How To Do SEO For Your Own Website Part 3: Content Is Most Important

This article is a continuation of our series on SEO tips and tricks that you can incorporate into your own projects and achieve real results. This time the topic is ‘how to write content for a website’. In previous articles we have discussed a variety of topics and themes included in professional SEO services, such as creating your own semantic core, the best way to structure your site and why is website content important. These topics are incredibly important and can be thought of as foundational knowledge in the SEO world. With that being said, we highly recommend that you go back and read those articles first before moving on to SEO content writing tips. Search Engine Optimization is a combination of many small things that contribute to huge results, so skipping these core components could negatively affect your ability to achieve desired outcomes. We can speak on this because our SEO specialists have years of experience. If you have already acquainted yourself with the previous articles, then you are ready to take your next steps forward in your website optimization process and learn more about website content strategy!

What Is SEO Content?

To begin with, you should understand what website content is.  Material by SEOHow To Do SEO For Your Own Website Part 1: The Semantic CoreHow To Do SEO For Your Own Website Part 2: Structure of the Site Content is the information filling the site: texts, images, graphs, tables, photos and videos. In general, it is everything that can be seen on the site and that carries information.

What is SEO content? It is the same texts, graphics and other elements of the site, as well as product pages, landing pages, interactive tools and even video elements, but which are created not only to convey information to users, but also for search engines. Why is website content important for SEO? SEO content is used to promote the site on which it is located to search engines such as Google.

Not every element of a site is SEO content. For example, blog pages don't always get as much organic traffic as the home page or category page.

​​Why Content Is Important for SEO?

Regardless of your type of business, your site can attract a lot of organic traffic to commercial pages. What is SEO content writing main task? To attract customers and promote sites. It's kind of like content marketing, isn't it? There is a statement that SEO content and marketing content are different, unrelated types of content. However, it's worth noting that strategies for both of these content types are not only closely related, but also complement each other to help promote your site in search engines.

How to create original content? When creating content, it is worth paying attention to the information you use. It should be relevant, useful, and information which motivates users to continue exploring the site's content. This will help increase the site's search engine ranking.

How does it work and why is website content important? 

• Google's algorithms analyze the behavioral factors of your visitors and their actions on the page. The lower the bounce rate and higher the CTR is, the more attractive your site appears to the search engines. If your content makes users click on links, then your site seems interesting and useful for search engine algorithms. Such principles help to get high search engine rankings.
• Also, quality content helps generate backlinks. When creating a content strategy for SEO, it is worth paying attention to increasing credibility. Sites that have quality content, have quality backlinks from reputable sources. They rank higher in Google and are more likely to reach the top.
• What is content optimization in SEO? This is the process of filling content with keywords relevant to users' search engine queries. When you write content, you can fill your site with keywords that will produce your site in search engine results when a user makes a relevant search query.
• What else is useful about SEO content is that it provides a user experience. SEO is a comprehensive approach to website promotion, which includes creating backlinks, writing quality blog posts, using keywords, creating a good site structure, optimizing robots.txt files and writing meta tags.

Still wondering why is website content important? SEO implies work with content, so it is impossible to say that SEO promotion is possible without working with the content of pages. Therefore, to promote a page in the search engines it is worth paying attention to the creation of good content.

What Is Considered Content by SEO Standards?

While your instincts may initially tell you that creating a content strategy for SEO is simply the text that appears on your website, the actual definition is much more all-encompassing. Where search engine optimization is concerned, content is anything that is present on the website. This includes, text, images, audio, videos, or any other file extensions. The best websites know how the content of a website is organized and optimize all the content they display, so it is good to ensure that your own site incorporates many different types of content for your visitors to experience. Commit this to memory now: content is the medium through which you will do the bulk of your active communication with Google and its algorithms. It is how you show search engines that this is indeed the proper page to display for whichever search query guided visitors to the page in the first place. You may have a beautifully developed semantic core and your site structure could be perfectly organized, but without the right content, Google doesn't know how to categorize your website or properly rank it in search engine result listings. That’s why unique content is important for SEO.

