SEO-optimized content is a fundamental element of any digital marketing strategy. If you want your content to be highly visible on search engines when typing chosen keywords, you need to ensure that your texts are SEO-friendly.
In this article, you’ll discover what SEO-friendly content is, what optimization means, and how you can improve the positioning of web pages on search engines thanks to content written according to SEO rules, and respecting the guidelines shared by Google.
SEO Content: What It Is and Its Role in a Web Marketing Strategy
SEO content is used for the visibility and optimization of a website. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, optimization for search engines. SEO-friendly content therefore helps search engines like Google understand and index online content.
Indexing refers to the scanning and cataloging of content such as articles, photos, videos, which provide users with relevant search results. The main function of SEO-friendly content is to increase organic traffic to a website by attracting more visitors. SEO texts, articles, and content also help with positioning on the first page of search engines (SERP).
It’s essential to create interesting content that satisfies user requests, who search for information online through keywords. That’s why SEO content must contain keywords strategically.
The search engine identifies the relevance of content and ranks it based on keywords. Additionally, it’s necessary to ensure that SEO content is written clearly and comprehensibly, and has a tone suitable for the target audience. These are the guidelines that Google itself gives to creators: create useful, reliable content designed for people.
Why SEO content is so important for website positioning
SEO content allows, through keywords, to find information that people are looking for more easily and efficiently. Texts and articles written following SEO best practices help to better understand a product or service because they provide clear information on the topic.
Moreover, SEO content is an effective way to promote a brand and increase its online visibility and presence. This is why they can’t be missing in marketing strategies for hairdressers, clinics, stores of all types, professionals. After all, Google’s guidelines are clear about the importance of pushing your sites through content, articles, and blogs that must offer quality and be useful.
Search optimization can indeed prove very advantageous in achieving online marketing goals, converting visitors into customers. A well-written and highly visible text will be proposed as an answer to users’ searches. Obviously, the higher you are in the SERP, the more chances you have of being noticed and reached.
Thanks to on-page SEO techniques, internal links that refer to other site content, adequate keyword placement, and targeted strategies, your content can compete and rise to the very top positions of Google, Bing, and other search engines.
If you commit to understanding how to properly implement SEO content, you can increase your website’s reach, your authority, and your online success. To achieve these goals, you’ll need to be clear about a few aspects:
- who your target audience is
- what content might be of interest to them
- what product or service you want to promote
- Who your online competitors are.
This way you can differentiate yourself from competitors, focus on the most appropriate content, and be useful to internet users you want to attract. If you have any doubts, contact us for a personalized SEO consultation.
Below are the best practices for creating successful SEO content
To write winning SEO content, you need to follow some fundamental guidelines. First of all, the content must be original and unique, as every search engine penalizes duplicate texts. Furthermore, content should be updated with new information to keep it interesting and avoid penalization of your website.
And it’s Google itself, the most used search engine in the world, that says optimized content should be of high quality, interesting to users, accurate and clear in the information it contains, and, of course, flowing and readable.
A categorical no to articles composed of unreadable walls of text, heavy, unappealing, or worse, with grammatical and lexical errors that provide incorrect information. Remember that Google, and not only Google, rewards those who are useful to people and provide them with an answer to what they’re looking for. An answer that obviously must bring quality to the visitor.
To be attractive to the reader’s eyes, according to Google’s guidelines, it’s good to divide the content into micro-topics and arrange them in short paragraphs.
Here are the fundamental rules you must follow to write effective SEO content
Keywords
A good starting point for having optimized content on Google or other search engines is choosing appropriate keywords for the website pages. First, you need to analyze the topic, find the words and phrases that describe it. You must ask yourself what words users might search for related to the topic. And act accordingly.
Remember that the best practice to give meaning to each keyword, to articles published on the blog, to content that should increase traffic and reach customers by intercepting their needs, involves as a first step a careful and targeted keyword research.
A respectable digital marketing strategy must aim to understand what the search intents are and the questions that users ask Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. To do this, you can also use some tools available online that help you understand which keywords to choose, depending on, for example, the search volume.
Among the most important activities to perform before creating SEO content, there “is also the”competitor analysis. You need to identify at least three competitors and study what type of content, and how much, they have published for a specific keyword.
The “competitor analysis must be detailed, meticulous, complete. Take into account every detail, the writing style, formatting, the number of words not just of one but of all the pages published by the competition. If you understand the” importance of the “analysis, you’re already on the right track to increase organic traffic and attract the” right user for you.
