We all know that to generate good SEO results a website needs to feature some great content. And, as a B2B PR agency, we work with our clients to make sure their content works hard for them both for PR and SEO. Here, Graham Robinson, managing director at digital agency, Shoga, tells us why we need to produce compelling content and offers his top tips for optimising your content for SEO.
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To get the edge over the competition, search engines need to deliver the best results to their users. To do this, they evaluate each web page in their results and give it an authority score. This score is based upon several factors, but the most important ones are the quality and structure of the content on the page and the number of incoming links.
The authority score of all pages on a website contributes to the overall authority score given to a website domain. This is one of the key factors for search engines when deciding where to rank sites within its results.
One of the main ways to improve a website’s authority score is to regularly write lots of detailed, keyword-rich content on dedicated pages. If this content is sufficiently topical and insightful, then it will attract the all-important incoming links from high domain authority websites.
So, when it comes to rankings, content is key. Here’s my top tips for optimising your content for SEO:
- Start with research to identify your keywords
Before you dive in, do some research around the topic you’re writing about. Identify the words and phrases your target audience are using when searching. The Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a good place to start. Also, have a look at who’s ranking first for the topic you’re targeting and look at what they’re doing to get there. Don’t just pick a single search term, have a look for associated words and include these in your article too. - Find the right place for your content
Try not to shoehorn lots of topics into a single article as this will result in a page which is too general in terms of content. It’s best to create dedicated pages that focus on a specific topic. These landing pages can then be fully optimised around a specific term alongside other devoted pages. The aim is to get each landing page ranking highly for specific search terms alongside your website homepage. - Write your content for people, not search engines
Don’t stuff your content with multiple occurrences of the same search term. The days when this technique worked are long gone and it’s mentioned in Google’s quality guidelines. If you’re writing about a certain topic, it’s natural to include specific words and phrases around it. Search engines are intelligent enough now to understand the context of your page content without the need for repeating a keyword a multiple times. - Ensure your content is correctly formatted
If you’ve got your article ready and found a home for it on a dedicated landing page, it’s important to tweak it so that it’s got the right structure. Search engines expect a page to be structured in a specific way. To cater for this, each page should have a meta title and description. Further details on formatting these correctly can be found here. It should also include heading and paragraph tags and important words and phrases should be highlighted in bold. It should contain a range of multimedia items such as images and videos and it should also link out to external sources where the reader can find further information on the topic. - Shout about your amazing content
It’s now time to share your content with the world. You could have created the most insightful and innovative article on a topic but if no one knows about it, they won’t link to it or share it with others. So to raise the profile of your content, ensure you syndicate it on PR newswires and across your social media presence. If there are other bloggers out there talking about the same topic, engage with them and share your content with them. Search for forums and social media groups that specialise in the topic and engage with the community.
