When it comes to crafting a successful SEO strategy for any online business, content undoubtedly lies at the core. Unless you have valuable, engaging and keyword-optimized content, you cannot expect to get results with SEO. It is, therefore, essential for internet marketers to focus on churning out the best content that can help them to lay the foundation of a robust and result-oriented marketing plan. The idea is to be very clear about the kind of content that is capable of driving tangible results at a rapid pace. This content not only encompasses the one that makes up your website or blog but also everything that you post as a part of your off-page plan. Here are some tips to generate quality content that brings results for your SEO strategy.
1. Know your target audience
With internet selling, everything boils down to building a buyer persona because you cannot actually come face-to-face with the actual customer. Before you conceptualize your content, know your audience, their demographics, preferences, and the information they expect. Once you have a well-defined picture of the audience, you will be able to come up with the targeted keywords. Accordingly, you can enrich the content with these keywords. While optimized content propels SEO, it also gets Google to prioritize your site for serving relevance to the target audience.
2. Focus on long-form and informative content
As mentioned in the last point, Google loves relevance in content and making it more informative will get you double the love. Long form content on your website and blogs does the job, provided that it yields relevant and in-depth information that is really useful for the audience. Again this kind of write-up brings dual benefits; not only does it boost your SEO but also has a positive impact on the audience. The longer a user stays engaged with your content, the better are the chances of conversion. Also, it portrays you as a trustworthy site that is concerned about catering rich information to the audience.
3. Keep it genuine and readable
Another mantra for creating great content for SEO is by keeping it genuine and readable. Being genuine means that you are providing authentic information that is taken from a reliable source yet is not lifted. Google has its own evaluation system that is capable of recognizing plagiarized content in seconds and can penalize you for the same. Readability is equally important, both for on-page content as well as guest posting. Keeping the content simple and well formatted is the key to meeting the standards of readability.
4. Enrich it with reliable facts and statistics
While storytelling is the soul of content, facts and statistics are the heart. They can actually go a long way in building audience trust and compelling them to convert. Make sure that your blog posts and articles are enriched with facts and statistics from reliable sources. Do not just quote random numbers but reference them to authoritative sources on the internet to get the audience to trust these figures completely. Adding graphs and charts is also a good idea to make these facts and statistics more credible and easily understandable for the audience.
5. Invest in visuals as well
Content is powerful indeed but adding visuals to it is capable of enhancing the impact manifold. Add relevant images to create an engaging journey that offers a powerful combination of text and images to the visitor. Human beings are wired to notice images and be engaged with them better than with text alone. Invest in contextual and high-quality images that add value to the content. You can even get creative and use video pieces to make the user experience more interactive. Make sure that the images and videos are optimized so that they do not hamper the page speed or disrupt the user experience.
6. Format content for featured snippets too
Do not confine your content strategy to on-page and blog posts but also optimize the featured snippets to get your SEO on the top. A well-optimized one is more likely to get your site on high rankings because Google automatically pulls snippets with rich and informative content on the top most search positions. Also, there are greater chances of the users clicking your site’s link and accessing it of they find relevant and useful information in the featured snippet.
7. Optimize for the voice search trend
Keeping pace with the latest trends is the goal, both for creating a winning content and SEO strategy for your business. Going by the latest search trend, you need to optimize content for voice searches to empower your SEO plan and get your site a high ranking. Since users are more likely to ask questions and seek answers, the best way to do content is to make it conversational. Insert long-tailed keywords smartly and get your posts answer the questions that an average buyer is likely to ask as a part of voice search.
8. Get user-generated content on your website
Another content trend that you should follow for better SEO results is that of getting user-generated content (UGC) on your website. As the name suggests, UGC refers to the content that comes from the audience rather than marketers. These pieces can be in the form of reviews, testimonials and user stories. Such content builds the trust of the audience and also gets you an extended social reach because audience tends to trust people rather than brands. Overall, such write-ups can give your ranking a boost and also strengthen your brand presence.
Content has always been the king and continue to be the same. Marketers should, therefore, get more attentive while creating pieces that are worthy, shareable and valuable for the users. Unless brands focus on creating engaging content, they can neither think of getting the audience to the website on the first place nor compelling them to complete their journey successfully. All in all, this is one of the most important elements that drive SEO and determine its success to a considerable extent.