A professional business website will undoubtedly be dominated by text as the main representation of its content, but this shouldn’t by any means be the only source of content available on the website. By incorporating videos and pictures for instance, you will greatly increase the amount of traffic that your site brings in from Google as well as reduce the overall bounce rate of your site through an improved user experience. Creating a content strategy for SEO is no joke. Trust us. Even though text is usually going to be a majority stakeholder in the bulk of your website content strategy, we do not want to downplay the significance of photos and videos as they pertain to search engine optimization. In fact, image optimization is a niche skill that developers learn on top of normal text optimization. Some websites consist mainly of images and thus can only be optimized using the image content available on their websites. This is why knowing how to create a good business website will give you a head start in your industry. 

What is content optimization in SEO? This is a set of methods aimed at improving your content according to Google algorithms. This includes:

• Keyword research: Every website content strategy includes a preliminary keyword analysis. If you want to attract new customers through search engines and relevant queries, it's worth doing keyword research before you start working on your texts and content. That way you can sort through the keywords that people are already searching for and create content for the actual queries.
• Keyword optimization: How to write content for a website, so that it attracts a lot of users? Fit the selected keywords into your content in such a way that they blend in seamlessly and are not conspicuous. Choose keywords with high, medium and low frequency, which logically fit in your texts to achieve the most effective promotion of the site on the Internet.
• Organization of content: SEO content writing tips include creating a text and breaking it into logical parts with headings and subheadings. You should structure your content in such a way that the site visitor, as well as search engines, can easily scan the page content and determine what it's about. This approach to organizing content promotes more than one page. By creating internal links to pages on your site that are logically linked to the main page, you give users a broader view of your site.
• Content promotion: Why content is important for SEO? To successfully promote your site online, you need to fill it with useful and relevant content that users will want to share on other pages, forums and social media profiles. This will create a certain authority, which will be taken into account by Google algorithms and your site will be considered reliable. In this case, search engines will be more likely to display your site on the results page for certain queries.

What Type of Content Is Best for SEO?

There are several types of content that are used on website pages:

• Authoritative Blog Posts - In SEO promotion, content plays a big role. Therefore, creating a blog page where you will post various informative articles can be a good boost to your site's ranking on the Internet. How to write content for a website? Post useful articles on the topic to establish yourself as an industry expert, then you can attract more customers to your site. Also, don't forget to post information on related topics that may additionally interest visitors.
• Infographics - What could be more understandable than infographics. Infographics are a graphical way of conveying complex information that allows you to do it quickly and clearly. An ordinary article may take several pages to describe all the content of an infographic, while a graphic image will reduce the time and effort spent on understanding written text. It is also worth noting that users are more likely to share infographics on social media, which promotes your site online.
• Videos - Want to know what is original content? Most search engine traffic today is allocated to media consumption. This form of content is more informative and engaging compared to regular written text. Video content brings a nice variety to your pages and allows you to attract more users. 
• Trending Content - Website content strategy can include the work with trends. Unfortunately, trending news doesn't always stay trending for the long term, but even a few days can be enough to attract more users to your site than usual. You can give customers a fresh perspective on a trend or describe how it relates to your topic to attract new users, show your expertise, or create a strong "trending news - your site" association. This approach is as good for promoting an existing product as it is for launching a new one.
• How-To Guides - No idea how to create original content? Write an instruction or step-by-step guide to something. There is always an audience that is looking for a how-to guide. This content format can be provided as a text article, an infographic, and a video with a visual demonstration. You can use customer calls to your customer service team as an idea for this type of content. As a rule, people, who do not find detailed information on the Internet, address there, and that means creating this type of content, you can stand out from the competition.
• Lists - Lists are a very convenient method of posting information. For some reason, a list becomes even more popular if it has numbers. To get people interested and attract more organic traffic to your site do some detailed research and lengthen your list as much as possible.

How does content affect website promotion in search engines?

Why unique content is important for SEO? It could be said that content is the number one most important aspect of search engine optimization. We realize that this is a bit of an oversimplification, but we cannot stress enough how important it is in driving traffic to your website. Take it straight from the horse’s mouth: Google blatantly states over and over that the more unique a site is, the better chances it has of being promoted. Testing a site for the uniqueness of its content is relatively simple and intuitive. Simply copy a sentence from your site and paste it into Google’s search bar. If your website is not the first to appear with the section from which you copied your text, then your site is either not properly optimized in terms of its code (front-end and/ or back-end) or your content is not unique. It is important that you remedy such situations as soon as you can.That’s why website content is important. Speaking of appealing to Google, you should also keep in mind that Google loves vast resources of information. If your website centers around a popular topic with many competitive keywords, your site should have hundreds of pages that are optimized properly so that it has a chance to compete for top positions in Google’s search engine result listings.