Make sure to include relevant and pertinent keywords to the content theme. Each keyword should also have a good search volume and little competition, to ensure top positions in the SERP. Be careful not to overdo it, though, as this could harm the overall quality of the text. And Google’s and other engines’ guidelines are unforgiving! Unnatural texts are considered junk, especially after Google’s recent update.
Keywords must be inserted into the content in a fluid and natural way, without making it heavy. They should be added to the title, the title tag, and the text, so as to stand out and be intercepted when the search engine returns a response.
To search for the most relevant keywords for your project, company, or service, an excellent tool is SEOZoom. It’s a 100% Italian software whose use is extremely useful. Let’s look at it together!
- Enter the keyword in the search field:
You will be directed to a page containing Volume (average monthly searches) and KD (Keyword difficulty – ranking difficulty). Remember to always choose keywords with low KD, preferably below 30 if possible, especially if you’re just starting out.
- Click on Search Intent to understand which keywords to include in your SEO content
Once you’ve chosen the keywords, it’s necessary to create optimized content that meets users’ requests and represents added value. The texts should offer advice and additional information related to the query.
To differentiate yourself from the competition, you can do some tests. Search on Google for each keyword you’ve chosen and analyze how your competitors use it. To surpass them in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) you need to focus on “originality and”uniqueness, offering useful and interesting content.
H1, H2, H3 Headings
It’s important that the content is well-structured. For this reason, it’s necessary to include headings and bullet points that make reading easier. The most used SEO headings are H1, H2, and H3, less so H4, H5, and H6. They are fundamental for clearly outlining the “topic of the” article or paragraph.
- H1 is the initial title of the webpage or article. It’s the most important and always includes the keyword.
- H2 is used to divide the text into paragraphs and specify the theme of each paragraph.
- H3 further divides the text of each paragraph.
In the case of this article, an example of H2 is “Writing SEO content following some fundamental rules”, while an example of H3 is “H1, H2, H3 Headings”.
Title tag, what it is and what it’s for
Also known as SEO title, the title tag is the clickable text that users see when scrolling through search results in the SERP. It’s fundamental for SEO optimization because it clarifies the content of the article both to the search engine and to the user.
The title tag, like the “H1, must contain the keyword and clearly indicate the” topic.
The Importance of Meta Description
Closely related to the title tag is the meta description. This is the brief description that appears under the clickable title when we search on Google.
If written well, with the main keyword, and including a call to action, it encourages the “user to click and read the” article.
Search Intent of SEO Content
The search intent, along with keywords, is fundamental when it comes to SEO. Understanding users’ search intent allows you to organize the editorial plan and create optimized content in line with their expectations and helps to meet their needs.
You should always ask yourself, why is the user searching for a particular word or phrase on the web? Are they looking for information, or are they interested in products and services? Content deemed most relevant to users’ questions will be positioned higher in search results. That’s why it’s useful to investigate search intents and try to act strategically, avoiding generic keywords. The more specific a keyword is, the higher the position in the SERP will be.
Internal and External Links
Every piece of content should have internal and external links. This important aspect of SEO strategy is known as link building.
Internal links connect the pages of the site to each other, helping users in navigation and increasing dwell time. They also serve to analyze the structure of the website, or blog, and the relationship between its pages.
For positioning in the results list, search engines take into account the average dwell time of users on the website, as it’s a metric that indicates the quality of its content.
External links direct the user to the site and are very important, especially if they come from sites considered authoritative in the reference sector. Search engines will consider the site relevant and place it in a good position among the results. External links help the site’s good reputation and are one of the parameters to monitor to measure the results of SEO content.
What “is the URL”
It’s important that t “he URL, that is, t”he address of a web page, clarifies its content. It should contain the main keyword so that users immediately understand what they will find inside. The URL of various articles contained, for example, in a blog or news site, also helps to identify so-called fake news, unfortunately very widespread, against which even Google has taken a clear stance.
Look at this example of effective SEO content
The website Giallo Zafferano is an example of a winning SEO strategy. The topic of the pages is famously that of cooking recipes. These are explained with an abundance of details, tips, and curiosities. Users visiting the site can read the preparation instructions for each dish and also see images, to have an even more precise idea of how to proceed and the final result of the dish. The originality and high quality of the content have ensured the site enormous visibility in search results and recognized authority in the field of cooking recipes.
