Creating High-Quality SEO-Friendly Content: Important Tips to Consider

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plays a crucial role in improving your website’s visibility on Google and other search engines. It is the best and most cost-effective way to reach your target audience. However, you must understand the fact that the quality of your website content also matters along with how well it is optimized. Poor content quality cannot perform even when SEO is perfectly done. Similarly, poorly optimized web pages cannot perform even if the quality of content is good. 

In order to make it to the top of search engine result pages, you need to focus on content quality while ensuring that you follow SEO best practices. Let us discuss how you can create high-quality content that is also SEO-friendly.

What is SEO Optimized Content?

SEO-optimized content is content written in such a way that search engines consider it worth ranking higher in the SERPs. In other words, SEO content writing is the process of creating content in a way that makes it rank higher on search engines. This is done by optimizing the content for specific keywords, maintaining good content quality, writing helpful content, and making the content easy to understand for users as well as search engines. 

Importance of SEO Writing

If you don’t optimize your content for search engines, it will never be visible to the right audience no matter how good content you have written. To make your content visible, it is important to keep SEO best practices in mind. SEO is like a bridge that helps search engines reach your content and position it in the search results. SEO writing can help you improve your website’s organic visibility by achieving high SERP rankings.

Tips To Create High-Quality SEO-Friendly Content 

Here are a few essential tips to consider for creating high-quality content that is also well-optimized for search engines:

1. Keyword Research: Finding Primary and Secondary Keywords

Doing keyword research is the first and most important step in the SEO content writing process. You can use a keyword research tool to find the top search terms in your specific niche. These tools provide you with a long list of keywords that are relevant and related to your niche. But not all these keywords can be the primary keywords for your content.

In order to choose the primary keyword, you can consider a few factors like the relevance of the keyword, search volume, traffic potential, and keyword difficulty. A keyword that is relevant and has high search volume and high traffic potential is ideal to be the primary keyword. Also, keep the keyword difficulty score in mind. The higher this score, the more difficult it is to rank for that keyword.

After finalizing the primary keyword, you can choose the secondary keywords that are closely related to the topic. By incorporating some secondary keywords, you can increase your chances of ranking for a wide range of keywords. Also, the secondary keywords are usually long-tail keywords and hence, are easier to rank for.

2. Do a Thorough Research about The Topic

Once you know which keywords you need to target, you can create topics around those keywords. Before writing about any topic, it is essential to have a thorough understanding of it. Use already existing articles, case studies, and other online/offline resources to understand the topic well. You won’t be able to answer user queries and write helpful content unless you have a clear idea of what the topic is all about.

3. Fulfill Users’ Search Intent

Search intent refers to the expectation of users when they search for a particular term or keyword on Google. In order to ensure that your content is well optimized for search engines, you must fulfill users’ search intent. An important question that arises here is: How do you identify what type of content will fulfill the search intent of users? You can do this by looking at the top-ranking articles for a particular keyword on Google.

Enter your target keyword in the Google search bar and open the first few top-ranked web pages to understand what type of content performs the best for that keyword. The best way to improve your search engine rankings now is to focus on search intent and offer the best user experience.

4. Write High-Quality Content that is Easy to Understand

The quality of content matters the most. Google is continuously improving its algorithms to prioritize high-quality helpful content and push down low-quality content that is aimed at ranking higher by manipulating search engines.

Your content should be well-written and must be easy to understand for your target audience. Instead of just stuffing keywords and following other such practices to manipulate search engines, focus on the below-mentioned factors to deliver high quality:

• The content should be original and not copied from any other already existing web page.
• The content should add value to your target audience.
• The content should be unique and accurate.
• The content should be written in an engaging manner.

Make sure that your content is written by writing professionals and demonstrates EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). 

Also Read: What is High Quality Content and Why is It Important?

5. Incorporate Keywords Naturally into The Content

It is important to incorporate keywords into the content, but they should not seem to be forced into the content. You should add keywords only where they seem relevant. The unnecessary incorporation of keywords is considered keyword stuffing, which is a black-hat SEO technique. Keyword stuffing can make your content look spammy to search engines. Not only this, but even the readers lose interest when they find that keywords are unnecessarily forced into the content. Therefore, keyword stuffing should be strictly avoided.

6. Use Subheadings To Better Structure the Content

Will you develop interest in a long blog post that is just one paragraph with no subheadings and sections in between? Probably not. This is why adding headings and subheadings becomes extremely important to make your content interesting and easy to read. It also helps you better organize your content and make it engaging to read.

