SEO Content Creation
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Even though keywords are essential in SEO, a business can not be successful without original content. Content is the sole reason why people search for any website. That is why we want to shift the focus today to content creation. If you learn how to create original content to improve your SEO, you will rank your website higher and gain more organic traffic and loyal customers.
Throughout this article, we will discuss original content and how to use it to boost your search engine optimization strategy. In the end, you should have all the knowledge required to put this strategy to use and help your business benefit from it.
What Is The Definition Of High-quality, Original Content?
Before creating original content to improve your SEO, you must first understand what defines original content. The essential characteristics of original content are:
- Comprehensiveness: the content needs to include all necessary elements important for its subject. It needs to be a well-rounded material that will be a unique source of truth for the user. If they don’t have to search for additional content to further understand it, you have achieved success and created something comprehensive;
- Usefulness: the content needs to be helpful to the user. One of the common mistakes is that you can create something comprehensive but present it to the wrong customer group;
- Helpfulness: the content needs to add value to the user. It needs to help them with something or solve a specific problem they have;
- It is educative: the content also needs to educate the user. The goal is to broaden their understanding of the subject and help them learn more. The more they know, the better.
- It is accurate: the content must be valid. You should never include unverified data to attract users. The originality must imply the accuracy of the information as well;
Before you begin content planning for SEO, you must do it with these characteristics in mind. If you manage to do that, your content will automatically become the best answer for the search query, which is the ultimate goal.
With that in mind, let’s see how to achieve this.
The Content Should Tell A Story
Before we get to any technical details on optimizing SEO content, let us first work on creating something original and unique. The actual value of content lies in its context and how you present it to the user. The best way to explain this is to use a story as an example.
Everyone loves stories, both kids and adults. They take you on an adventure, and that adventure depends on how the story is told. The hidden meaning or the conclusion of a story represents its context. It is a fun and engaging way to capture readers’ attention, captivate them with your ingenuity and imagination, and create a fantastic experience. That is why marketers use storytelling as a marketing tool to entice potential customers.
When creating any content, think of the best ways to present it to the users. If you are trying to sell a product based on the content you release, it will not achieve its full potential. However, suppose you focus on telling a story about your business, the vision of the company, and how it relates to your products. In that case, the content will suddenly become comprehensive and meaningful to the users.
How To Find Inspiration For Original Content?
Finding inspiration to create something original and unique is the most challenging part. For example, if you are looking for blog content for your industry, there are a couple of different strategies you can use:
- research competitors;
- research your clients and their needs;
- utilize SEO keywords;
- re-purpose content to create something new and fresh;
Research Competitors
Remember that your competitors have the same goal as you. They want to create something original and unique and present it to their clients. You can use that as a source to find motivation and inspiration. However, there is a pitfall here you should try to avoid. You should never copy their content to try and make it yours. Remember that their content is optimized for their business. It is not written for your company and does not align with your vision and company goals.
What you should try to do is to take their idea and transform it into something better. That is a very challenging approach but also a very efficient one.
Research Customers And Their Needs
Another source of inspiration is your customer. If you had to choose between researching competitors and researching customers, you should always go for the latter. Customers will tell you exactly what they need. You only need to listen and give them what they want.
Analyze overall sales, most sold products, and even customer reviews. Any customer communication will give you a potential topic to discuss and improve.
Utilize SEO Keywords
SEO keywords are phrases that customers use to find your business online. When you do your SEO keyword research, you will have a list of the essential phrases. Each of those phrases can be a subject for a piece of content.
For example, let’s say you are selling shoes. Market research shows that the current trend is quality shoes for winter weather. You already know this is what the clients will search for. Use that research to create content for your blog and attract potential buyers. You can talk about the materials you use in shoemaking, how they perform under heavy weather conditions or even write about some fun facts about shoes.
Re-purpose Content To Create Something New And Fresh
That is one of the essential skills you should have at your disposal. If you understand how to re-purpose or re-write old content, you will have an unlimited source of inspiration.