Example of SEO content from Giallo Zafferano
Keywords are very important in Giallo Zafferano’s SEO strategy. They have chosen relevant and specific keywords regarding Italian cuisine and recipes, using them effectively. Titles and meta descriptions are also well utilized and allow the pages to rank among the top results in the SERP.
Moreover, the link building is excellent. External links pointing to the Giallo Zafferano site are innumerable and relevant. Not to forget another very important aspect that has allowed Giallo Zafferano to climb in the SERP. Which one? The site is mobile-friendly! The version displayed on mobile devices adapts perfectly to the screen size without compromising the pleasantness of reading.
How to measure the effectiveness of SEO content? Read our suggestions
To measure the effectiveness of SEO content, various elements and parameters need to be considered and monitored. These metrics can have very positive effects on a website’s ranking if used correctly.
Among the most important metrics are certainly:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- CTR (Click Through Rate)
- Average time on page
Every time a page appears in search results, it’s called an impression. This value indicates how many times the page is viewed by potential visitors. A click occurs when the user, among the search results, chooses to enter the page.
The CTR is the percentage of users who click on the page link compared to the number of impressions. The amount of time spent by t “he user on the page” can indicate the usefulness of the content. The longer users stay reading, the greater the impact on the web page’s performance in the overall SERP ranking.
In addition to the arrangement of keywords, internal and external links, other parameters to consider in measuring the success of the SEO strategy are the increase in organic traffic, that is, the number of visitors who visit the site by clicking on the search result, the acquisition of new potential customers interested in products or services, the increase in conversion rate and the improvement of the conversion rate from visitor to customer.
However, it’s necessary to keep in mind that these metrics can vary significantly depending on the type of business. Therefore, factors such as the industry, clientele, and objectives must be taken into consideration before determining which metrics to monitor.
Through tools like Google Analytics, you can effectively monitor the results of your SEO content and understand if adjustments are necessary.
What factors does Google evaluate to determine the quality and ranking of SEO content? Continue reading
First and foremost, Google assesses whether content is relevant. Then it chooses among the most useful ones, evaluating the expertise of the writer, “authority and” reliability. In practice, this is what we know as EEAT, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, which means Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Reliability.
The search quality evaluators, who follow specific criteria, determine whether content has a high level of EEAT.
Always ask yourself who, how, and why when publishing SEO content
Who created the content?
Users should clearly understand from the start who created the content. For this reason, Google suggests always asking if users easily understand:
- Who is the author?
- Do the lines with the “author’s name link to additional details about the” author or authors involved, providing information about them and the topics they write about?
The Google guidelines suggest adding as much information as possible about the content’s author.
How was the content written?
Readers want to know how a text was written. For example, the guidelines state that “with product reviews, you can establish a relationship of trust with readers when they understand the number of products tested, the test results, and how they were conducted, all accompanied by evidence of the work done, such as photographs”.
The how
also includes the use of artificial intelligence and automation. Sharing details about the processes that led to the content creation helps visitors better understand any benefits that automation may have brought.
Therefore, it is necessary to always ask yourself, for each piece of content, if:
- Are visitors well informed about where and why AI was used in the text?
- Does the “author clearly explain how they used” AI to create the content?
- Has the “author explained why they found it useful to use” AI to create the content?
In general, Google’s advice to those creating web content is to add information and clearly indicate if, where, how, and why “AI or” automation was used. If visitors expect to find this information, we must make it evident and not conceal it.
Why was the content created?
The reason, and therefore the why, we create a particular content, should be the first question we ask ourselves.
First and foremost, content must be useful and help users. These are the two main evaluation elements that Google considers to reward or penalize a website and its pages.
Pay close attention! Google does not allow and considers as spam content created solely to increase traffic. Even worse if automations and AI are used to create them. Google’s exact words: the “use of” automation, including AI-generated content, to produce content with the primary purpose of manipulating search result rankings constitutes a violation of our spam policies.
Important: remember that Technical SEO is also needed to optimize and rank a website
To rank a website in the top positions of the SERP, attention must be paid to every phase of “optimization, including Technical SEO. This is a set of activities useful for optimizing a site through a series of interventions. It is often seen as a subsection of on-page SEO but, in reality, it’s like a separate branch because it deals with optimizing the” architecture of the website and not the content.
If you’re considering creating SEO content and positioning your website, start with the basics. Ask yourself the fundamental questions, first of all ask yourself why you’re creating content. Then answer the questions: who is writing it? How? Never deprive users of quality, relevance, and usefulness. Remember that Google doesn’t forgive.
