Are you wondering how to increase your SEO ranking while using and creating relevant content? These handy copywriting tips can be the key to guide you in how and what to post.
1. Set An Intention
Choosing a realistic keyword goal is the start of your writing journey. Going into it, have a clear target in mind for your keywords as it’s best to have achievable goals before beginning your content; this will set you up for success. Industry terms with a higher search volume are often extremely competitive. Websites holding less authority are unlikely to rank on the first pages, regardless of their content quality. Finding Keywords that have a difficulty score to the same value or less than your site’s DA have more informational search intent, yet present opportunities for your content to quickly increase rank and drive more clicks.
2. Do Your Research
The top-ranking content is ready and waiting for you on the first page. If you want to know what takes first rank, analyse the top ranking content and use them to mould your own content. Look at all the key feature of this content. Note the length, page title and meta descriptions that are calling users to click.
You don’t want to create a complete copy of your competitors, but do this to better your understanding of what kind of content, authority, writing style and page experiences Google crawlers are responding to.
3. Write For Your Audience
Your users are searching for a reason and understanding what that reason is; is search intent. Search intent can be narrowed into four categories: Navigational, Informational, Transactional, and Commercial.
Google will optimise its user’s experience by targeting certain SEO keywords to its user’s search intent category. For example, transactional keywords promote more product or service pages under the assumption its user wants to make a purchase.
Your keyword can be divided into the above four categories, so it is best to make sure your content meets that intent.
4. Quality Above-All
Google’s aim is to give the highest quality content to its users.
Relevance, loading times, backlinks and referrals are seen as the best quality content for Google users. In terms of the quality signals that can be communicated through copywriting, Google looks for:
• Comprehensive, in-depth content
• Original analysis
• Expert sourcing and authorship
• Correct grammar and spelling
5. Hone Your Expertise
Content length does not make a higher ranking, however, there is a strong correlation between longer content and top rankings.This is because the topics mentioned in long content are more likely to include the quality signals listed above.
Be comprehensive and explore all topics of your content in-depth. There are keyword tools that can help you increase the quality of your content by showing you sub-topics that correlate with your keyword goal.
6. Use Tools Available
Making the most out of AI and NLP tools can create boosts in your keyword rankings.
Tools such as Clearscope, SearchAtlas, SEMrush, as well as much more, can have software that creates content optimisation to more accurately conduct your SEO copywriting process. These tools work by identifying common words and topics that are used in the top-ranking content and offer similar terms as a suggestion for your content. Be sure to integrate these terms in a natural flow and the results can be significant.
7. Answer Questions
One of the best ways to improve keyword rankings is to directly answer common questions that your ideal users are asking in relation to your target keyword.
You can find these questions out by two ways: Google Search and a keyword tool.
Look at the People Also Ask and autocompletions offered by Google to see which are the most common questions users are asking about a topic. Make sure you include those questions and clearly state their answers in your content.
8. Add Headings
Your headings are the first point of contact between your users and your content, so it makes sense that Google would take these into consideration for your SEO. It!s imperative to the success of your keywords to include them in your h1s and h2s. Conveniently Google is smart enough to link your headings with synonyms and other related terms.
Google!s NLP algorithms use headings to understand your content more deeply. Adding these terms into your headings can draw strong relevance without seeming to contest your content.
9. Readability Is Key
Your content should be easily understood by all people. This also applies for content that is poorly written or full of typos as well. Poorly written content and bad grammar ruin the integrity of your content and don’t allow for SEO keywords to be picked up.
To improve the reading experience for your users; aim for shorter sentences and paragraphs, while keeping the language simple and accessible, but still on brand.
10. Include Relevant Links
All your internal and external links, as well as the text used to anchor those links into your content, are important quality signals to Google. To ensure you get the most out of your links, link relevant, authoritative and reliable sources, while making sure you utilise the best anchor text practices:
• Anchor text should be relevant to its destination page
• Don!t exactly match your anchor text, it creates more competition between your content and the link in key words
• Avoid generic anchor text (eg. “click here”)
• Use contextual anchor text as often as possible, to continue the flow of the sentence
11. Make It Easy
User-friendly features like a table of contents and links show your content in an easy experience for its users – especially for longer articles or resource pages.
12. Get Google Onboard
Once your content is published give it some time (about a week or so) to gain traction, then log in to your Google Search Console account to ensure Google is reading and understands your content correctly. Make note of keywords that are earning impressions.
If the key words are not close to your original goal, you may need to look into revisions of your original content. If they are the key words you started with, then great! You’re onto a good thing. Impressions are always a great early sign that Google understands your content to promote it.
13. Test Your Tags
Ensure to write optimised meta tags so Google understands your content and encourages users to click.
Don’t go into meta tag optimisation with a close enough is good enough approach. If you notice after a few months, your site gets to page one but still has a low CTR, play around with page titles and meta descriptions to see if and what produces better results.
14. Update Regularly
As with everything in life your content will, overtime, become outdated. It’s not something that can be helped but is something to be aware of.
Revisiting content that does not reach the target performance and adjusting to more relevant content is a simple way to keep your content up to date and on trend.
Content assets that perform the best should be updated a minimum of once a year, particularly if they are dependant on the current trends to make them relevant.
The online space is ever-changing and evolving, and is always good practice to evolve and grow with it. This ensures that your content is best-placed to reach your target audience and will improve your SEO over time.
For guidance on how to get there, reach out to us at Wild & Free Media on hey@wildandfreemedia.com.au.
