Content SEO is an important part of your SEO strategy. Without content, it would be impossible for your website to rank on search engines. Therefore, it is important to create and configure high quality content. This ultimate guide covers the most important areas of content SEO. If you want to learn how to create ranked content, read on.
Table of Contents
What is content SEO?
Content SEO refers to the creation of content that helps search engines rank web pages higher. It covers everything related to creating and structuring content on your website. There are three main factors to consider in order to create content that ranks your site well: keyword strategy, site structure, and copywriting.
Content SEO is important because search engines such as Google read websites. Therefore, the words you use on your website determine whether your website is ranked on the results page. Of course, your website should be well designed with a great user interface, and all the technical things to rank your website on Google should also be covered. But without high-quality content, your site has no chance for search engines.
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1. Keyword research
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is basically a step you take to create an extensive list of keywords you want to rank. If you want to generate traffic, you need to know what your audience is searching for, so your content SEO strategy should start with a keyword search. Keyword research helps you find terms that you should aim for ranking.
- First, write down your company’s mission.
- Then make a list of all the keywords you want to search.
- Then check the search intent.
- Finally, create a landing page for all these keywords.
Proper keyword research requires a clear understanding of the terms used and the terms used to search your website page. This overview serves as a guide for writing content to your website.
Why is keyword research so important for SEO content?
Appropriate keyword research will clarify the search terms used by your target audience. This is very important. At Yoast, we regularly encounter customers who use certain words when talking about products, but they use completely different words. It doesn’t make sense to create and optimize SEO content for words that people don’t use. A good keyword search ensures that you’re using the same words as your target audience, so every effort to optimize your website is worth it.
Some terms we use in keyword research
Keywords and key phrases
We always tend to use the word “keyword”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be one word. “WordPress SEO” is a keyword like “Google Analytics Plugin”. Therefore, you can have a keyword that contains multiple words!
long tail keyword
The longer (and more specific) the search term, the easier it is to rank the term. More specific (usually longer) keywords are usually called long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are more specific and more niche-focused.
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How many keywords?
It could be very difficult to offer an specific wide variety of key phrases you need to recognition on. And then again, it`s very simple: You simply want to have a lot – as many as you could arise with. More than 1,000 key phrases might be too many though!
Even if you`re a fairly small business, you`ll probable emerge as with more than one hundred key phrases. But you don`t must create pages for all of those straight away. The wonderful factor approximately having a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is that you could regularly upload content. Think approximately what key phrases you would really like to rank for proper away, and which of them aren`t straight away important. Determine what your priorities are and plan the introduction of your content.
Head or tail?
Keyword classification is essential. Some keywords are very common and competitive (head), others are long tail keywords. Decide what your most important high-level keywords are-the ones that generate enough traffic for your website and are most suitable for your business. You probably only have some of these common keywords for your business, the rest tend to fall on the roadside. The next section provides more information about long tail keywords (and what these keywords mean).
Top-keyword-focused SEO content should be placed on the site’s top-level pages (home page and one level below the home page), while long-tail keyword-focused content is rather on your web. The bottom of the site.
Keyword intent and search intent
When doing a keyword survey, it’s very helpful to think about your search intent. If they enter your keyword as a search term, are they looking for information? Or is it their goal to buy something? The intent of the keywords is clear with keywords such as “buy a leather sofa” and “how to train a puppy”. But it’s not always easy.
Four types of intent
Navigation intent: People want to visit a particular website, but instead of entering a URL, enter a term into a search engine.
Information Intent: People are trying to find answers to specific questions or information on specific topics.
Commercial intent: People want to buy something in the near future and do some research before buying it.
Transaction Intent: People want to buy something after completing a search for commercial intent.
Search engines are always trying to be accurate about what people need, and it’s getting better and better by guessing people’s intent. Simply put, 95% of people who search for “replace car tires” have an intent to provide information, and optimizing the transaction intent to sell tires is almost never ranked. Probably.
Check the SERPs
When you do a keyword survey, you’ll see a wealth of information on the results page. If you want to know what the intent of the people using your keywords is, do a Google search for those keywords and take a closer look at the search results. Try to create content that matches the specific needs extracted from the results of each keyword. This post details how to use search results to create the right content for you.
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Keyword research tools you can use
There many keyword research tools you can use but I personally use H-SUPERTOOLS and SEMRUSH KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOL and I think they are the best
Adapting your keyword strategy
Your keyword strategy is not static. It should change and evolve with your business and website. It should evolve and grow with you. If not, you are wrong with it.
You should monitor changes in your company and adjust your strategy at the same time. Add your keywords to the list when your new product is for sale in your online store. If you’re targeting new markets, it’s important that your keywords also target those new markets.
