How do you make your content user-friendly AND searchable?

In my experience, knowing your audience is the compass that guides user-friendly and searchable content creation. Understanding their pain points, goals, interests, and search behavior is paramount. Google Analytics, Google Trends, social media insights, and surveys are valuable tools to gain audience insights. By crafting content tailored to their needs and expectations, you increase the likelihood of reaching them effectively through search. A well-informed content strategy caters to your audience, delivering valuable experiences and boosting visibility in the vast digital landscape.

Ensure you divide your text into smaller paragraphs, approximately every 200-300 words, and incorporate bullet and numbered lists. These white spaces enhance the article's readability. Additionally, consider integrating more images throughout your content to break the text and provide readers with visual cues. For instance, in a 2000-word blog, avoid including only four images. Aim for a minimum of ten images distributed throughout the article to enhance interactivity and user-friendliness.

Understanding your target audience's needs, preferences, and language is crucial. Tailor your content to meet their expectations and provide them with valuable information.

Make customer research a priority. By understanding the exact needs, challenges, and interests of your audience, you will naturally be able to create content that makes your target audience happy AND performs well for organic search

I've learnt a few golden rules for crafting content that's both user-friendly and searchable. Firstly, understanding my audience is pivotal. I invest time in audience research to ensure my content resonates with them. I then strike a balance between human touch and SEO optimisation. Keyword research is indispensable, but I never stuff my content with them; instead, I weave them naturally into engaging narratives. The use of subheadings, bullet points, etc aids readability. Regularly updating my content, keeping up with the latest SEO trends, and ensuring mobile compatibility have been invaluable too. It's an art and science combined, and while it requires continuous learning, the results are undeniably worth it.

Don't just go after broad keywords. Optimize for long-tail keywords to capture more specific and targeted search traffic, increasing the chances of attracting qualified leads.

Start with the words and phrases you know your audience is using on a day-to-day basis. Then think about the intent of the words you're going after. Some will inevitably be relevant, but what intent lurks behind that keyword? Ideally, it's medium to high buying intent.

Conduct keyword research to identify the terms and phrases your audience is likely to use when searching for content like yours. Incorporate these keywords naturally into your content to improve its visibility in search results.

Make sure Keyword Intent is considered when selecting your content's focus keywords. Keyword Intent refers to the reason a person searches a term. With every keyword, you must consider the type of traffic it will bring and what the intention of the person searching it likely is. Some of the leading SEO thought leaders in the industry, like MOZ and Wordstream, use these categories to better understand and analyze intent: Informational – searches to find answers to questions, or to learn something Navigational – searches to find a specific website Transactional – searches to buy something Investigative – searches that are tied to commercial research that may or may not end up being transactional.

It’s essential to place your keywords in the headlines and early on in an article. You’d want to ensure that a user feels like they are in the right place at once. You can also look into Google-friendly schemas (for recipes, products, venues, movies, etc.) to generate additional rich results in Search.

Your headline is the most important part of your content. Infuse emotion into your headlines to connect with your audience on a deeper level and make your content irresistible.

Craft headlines that are concise, descriptive, and attention-grabbing. A well-written headline entices users to click and read more, while also helping search engines understand the topic of your content.

Make sure to break your paragraphs after ever 200-300 words you've written. Along with bullet and numbered lists, having white spaces all across your article improves the readability. Plus, try to add more images into your article to break the textual flow and give readers a visual idea of what you want to say. For example, in a 2000-word blog, don't end up inserting just 4 images. Use minimum of 10 images and spread across the article to make it more interactive and user-friendly.

Use headings, subheadings, bullet points, and short paragraphs to organize your content. This structure makes it easier for users to skim and scan your content, improving its readability and user-friendliness.

Optimising your content for SEO is key if you want to get discovered by the right set of people at the right stage in the funnel. Are they seeking solutions to address a problem? TOFU - your content piece needs to be present there and your content should be optimised to cater to that search intent. Same holds true for other stages of the marketing funnel. In our zeal to make something sound 'good', we often tend to not pay attention to optimising our headings and that can negatively impact when and where we show up in the search results. From the frequency of keywords to headings, ALT text of images and more, remember that optimising your content for SEO can positively impact the intent you serve and hence your business goals.

SEO is really understanding consumer behavior. One thing many folks underrate from an SEO perspective is topical relevance over time. Folks over-index on search trends which leads to a ton of articles about "why barbie's release marketing is a masterclass in partnerships" which no one will care about in 3 years. Whereas something more evergreen can have much more longevity. Further, SEO is more than just a Google search. As content platforms evolve (particularly video platforms) and LLM eats the world, it becomes clear that ranking in content results matter just as much as web search.

Besides incorporating relevant keywords, optimize your content for search engines by including meta tags, meta descriptions, and alt tags for images. Also, ensure your content loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, and has a clean URL structure.

Use analytics tools to track the performance of your content, such as page views, time on page, and bounce rates. Analyzing this data helps you understand what content is resonating with your audience and what needs improvement, allowing you to refine your content strategy over time.

Don't forget mobile optimization: Make sure your content is mobile-friendly and loads quickly, as search engines prioritize mobile-friendly websites in their rankings.

Keep a close eye on the questions that come under “People Also Ask” in SERPs for search terms related to your audience. This can be a great way to uncover customer pain-points and create content that offers a solution to these questions

It all starts by getting out of your own way. The content isn't about you, your opinions, or your subjective gut instinct. You have to *DO* the work of getting to know your audience deeply. What they love, hate, do every day, use every day, think like. And the best way to do this is to spend time with them on 1:1 calls.