With subheadings, readers also find it convenient to find information that is relevant to their interests as they don’t need to read the entire blog post if they are trying to find the answer to a particular question. They can directly jump to the relevant subheadings and find the information they are looking for. 

7. Improve The Readability of Your Content

The readability of your content also matters when it comes to the most important factors contributing to your search engine rankings. If your content is difficult to read, search engines as well as the users will find it difficult to understand its context. To improve the readability, you will have to keep a few factors in mind:

• Make sure that there are not too many long sentences in your content.
• The vocabulary should be easy to understand for your target audience.
• Sentences should be reframed in a simple manner and must not be too complicated.
• Paragraphs should not be too long. You can break down text into multiple paragraphs for better readability.
• Use numbered lists and bullet points wherever suitable.
• You can also use visual elements like infographics or data charts when written text seems complex.

You can find various tools online to check the readability of your content. By using these tools, you can identify if there are any potential problems in your content and improve them before publishing the content.

8. Add Relevant Internal Links

Link building also plays a vital role in your search engine rankings. When publishing an article or blog post on your website, see if you can add any internal links. Internal links are the URLs that point to your own website. If you are publishing a blog and you remember that you have written a related blog post in the past, you can add a link to that blog to the new one or vice versa.

This is helpful for search engines as well as readers to find more pages on your website. But make sure that you only add internal links where they are relevant. Don’t just add any random internal links for the sake of achieving higher rankings as it can mislead the users.

9. Answer User Queries Within The Content to Appear in Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are search engine results that show a web page’s content along with its URL for specific user queries. Although Google doesn’t show featured snippets for every user query, these snippets are a great opportunity for websites to improve their visibility. See if Google shows featured snippets for your primary or secondary keyword.

Optimize your content for the same keywords and write content in a similar manner. For some queries, Google may be showing paragraph featured snippets, for other queries, it may be showing numbered lists, and so on. Don’t just replicate the content of your competitors. You can just take inspiration from the way they have written content, which is ranking on featured snippets. Try to write content in your own way and make it more engaging to outrank the competitor.

Also Check: How to Optimize for Featured Snippets to Rank on Position Zero

10. Write a Catchy and Well-Optimized Meta Title

The meta title of a web page is the title that is visible in the search engine result pages. It is the first impression of your web page for users as well as the search engines. Google uses the title tag to understand the context of your web page and users will click on your page’s URL only if this title appeals to their interests. So, make sure that the meta title of your web page is catchy and relevant to the primary keyword. Ideally, the length of the meta title should be between 55 to 60 characters. Also, it should contain the primary keyword.

11. Write Appealing Meta Descriptions

The meta description is the text that is displayed along with your page’s meta title and URL in the search engine result pages. This meta description should give a brief overview of the web page’s content. It should be written in such a way that it encourages users to click on the URL and visit your page. Although it’s not a ranking factor, it can impact a user’s decision of whether to click on your web page or ignore it. The length of a meta description should be not more than 160 characters.

12. Update The Content Regularly

In order to stay relevant in the eyes of search engines, you must update your content regularly. Even if your web page is ranking in the top three results today, it may see a decline in the rankings a few months later. This decline is known as content decay and the best way to avoid content decay is regularly updating your website content with the latest information and market trends.

13. Keep The Content Length Optimal

The length of your content should neither be too short nor too large. Too short content might not be able to achieve high rankings on search engines. On the other hand, content that is too lengthy might seem boring to the audience. Therefore, it is always a good idea to go for medium-length blog posts and articles. You can even go for lengthy ones if you are confident enough in the topic you are writing about. It should just keep the audience engaged.

What Our SEO Experts Have to Say?

With Google’s advanced algorithms, the quality of content has become an even more important aspect to consider for website owners. You can no longer achieve high search rankings by writing poor-quality content and stuffing keywords into it just to manipulate search engines. The content must be SEO-optimized but the optimization must be done in a way that doesn’t hamper user experience. Incorporate keywords naturally, add internal links only where they are relevant, and keep the content length optimal to improve user experience. Better user experience will eventually lead to higher search engine rankings.

The SEO Agency in India at MadHawks recommend creating user-first content. Try to identify what users want to see when they visit your web page and write the content accordingly. For any further assistance with SEO or content, you can connect with our experts today!