There are several keyword strategies you can use. The
first ranks long-tail keywords and then targets broader keywords, but focuses on broader keywords and then targets more long-tail keywords. You can do it too. You can zoom in to track more niche activities, broaden your approach, add content to different things, or both at the same time.
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2. Site structure
The second important aspect of content SEO is the structure of your website. First, I’ll explain why page structure is so important, and then I’ll show you what the ideal page structure looks like. We also share tips for (quickly) improving page structure without completely interrupting the core of your site.
Why is site structure important for content SEO?
There are two main reasons why page structure is an important ranking factor and therefore essential for creating SEO content.
a. A good structure helps Google to ‘understand’ your site
The way your website is structured gives Google important clues as to where to find the most important content. The structure of your site determines whether search engines understand what your site is about and how easy it is to find and index content that is relevant to your site’s purpose and intent. Therefore, a good page structure leads to a higher rank on Google.
By creating such a structure, you can use existing content that attracts links from other pages to rank other pages as well. The structure of your site helps distribute some of that link juice to other pages of your site. On a commercial site, that means that you can use highquality content you`ve written to boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too.
B. Good structure avoids conflicting with your own SEO content
Your website probably has several articles on similar topics. For example, Yoast writes about SEO. If you’ve written eight articles about SEO, Google doesn’t know which one is the most important. If we don’t clarify that in our site structure, we’ll be competing for Google’s top spot in our own articles. Therefore, solving these problems with a robust internal link structure will result in a higher overall ranking.
The ideal structure of a site
Ideally, you should configure your site like a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid is the home page, which has links to several other pages (such as category pages). These pages link to more pages.
An effective content SEO strategy links your keyword strategy with how your website is organized. With the right keyword strategy, we’ve been thinking about both popular competitive keywords and long-tail niche search terms. You need to create a similar dichotomy for your site structure. Pages that focus on more common search terms appear at the top of the pyramid, and pages optimized for longer-tail keywords appear at the bottom of the site structure. These long tail pages at the bottom of the pyramid should be correctly linked to the pages above the pyramid.
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Profitable tips on improving your site structure
If you’re serious about content SEO, you probably already have a live website. Therefore, ideally setting up the structure of your website in the form of a pyramid may be a bit slow. Don’t Despair-There’s still a lot you can do to improve the structure and SEO content of your website.
Decide upon cornerstone content
You should focus your efforts on the underlying article. These are the items you are most proud of and best fit the mission of your website. Indeed, this ultimate guide is one of our foundations. You want to rank the highest for these articles. If you haven’t decided which article is the most important, think about it now. Make these articles the best ones on your site. Give them extra TLC and update them regularly.
Link from tail to head
Once you have determined your valuable foundations, make sure you link to those foundations from all the “tail” articles. That way, Google knows which items are ranked best. Read all about it in our article on incorporating the foundations into the structure of your website. Yoast SEO Premium has an advanced internal linking tool that automatically suggests related articles to link to.
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Use tags (but not too many)
Your website will also benefit from adding tags. Tags and taxonomy make your website more structured, or at least better understood by Google. Group articles on similar topics. But don’t overdo it. Some people have more tags than articles. Using too many tags will lead to a confusing, poorlystructured website.
Avoid duplicate content
The same SEO content can appear in multiple locations on your site. As a reader, you don’t care: you still get the content you came from. However, search engines don’t want to see the same content twice, so you need to choose what you want to see in your search results.
If other websites link to your product, some of them may link to the first URL and others may link to the second URL. However, if all of these duplicates link to the same URL, you’re much more likely to be in the top 10 for related keywords. Normalization is a solution for replicating content. You can configure the canonical URL on the Advanced tab of Yoast SEO.
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Remove old SEO content
Need to keep old content? That is, you can choose to update, merge, or redirect as part of regular SEO content maintenance. If the content on page
is out of date, delete it. However, there may be some valuable links to this page. Consider redirecting the URL because you want to be able to benefit from these links even if the page no longer exists. With the Yoast SEO Premium plugin to help handle
redirects, page redirects aren’t difficult. If possible, redirect the old URL (301) to the page or product that replaced the old page or product, or to the related page if there is no replacement. This can be a category page for each product, or as a last resort, a home page. That way, the (old) pages won’t disturb the page structure.
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Deal with orphaned content
The term “isolated content” refers to articles that do not contain links to other articles or posts. This makes these articles difficult for both Google and site users to find. Google ranks this type of content as less important. Therefore, if an article is important to you, make it clear to Google (and your visitors) by linking to that particular article from other (related) content. Read more about solving isolated article problems in the article about orphaned content.
