they also help search engines assess the relevance of your web page. Some things to remember:
- Keep titles shorter than 60 characters
- Include relevant keywords, but avoid keyword stuffing
- Use action words
- Write different titles for each page
First impressions matter, and headlines are the first things that users see. It would be a shame if people didn’t read your exciting article just because the title didn’t speak to them!
Keep Content Above the Fold
“Above the fold” is the area of a webpage that’s visible without having to scroll down. This type of content is especially important for organic search visitors. It’s all about user experience. You want them to find what they came for on your site as easily as possible. Although Google doesn’t prioritize above-the-fold content anymore, placing content like this can help with user experience and social shares.
Let Us Write For You!
It can be easy to overlook what matters most to consumers in this ever-changing digital world. Your customers are the heart of your business; hence, they should also be your utmost priority. Creating content that ranks shouldn’t be the final aim. Instead, you should focus on creating valuable content that matches the users’ search intent and offers them what they want. Convinced that insightful content is the way to go but unsure where to start? CadenceSEO may be the answer you have been searching for. We navigate the latest trends and practices while prioritizing a customer-centric approach. Let us help you create valuable, SEO-friendly content that will increase brand visibility, boost organic traffic, and propel your business to new heights. Contact our team of SEO nerds for a free consultation today!