SEO content is all about your audience. If you want to improve your content marketing, you have to use SEO. Highly-ranked content that drives traffic and leads should be user-focused. When you write for the right people, your content will perform better.
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Write To The Right People With Targeted Keywords
Your content isn’t going to reach the right people if you don’t optimize it with carefully targeted keywords. Targeted keywords are the keywords and phrases that your audience is searching for. To find these keywords, you will need to understand:
- Who your audience is
- What kind of information they’re looking for
- Why they need this information
- Which keywords they’re using to find it
This might seem like a lot, but you can break this down into some activities:
- Audience research. Identify who wants and needs what you offer. Find where they are online. Talk to them to work out their habits, preferences, demographics, and stats.
- Keyword research. Find relevant keywords that relate to your niche, your audiences’ searches, and your products.
- Topic research. Come up with content topics based on the keywords you’ve found and what your audience whats to know.
Learn more about finding keywords.
Focus On Readability
SEO content that gets to the top of results pages needs to be readable. When your audience clicks on your link, every single element on the page should make them want to stay and read your content. When people stay and read, this makes your page look really good to Google.
When people stay on your page, this tells Google that it is relevant to the search query and the user has found the information that they were looking for.
This is called dwell time, which is the amount of time that passes between the point when you click on a search result and the point when you go back to a results page.
Readability helps to extend dwell times with a few things:
- Clarity
- Organization
- Logic
- Simplicity
To be readable, your content needs to get its information across in an understandable way.
When your content is understandable to more people, more people will stay on your site longer, and which will help your Google rankings.
Go Deeper In Your Content
A big trend for SEO is creating content that goes deeper into your topic.
This works for higher rankings because Google is looking for good quality content. Sites that can provide depth in quality content coverage can really boost their rankings compared to sites that are weaker in the depth of their content.
It looks like this trend is only going to continue, so it’s well worth trying to create content that is more in-depth. How can you create deeper content?
- Write long-form blog posts. Aim for 2000 words or more for these in-depth posts.
- Explore topics that have a lot of different angles to explore.
- Write ultimate guides.
- Go beyond the basic research. Instead of using Google for research, use JSTOR or Google Scholar. Industry publications could help too.