SEO content writing tips involve working with the algorithms of search engines for a better understanding of the principles of promotion of the site in the intranet. Modern Google's algorithms automatically recognize content with low value and prevent pages with such content from reaching the top of search results pages. Therefore, even if your site has bits of useful information among useless content, your site will not rank. Reaching the top in such a case is possible only if there are no competitors in the niche. If you want to get more organic traffic and promote your site in search engines, your website content strategy should include a “get rid of useless and low-value content” point.

The process of analyzing the information provided on the site is fully automated and is in constant development through the use of a machine learning model. Google search is constantly updating to make sure people are better at finding useful information. So when creating a content strategy for SEO, make sure that you create content for people, not For the search engine. Since Google updated its algorithm in August 2022, the search engine has been very careful to make sure that your content is useful and informative, rather than just a bunch of keywords that are designed to promote you online.

‘Google Search is always working to better connect people to helpful information. To this end, we're launching what we're calling the ⟪helpful content update⟫ that's part of a broader effort to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.’ 

Those who are committed to creating a content strategy for SEO for people (not for search engines) use only verified and useful information along with the latest SEO promotion techniques for their content. You can easily check whether your content meets the goals of proper SEO optimization by analyzing it according to the following points:

• Your site has a target audience that is interested in your content
• Your content conveys expertise and useful information related to the chosen topic
• Your site has a purpose and specialization
• Your content gives enough information to make the user stop their search
• Your target audience is satisfied with the quality of your content 
• You use Google recommendations when writing content

Website Content is not a ‘Once and Done’ Task

For those of you who were hoping that you would be able to simply write up your content once and be done with it forever, we have some bad news: creating a content strategy for SEO and writing texts for pages once is not enough. Website content requires consistent upkeep and maintenance to best perform on search engines. Google literally takes into account the “freshness” of your site’s content and the frequency with which you update it. This shows the algorithms that you are active with your site and thus, your business. Similarly, customers will appreciate seeing up-to-date information ready for their consumption, giving a human factor to your website. Use SEO content writing tips to accomplish this. For instance, you can add a Blog section to your website and make it a point to write a new post there at least once per week. Other sites use a News & Highlights section to keep the public (and Google) informed on the day-to-day activities of the company and its presence in the community. Doing so gives a personal touch and puts you in an optimal position to be successful with your search engine optimization endeavors. The key is to update this information consistently and increase the overall number of pages on your website.

What an ideally optimized page should look like

In the table below, we outline for you how the content of a website is organized on each page of the website. Admittedly, the table is a somewhat simplified version of the complex schema we use to optimize our clients’ content, but we still guarantee that if you follow these instructions exactly as we present them, you will be successful. It is also worth mentioning that the complex and long-lasting elements of the video pages and tables are usually used on the main sections of the website as opposed to the subpages.

Which SEO Content Writing Tips You Can Use for Your Website

We have selected the top most useful SEO content writing tips to help you write properly optimized SEO content.

• Write for audience - It would seem the most obvious point when creating content is to write for the audience. However, not everyone can follow this simple advice. You should create content based on the goal of informing your audience about your topic. Don't get carried away with marketing only, you can create informative content related to your field. In this way, you will attract a larger audience and establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
• Have a proper page for content - Devote a separate page to informational articles. Create a blog where you will collect all your articles on a particular topic. This way you can properly place informational content in the site structure and your users will easily be able to find the information they need
• Keep relevant keywords - How to create original content? Conduct a preliminary analysis of search queries and keywords relevant to your topic. This way you can understand what potential users are looking for and use this information to promote your site online. Regularly check the relevance of the keywords you use in your content and, if necessary, replace them with more relevant ones. That way you can promote your site and grow your business.
• Have a proper text structure - You can write great content, but it won't do any SEO good if it's not properly structured. Your website content strategy should include the work with texts’ structure. Divide the text into meaningful paragraphs and write appropriate headings and subheadings for each part. Such content will be easier for your users to explore, and the search engine will be able to analyze your site faster and match it to the right search queries.
• Use visual media - While creating a content strategy for SEO don’t forget about media elements. Add photos and videos to your content to diversify your text with visual elements. Users can get tired of monotonous pages with endless lines of text. Add Media Files to your pages. This will make you stand out from your competitors, make it easy to convey your message in an unusual way, and attract more customers.
• Use proper linkbuilding elements - By creating backlinks to your site, you increase user trust, spread your content in search engines and recommend yourself as an expert in a field. Make your content interesting so that users share links to it in forums and social networks.
• Have a unique content - Write unique texts. Do not copy information that is on dozens of sites. Why unique content is important for SEO? Google algorithms will recognize some of the text borrowed from another resource and mark it as spam, preventing the page from ranking further. Find something new and stand out from the competition. That way, you'll attract an audience and get to the top.

