Search engine optimization (SEO) will also remain exciting in the second half of 2021. Recently, the Google Core Web Vitals (additional metrics for evaluating website performance), the EAT principles (assessment of pages according to expertise, authority, and trust), and mobile-only indexing have brought a lot of movement into the topic.
Even if the SEO tide turns quickly and algorithms determine the approach of website operators: content, i.e., the actual, often directly visible content of a website, remains a constant in SEO. Content marketing is, therefore, still one of the most necessary adjusting screws for search engine optimizers, yet content is often published without SEO.
What do website operators have to consider when it comes to their content? The answer is as simple as it is complex: write good content. We have put together ten tips for you, how your content finds its way to the search result pages (SERPs for short, Search Engine Result Pages) and, ideally, even to the top:
Objective: What Is The Strategic Approach Behind SEO Content?
Develop a goal, metric, and strategy for each piece of content. What do you want to achieve with the article or the page? Which strategic plan does the content contribute to – employer branding or expertise? Is it perhaps a text with an advertising flair after all? A defined strategic goal gives your content a central theme.
Target Group: Who Does The Content Address?
Before starting your SEO content measures, define the target groups your products, information, or services are relevant. Creating personas can help you: Who do you want to address? How does this person talk? What does your target group think? Where could she get in? What could put her off? Allocate the content to the content when creating a persona and use it as a guide in terms of language and style, vocabulary, and the choice of call-to-action (CTA). Assigning the personas content also helps you to keep track of which content has been played more recently. The variety also automatically creates diversity in address, design, and strategy.
Keyword research: Which Search Queries Are Written In My Target Audience?
Now that you know your target audience well, it’s time to make a keyword selection. We recommend one topic per page. Think about topic hubs and define focus and secondary keywords, including synonyms and combinations at the topic level. Cluster the keywords you find according to search intent: What is the goal of such a query on Google? The search for “shoe store in Bonn” is undoubtedly based on a different intention than “shoes online shop.” Make the search intent an advantage for your content and align it accordingly by answering questions in the respective search intent cluster (subject area).
Authenticity: How Does My Text Look Natural?
Let the selected keywords flow naturally and relevantly into your text. Don’t force repetitions or unnatural sentence structures to accommodate keywords. Think more in terms of topics and topic hubs than in words and sections. Ask yourself: Does the incorporation of your keywords seem stilted and forced? Does the period feel unnatural, or does it make it difficult to understand the key messages? We advise optimizing texts not only for robots (search engine programs that scan, assess, and classify websites). Remember that search engines imitate human users and are possible to show them relevant content. Write for the person you want to reach, inform, or touch.
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Structure: How Should A Text Be Structured?
Structure your content like a specialist article. Define headlines and subheadings, insert infographics. Summarize interim results and use lists where appropriate and relevant. Ask yourself: Is the topic conveyed in an understandable, informative and attractive way? Does the text appear natural and logically structured? Is the reading flow undisturbed? If you cannot answer “yes” to all of the questions, you should revise the structure of the text again.
Content Maintenance: What Should Be Considered When Adding The Text?
Content SEO doesn’t stop with the creation of the piece of content. So that your content also has the chance to be indexed and “understood” by Google, you should not ignore its technical integration:
- Images should not exceed an image size of max. (!) 500 KB.
- Images should have an alt and title attribute. The alt attribute describes the content of the picture. The title attribute gives the picture a heading.
- The title and meta description should always be relevant, uniquely maintained, and summarize the content.
- Lists should also be marked as HTML lists.
- It is no longer a problem to use multiple h1 headings (the most critical headline) on a single page; make sure that a maximum of one h1 header is used per section.
- Please never insert content directly from Word, as Word’s formatting could be transferred to the What-you-see-is-what-you-get editor.
- For links, please include the rel-attribute no-referrer no opener nofollow. The colleagues from “Remarkable SEO” explained this well in their help article “Rel Nofollow Noopener Noreferrer.”
- Check breaks in various viewports. Use & shy; to specify that long words break at this point if necessary.
Quality Instead Of Quantity: How Long Should An SEO Text Be And Why?
You have probably come across statements like “the text must have at least 6,000 words” in content marketing. According to a February 2020 study by Semrush, longer articles ( at least 3,000 words ) get
- three times as much traffic,
- four times as many shares and
- 3.5 times as many backlinks
Like shorter articles with or under 1,200 words, nevertheless, for you as a website operator, quality should not be subordinate to quantity: Write informative, interesting, keyword-optimized, structured, and well-researched texts – ideally, these are around 3,000 words long. We strongly advise against adding keywords one after the other (keyword stuffing) or using similar techniques.
Frequency: How Often Should Blog Posts Go Online?
If you run a blog or a news site, you should define a frequency for your SEO content. Do you want to publish something once or twice a month? Is this a realistic goal? How flexible would you like to be to react to news or trends, for example? We always advise our customers to have a structured editorial plan, also for SEO content. Note down your ideas, goals, target groups, keywords, and responsibilities and required material, such as header images or photographs, and publish the text within the defined time frame.
Distribution: How Do You Market Your Content Now?
As mentioned, content marketing doesn’t stop after you’ve finished an article. Editors and website operators must keep an eye on potential even after the report has been published. Above all, possible synergies between social media and SEO are often not used: Do you have a social media channel, and if so, do you regularly share your SEO-optimized content there? Do you also share new blog articles there and connect the tracks, for example, via link-in-bio functions (so that users can also access blog articles via the link in the biography of your social media profile)? We advise you also to use SEO content via social media channels to distribute to exploit their full content potential.
Analysis And Optimization: Do SEO Texts Stay The Same As They Once Went Live?
Keep an eye on your article or page even after it’s published. Use tracking solutions or external tools to monitor the performance of the SEO content. Suppose you notice that focus and secondary keywords are not ranking as planned. In that case, you can optimize them afterward: Search for new combinations and synonyms, rearrange texts and use more relevant terms. Also, note the loading times of your page; these can be checked with Google PageSpeed Insights
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