What you can do is take a popular article from your blog and:
- turn it into an infographic with valuable statistics;
- define the most impactful paragraphs and use them to create social media posts;
- invite professionals in the industry and do a podcast with a Q&A session to cover the subject of the article;
- turn your article into a video submission or a series of video submissions, optimize them for the web, and create a video playlist on YouTube;
- try to re-write the article from a different perspective, and talk about what’s changed from the first version;
- make a case study out of the article;
Many beautiful ways exist to re-purpose content and provide new things for your customers.
How To Improve Your SEO Through Original Content?
Original content on its own is essential for SEO. Google values originality, and anything that helps users solve problems automatically ranks your website higher.
However, you still must optimize content to get the most out of it. Here, we will discuss content optimization’s technical side and how it affects SEO rating.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Creating original content to improve your SEO does not mean stuffing it with too many relevant keywords. That is a common mistake that you should avoid. First, your content will lose its value and originality because keyword stuffing is evident to the users. Second, Google will recognize and take it as a bad thing, negatively affecting your SEO rating.
Use Links To Boost Your Content
Link building is an overall strategy that boosts traffic. If you want more customers on your website, you will partner with another business and ask if you can create content for them, but reference your website or business by adding a link.
If your business gains popularity, others will seek out your company to do the same for you. However, to naturally attract links, your content needs to be original. It will attract more attention based on its quality and help boost your SEO efforts. That is how you will get backlinks from authority sites.
Remove Unnecessary Content
Have you ever visited a website and gotten lost in the amount of content? If yes, could you find what you were looking for, and how much time did it take? Was your experience pleasant or not?
These are all fundamental questions to ask yourself. While exceptions exist to the rule, overcrowded websites quickly lose traffic in most cases. Content pruning is necessary for SEO because it helps your users to focus on the essential things.
That does not just mean removing entire pieces of content that do not fully satisfy the level of quality. You should also remove unnecessary elements that do not contribute to each piece individually. For example, if you write a 5000 words article but only a fifth has relevance, you have wasted time writing 4000 unnecessary words, wasting readers’ time. The same logic applies to links, keywords, images, and any element of content that does not contribute to its purpose.
That is also bad for your SEO efforts. However, if you eliminate some of it to make it more compact and impactful for the readers, it will contribute to the website and your business.
Your Content Should Contribute To Various SEO Elements
Even though content alone is a huge part of SEO, it can also impact other SEO elements. For example, you should structure content to aim for featured snippets. Furthermore, you should optimize content to fit mobile devices. We already spoke about using links to enrich your content and make it more valuable.
If you add images, you should also properly optimize image attributes and the image itself. Keep in mind that images add to the value of the content. They should be relevant and relatable. When done correctly, they will also show in image searches on Google, which is also very important.
Another thing to remember is that you can also optimize your content for voice search. That has been a prevalent strategy in the past two years. Google includes voice optimization, and you should not skip this step.
Create Original Content to Improve Your SEO By Making It Accessible
Accessible websites are the thing of the future. All customers should have the same rights and possibilities to fully enjoy the content. However, people with various disabilities cannot use the internet similarly. That is why you should optimize your content to be accessible to everyone.
First of all, you should adapt your writing style to your customers. Overcomplicated sentences and technical terminology will confuse 80% of average readers. Second, provide alt attributes to all images to help users understand the context. Furthermore, you should ensure that the color contrast is not challenging. Also, underline links and make them a different color to help people understand they are links.
There are many ways to create original content to improve your SEO and make it accessible to everyone. It is best to research this subject thoroughly, develop a checklist of best practices, and make sure you use them to improve user experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is a process that improves the quantity of unpaid website traffic.
How does SEO work?
SEO uses elements that search engines value the most and ranks the website based on its use.
What are different SEO types?
There are On-Page and Off-Page SEO.
How often should I optimize my content?
Once in three months to once in six months, depending on your time availability.
What is content marketing?
It is a form of creating and publishing content that targets various customer demographics for marketing purposes of advertising a business of products.
How can I tell if my content is valuable to the users?
Content is valuable if your website ranks high, has increased shares on social media, and attracts user attention in the form of comments.
How does content affect online users?
It increases conversions and may influence purchase decisions.
