How to Create Content for SEO

A beginner’s guide to writing content that search engines and users love

“A person holding a magnifying glass, wearing a striped suit and blue sunglasses in Bend” by Marten Newhall

Search engines use the written content of your website to decide if you’re a good result for their users. Knowing this, you can optimize your content so it appears higher and more often in searches, a process known as SEO.

You shouldn’t create all content with the goal of improving your SEO. That can come off as disingenuous and sales-y, and possibly hurt your brand.

But — if incorporated into a larger content strategy — SEO can allow you get the most out of your content and get more eyes on your product.

In this post, we’ll focus on two main features to improve your written content with SEO in mind:

1. Keywords — what you’re including in your written content
2. Layout — how you’re presenting your content

Keywords

Finding the Right Keywords

If you want your content to appear in relevant web searches, you need to include the correct, corresponding keywords or phrases.

You can identify keywords you should be using by doing the following:

1. Write down a list of terms or phrases that you think potential users are searching for.

Keep in mind — the shorter and more common the phrases you pick, the more competition you will face in search engine results.

You’re looking for the balance between phrases common enough to have an audience and niche enough to differentiate your product.

2. Expand the list by searching each of your answers and checking the related searches that Google suggests.

3. Double check your ideas.

• Google Adwords includes a free feature called “Keyword Planner,” which can help you expand a list of keywords or find better phrases to use, based on what users are already searching.
• In Google Analytics, you can check what searches are already sending users your way by checking: Acquisition → All Traffic → Channels → Organic Search.
• You can use third party tools like SEMrush or Moz to analyze how you and your competitors are appearing in search.
• Blog comments are also a good place to see how your users respond to your content, what questions they still might have, and, therefore, what they may be searching for online.

Incorporating Keywords

When incorporating keywords, you want to do so organically. Search engines can detect if you’re stuffing too many or irrelevant keywords into a page of content. And it won’t help your search engine ranking.

Google has updated its algorithm to penalize “keyword stuffing,” or the inclusion of excessive keywords in the backend of a website.

If possible to do so organically, keywords can help when included in:

• The url
• The meta description
• The title
• The page’s additional headings
• The beginning of the page’s copy
• At least four more times throughout the copy (and bonus points if it’s written in various forms)

Each page of SEO content should be aimed at one search query. If you try to make a webpage that answers multiple questions at once, you reduce the odds that it will be shown for each one of those queries.

You also shouldn’t create multiple pieces of content directed at the same keywords, as you don’t want to compete against yourself for users.

Keywords + Images

Search engines ignore the visual content on a webpage. So any content that you want to work towards SEO needs to be text (in HTML format).

If you want your pages’ visual elements to appear in image searches or help SEO, make sure to give your images text titles and alt tags that reflect the subject of your page or incorporate your chosen keywords.

There are a lot of photos online with a title like “image01.jpg.” So an image with a title like “best-blog-writing-practices-header.jpg” is much more likely to appear in related image searches as well.

Layout

Of Pages

Like any company, search engines want the best experience for their users. They can tell if users are consistently visiting a site then quickly leaving — also known as bouncing — and will assume that this site is not a good result.

The most obvious way to prevent users from bouncing is to have interesting content that is valuable to visitors.

But — if you’re confident that your content is topnotch — you may then want to check the following layout features:

• Page content is above the fold, so users do not have to scroll far to find it
• Text is well-organized and easy to read
• Image and video files are not too big and download quickly

Of URLs

When crawling websites, search engines behave like users — following links from one page to another.

If you want a search engine to find your content, you have to make sure it’s clearly linked to and that your website is easy to navigate.

If you create a webpage that your site doesn’t directly link to or that is hard to find, it will not help SEO.

And if you want search engines to recommend your content, you should also make sure your urls:

• Don’t change
• Include appropriate keywords or phrases
• Use hyphens to separate words
• And — most importantly — reflect the content on the page

A url like www.website.com/blog/how-to-create-content-for-seo will perform much better than an automated url like www.website.com/blog/post35

Now — Time to Promote the Content You’ve Created!

Once you have written content that you’re confident will perform well with search engines and that people will enjoy, it’s time to promote it!

You can further help your SEO ranking by linking to the content across your own channels online and on social media. Your content’s ranking will also be bettered each time another site links back to it — a feature known as backlinks.

You can increase or exchange backlinks by building relationships or entering into partnerships with other sites.

Happy searching!