Deal with content cannibalization
If you have been writing content for some time, you may have dozens of articles on a given topic. Search engines and users can be confused if these articles say the same thing. You have so much similar content that your content can compete with itself in search engines. This is known as cannibalism of keywords. That’s not bad in nature, but it’s something you have to see. Is your article working as expected, or is competition hurting your chances at the top of the rankings? Fortunately, it’s not difficult to find and fix cannibalism in keywords.
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3. Copywriting for content SEO
The third and final aspect of a successful content SEO strategy is copywriting. The most important thing is to write an article that is appealing to you to read and will keep your audience on your site. At the same time, we want to make SEO content attractive to Google. However, some people go too far and tweak their content so openly that it’s terribly read. Yoast recommends optimizing your text for search without compromising the originality of your ideas or the readability of your text.
Writing SEO copy starts with an original idea
The first requirement for high quality copywriting is to write the original content. Blog posts or articles should be “fresh,” new, and original. This should be different from all other blog posts and articles that already exist on the internet. It should be the content that people want to read. If you do a good job of searching for
keywords, you’ll end up with a long list of terms you’re looking for. This list will serve as a guide. Keywords are not a problem yet. Try to come up with the original idea for your blog post. In other words, the idea is that the focus keywords you need are in a prominent place.
Original SEO content does not necessarily mean new content. Of course, if your story is completely new, it automatically means it’s original. However, expressing a (professional) opinion on a particular topic also counts as the original content. Your unique perspective on the story makes your content unique and original.
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Think about your audience
If you want to write your own content, you need to think about your viewers and their audience. Also, ask yourself.
- What do you want to convey to the audience?
- What is the main message of your article?
- Please tell the purpose of the article.
- After reading your article, what do you want your audience to do? (Would you like them to participate, buy yours and read more posts?)
Thinking about these questions will help you come up with creative ideas for your posts and articles.
Content design and content SEO
Content design is a process that helps you create content based on the needs of real users. Not only will it help you understand what your users want, but it will also focus on what they really need. Thinking about content in this way, users can get it when and in the language and format they need.
Content design is more than just a technique for creating better content, it’s a new way of thinking about content. If you want to know more about content design, read Content Design: A great way to create user-centered content.
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Copywriting requires readable SEO content
An important requirement for writing quality content is to write content that is easy to read. Readability is important to both viewers and Google. After all, people not only read your articles, but Google too. If the
text is properly structured and clearly written, the reader will understand your message, but perhaps more importantly, it will also help Google understand it better. When your main message is clearer to Google, your post is much more likely to be ranked better in search engines. Readability of the
is related to many factors, such as text structure, sentence length, and clear paragraph description. Read all about the importance of readability in this post. For readability tips, see the article to make the article easier to read.
Content, context and search intent
As Google gets smarter, it’s starting to better understand the content of its website, thanks to many developments in natural language processing like BERT. It’s not just the number of times a keyword appears on a page. It also takes into account the context of these keywords, such as: B. Simultaneous terms and phrases, related words and synonyms. In addition, as mentioned earlier, Google can better understand a user’s query: it tries to understand what the user’s search intent is. Is he or she looking for a product or just information? Which page is best suited for this intent?
All of these developments mean that you need to focus more than using keywords often enough. This also means that you need to think about the words you use: do they clarify the topic you are talking about? Also, do you keep in mind the purpose of the post or page you create? Is it just providing information, or is it trying to sell something, or is it exactly what the user is really looking for? Yoast SEO Premium lets you optimize your SEO content with synonyms and related keyphrases, making it even easier to add context to your articles.
Optimize content for search engines and readers
The final requirement for creating high quality content is to make sure that your content is optimized for your search engine. You need to be able to find SEO content easily. Discoverability has to do with increasing the likelihood that Google will retrieve the content of the results page. It’s important to perform this last step after writing an original, easy-to-read post.
Yoast SEO helps you optimize your text a bit more. Once you’ve written an article, focused on its original idea, and optimized the readability of your post, you need to review Yoast SEO’s SEO analysis. The red and orange bullet points indicate which aspects of discoverability require a little more attention. However, as long as the overall score is good, you don’t need a green ball on all sides.
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Conclusion on content SEO
Content search engine optimization is any such large a part of search engine optimization. It encompasses all of the factors of writing and structuring content material to your internet site. Content search engine optimization is essential. No one will study your content material if it`s crappy. Like visitors, Google reads and scans your internet site text. Google`s set of rules comes to a decision the rating of your web website online in large part primarily based totally at the content material you publish. And all of us recognise content material is king. So, you want to write down remarkable search engine optimization content material, recognition at the proper key phrases and shape your internet site in any such manner Google knows it. It`s quite a few work, however it’ll repay withinside the lengthy run.
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