When you create content for your site, do you feel torn between pleasing your actual audience and grabbing Google’s attention?
It’s a battle far too many content creators wage on a regular basis, constantly seesawing from one extreme to the next. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way.
3 Ways to Get Your Point Across and Nail SEO Best Practices
You don’t need to choose between creating a well-written piece of content that will prove valuable to your readership and using SEO to earn better rankings.
In fact, back when Matt Cutts was at Google, fighting the good fight to punish low-quality websites that relied on “black hat” SEO tactics, he made it clear that “the best way to compete” was with better content.
The following three tips will help you do this while still applying SEO best practices.
1. Utilize Software for Keyword Research
First, it’s essential that you use software to handle keyword research. If you’ve been interested in SEO for a while, you’ve probably found plenty of guides about how to find keywords without using any tools.
Sure, it’s possible. Most of us could probably get to work every day on foot, too. That’s not very realistic, though. If nothing else, after a week or so, we’d realize these long walks just weren’t a good use of our time.
So, you can do your keyword research manually, but you’d be wasting hours and hours every month that could be better spent creating amazing content.
Here are the top keyword research tools on the market today:
- KWFinder – It doesn’t get much simpler than this tool, which is a real selling point for a lot of people. Even if you’re completely new to using keyword research software, you’ll be up and running in a matter of minutes.
- Google Keyword Planner – While this tool is probably a step-up in terms of complexity compared to KWFinder, it’s also free, so it’s a great option to start with.
- SEMRush – If you’d like a more robust option that can do other helpful things like analyze your competitors, show you where your backlinks come from, and more, this is a fantastic tool.
If you’re using WordPress, another great tool is the Yoast WordPress plugin. Among other things, once you’re done with your post, Yoast will tell you if your main keyword was used enough to show search engines it was the topic of discussion. After all, there’s no point in doing keyword research if Google and others won’t notice.
2. Give Yourself Enough Room to Make Your Point
The cardinal sin of those who just create content for SEO purposes is that they usually don’t write enough to truly make their point. They’ll claim their post will show you how to save for retirement, but it’s only 500 words.
Does that sound like enough for such an expansive topic?
When Brian Dean at Backlinko looked at more than 1 million Google search results, he found that the average page contained 1,890 words.
That’s a lot.
He also found, however, that “topically relevant” content significantly outperformed competition that didn’t cover topics in depth. So, word count isn’t the be-all and end-all SEO factor. It’s more important that you give yourself enough words to do your subject justice.
Neil Patel has a valuable take on the word count debate, as well. In short, he found that longer posts gain more social shares and backlinks (more on that in a moment). Again, this is probably because these articles do a better job fully covering their subjects.
3. Write for People Who Can Give Your Site Backlinks
We just briefly touched on the importance of backlinks, but they are so integral to search engine optimization that we’re giving them their own section.
As Brian Dean is fond of reminding his readers, your audience probably can’t provide backlinks. For example, if you write an article about how to create a budget, it might go over well with our audience, but how many of them can link to it? Do they have websites that are relevant to your niche?
If not, you’ll have to think about creating content for influencers in your market.
What kind of content would they like to share with their preexisting audiences? Could you do research for one of your posts that they might want to leverage for one of theirs?
This kind of approach is central to search engine optimization in 2017 and there’s no reason to think that will ever change. All things being equal, a site with more backlinks will outrank you for any keywords you’re competing over. In fact, thanks to Google’s semantic search feature, they could beat you for keywords they didn’t even use if they’re content is relevant to it.
You can still write what you mean, of course. You’re just considering a wider audience for your content.
Aside from SEMRush, other great platforms for seeing where your competitors get their backlinks from (and, thus, where you should look, too) include:
- Ahrefs: This is largely considered the best backlink analysis tool on the market.
- Magestic SEO: As “the planet’s largest link index database,” this platform is great for finding every link your competition has earned.
- Linkody: The big selling point for Linkody is that it automates backlink analysis for you, including looking at competitors. That’ll save you a lot of time as your content marketing efforts ramp up.
Once you begin writing content your influencers will love, make sure they see it. This strategy takes time, but it will allow you to create meaningful content and earn better rankings.
Search Engines Like What People Like
Here’s the good news behind all this: search engines want to please people. While they haven’t always done a perfect job of this, updates like Google’s Hummingbird show that search engines are becoming better and better at judging what people really want: high-quality, useful information that’s easy to read.
So, while you’ll want to use the SEO best practices we mentioned above, you can rest assured that, in the long run, delighting your audience will delight the search engines, too.
About the Author
Jeff Stec is the Principal at Tylerica Marketing Systems, a “boutique style” marketing agency that emphasizes online presence and inbound marketing. As an Austin marketing expert, Jeff works with small businesses to help them grow by focusing on marketing systems and marketing strategies that are integral to their business, not just “tactics du jour”. Jeff is a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant, A Duct Tape Marketing Total Online Presence Expert, a Yext Certified Partner, and an Austin SEO for Growth agency partner. He is also a contributing author to the book “Renewable Referrals: how to cultivate more profits”.
Source: SEO For Growth