Content SEO

Let’s talk today about what is Content SEO and why do you need it on your website.

In my previous article I have explained in more detail what is Technical SEO, why it is important and what does it include. Today I am going to “slice” the Content SEO and give you an insight into what it is, why it is important, and what to pay attention to when writing your content.

Content SEO is a physical manipulation and optimization of any type of content you are publishing on the website or other digital media.

Before creating the content, ask yourself three essential questions: why this topic is important for my audience, what questions I am going to answer with the article, and what is the best way to write it.

You can use the local and global public media to find inspiration for an article, queries from your business users, local and global trends, and other available sources.

Knowing enough about the topic you are going to write about means a lot and being an expert in a given area would help you a lot when writing content and also in Search engines, especially Google who is pushing the expert article to the TOP.

Before start writing content, research your competitors, look into what they do and how they do it, and of course, make initial keyword research. This would help you build your content better and rank it better in Search Engines, ones when it’s published.

Content SEO is all about creating the user-friendly content that people would love to read and share and that would rank high in SERP and drive you good, high-quality leads by organic search. Not less, and not more, and if it’s done well, it would guaranty the flood of visitors to your website for a long time, without spending any single cent on additional promotions of the page.

So, how to do the SEO on your content page?

First things first! You need to determine the essential keywords for your content and make a Web Audit on the page, comparing it to the competitor’s pages with similar or same content.

If your copyrighters know how to use keywords while writing the content, they would save a lot of time for the SEO specialist while optimizing the page. If they don’t know it, they may need training on this matter.

Be sure to place your keywords strategically wherever it belongs and have to be, including the page heading, page title, Meta description, page content, and image alt tags.

I know that many of my younger colleagues with up to 1-2 years of experience would not agree with me, but from my rich experience, I have proven numerous times that keyword density in the page content is important.

And while Google is the strongest search engine in many countries, it’s not strongest everywhere, and numerous other, smaller search engines are widely used. For example, Bing and Yahoo still hold approx. 30% of the global market, and there are over 140 more search engines and directories except for those 3 biggest ones, and who, by my personal experience hardly depends on the keyword density, so the good and smart marketer would not ignore this opportunity to drive 30% or 40% more traffic to the website.

By properly optimizing the content for most of the search engines, or at least the strongest one in your targeted markets, you should drive much more traffic to the website than just sticking to only one biggest, ignoring all others.

TF-IDF

For this, the keyword strategy should be carefully planned and implemented, which means placing the 1-3 essential keywords into the strategic places in the content.

To properly use the keywords, you should need to analyze the competitors, what they do and how they do it and grow the keyword density of your article to be on TOP of them. Not lower, but on TOP.

This is called the TF-IDF, or Term Frequency – Inverse Dense Frequency, which is a term defined by the Search Engines describing how important some keywords are in the content.

It’s not easy to precisely calculate this formula by hand, but helpfully, there is specific software that can do that work for you.

Google, as the most advanced search engine today is not using actively this formula anymore (at least they do not admit they use it), but all other search engines do use them, and it is essential to keep this in mind when optimizing the content.

On the other side, no matter if we want to admit it or not, but my personal experience shows 70%-80% better performance on pages with properly set up TF-IDF even on Google, compared to the pages that do not have it implemented, and this is proven on a long term experience and testing of both models.

When optimizing your content, keep your readers in mind in the first place, writing the content for your readers, not for the search engines!

Second, when optimizing the content for the TOP position in SERP, be careful with the usage of keywords.

If the content is under-optimized, the page would not raise high enough to the SERP it deserves.

On the other side, if the page is over-optimized for specific keywords, you may be deprived of the TOP of the SERP because of using the illegal SEO technique so the outcome would not be as you wish, again.

The best way is to find the golden middle and properly optimize the content both for readers and the Search Engines and the result would be visible shortly and will stay for a long time.

To be able to properly do the SEO for your content pages, you should also know the ranking factors of the other Search Engines, except Google, which would allow you to achieve the best possible results and achieve the organic leads for a longer time.

Also, keep in mind the content length. Both people and search engines are more liking the longer content, descriptive, human-friendly, who describe the topic from all sides, giving as much information’s as possible to the reader from different angles. Short written content may be ranked lower or even not found by people, which makes the efforts of copyrighter useless.

The low text-to-HTML ratio on the website can be also a problem when you want to rank your page high, same as the duplicate or scraped content from other websites. Both readers and search engines value uniqueness, originality, and expertise in the area your content is covering.

After your content is written, take your time to check your pages once a month, check the Content SEO factors and compare them to your competitors and make the needed improvements to them. Your competitors are not sleeping and they also want the TOP positions, so being on TOP of competitor battle all the time is very important when you reach the heights.

Case study

I would give here an example of a small company website.

We have two pages on the same quality server, with the same page speed, with the same content quality and length, with the same backlink numbers and quality, and with the same technical SEO.

Page A is facing a positive weekly growth in organic traffic, while page B is staying far behind during the same time, with the same page characteristics and content length, and quality.

The only difference between those two pages is: page A has done the technical SEO, deep content SEO with the deep keyword optimization, while page B has done only the technical SEO and is missing the content SEO.

As we can see, the content SEO is an extremely important factor for any company, no matter if it’s on the website, in Social Media post or on Youtube and not considering it properly, not giving it enough time to be done, or even worst ignoring the content SEO, the company should be losing a huge number of qualified leads, and the sales, of course.

Do you need any additional information about Content SEO? Feel free to send me a personal message.

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