The Most Popular Content-Based Errors in Website Promotion

This may come as no surprise to some of you familiar with the way Google’s algorithms operate, but it is important enough to state over and over: do not, under any circumstances, copy content from another website and paste it onto your own. Why unique content is important for SEO? If the content will not be unique Google will flag your site as a copycat of another, costing you time, rank, and money. If you plan on having your site discovered through the use of images, it is important that you only use unique photos on your site. Even better if the images are originals. Another common mistake people make is when they think they are outsmarting the system by listing the keyword they are trying to promote hundreds of times on the same page. When Google’s search engine methodologies were still in their developmental stages, this technique would have worked. However, Google has since evolved to overcome this trick. Nowadays, tactless SEO content writing tips such as these will get you banned from promotion opportunities on the search engine. It's important you understand that these Black Hat SEO tactics are dangerous and can lower your rank. Finally, you must remember to draft the content of your site in a readable manner. Keep your current and potential customers in mind when doing so. It is no use if you perfectly optimize your website and yet visitors can’t stand to read what you have written because it is too clunky or poorly organized.

How Should the Content Look Throughout the Year?

As we’ve already touched upon in this article, you cannot simply write an article and forget about it once you’ve posted it to your site. Your website content strategy should include the need to continuously revisit your work and update it where necessary. This gives your readers the most topical information and shows Google that this is a website with worthwhile information that should be presented to more people. Now we will show you how to work with the materials you have already written.

• 1 month – You have added the article to your site. Provoke a discussion on the article by engaging customers in the comments section and encourage more people to ask questions and give their thoughts.
• 2-3 months – Post the article on all of your social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. If your budget permits, focus on the quality of the traffic that you bring in through these mediums. For instance, we do promotional work in systems like Outbrain.
• 4-6 months – Mention and reference the article in new posts and articles that discuss material similar to that in the original. Post it in blogs related to the theme of the article and answer questions in Quora and Yahoo Answers using the article as a reference point to your answers.
• 6-9 months – Add some new information to the article. It could be a new paragraph, several images, chart, etc.
• 9-12 months – Make a video version of the article and add it to your site and to your company’s YouTube channel. Be sure to provide a link referencing back to the original article.

And the circle continues on into infinity. The above-mentioned website content strategy will be a bit redundant for smaller blogs, but it demonstrates the maximum possible effort one can take in order to get the most out of each and every article they post to their website. SEO is becoming more and more competitive by the second, and staying up to date with SEO trends will give you an edge. You must do the most you can in order to beat out your competitors on the SERP!

Analyze the Competition and Draw Informed Conclusions

Many of our clients ask us how to create original content and how much text and pictures they should have on their website in order to achieve desirable SEO results. They expect there to be a magic number. However, this is not the case. The amount of content and keyword frequency for your site to be successful depends on the competitiveness of your industry and the keywords you hope to promote. For instance, one of the tips on how to write content for a website: if you are promoting a series of words that you know your competitors are also likely promoting, look at their sites. If they have hundreds of pages with each page containing at least 1000 words, you will, at a bare minimum, need to match that amount of content. Of course, it’s better to go above and beyond what your competition is doing. Search optimization is incredibly competitive, so you will need to be willing to put in the time and effort necessary in order for it to bring you tangible results using SEO content writing tips.

So Why Is Website Content Important?

By now it is probably apparent to you that content is the number one most important aspect of website promotion on search engines. When you are distributing your time to the various aspects of SEO work on your website, content should, by far, take up the bulk of your attention. By giving website content strategy its due diligence, you will immediately begin to see the specified results it brings. Further, by making the content interesting while optimizing it in accordance with information outlined in this article, we also compiled the best SEO tips and tricks that will help you retain more visitors and see a positive influence in your overall site conversion rate. If you are looking to boost the amount of new customers your website brings in through its optimized content but need some help getting started, feel free to contact us at Direct Line Development for expert guidance and advice!