When searchers find your website seeking answers to their questions, there would be no point unless your site has content. Content is anything meant for your searchers, video, images, and text. Creating good content increases your traffic, conversions, and activity on your site. Search engines rank good content higher in search results making your website more visible. How a search engine decides what content is valuable and how it ranks depends on how well the content matches the query. The key to higher rankings is high-quality content that fulfills a searcher’s intent.
General Rules for Good Content Creation
- Content should be well-written with proper spelling and grammar.
- Write for a general audience and avoid specific jargon unless you are writing for an audience in a specific technical field.
- Spice up your articles with mixed media, photos, videos, and graphics.
- Make articles easy to read and scannable. Readers like to quickly skim web articles and if they can’t find what they are looking for they will quickly move on.
- Divide your content into sections and subheadings with bullet points and numbered lists and always include plenty of empty space or white space around your words to make them more readable.
- Once you have created your content you want to make the most out of it. Optimize your content with target keywords and catchy titles.
- Most importantly post new content regularly to keep your audience’s interest and keep them coming back.
Know Your Audience – And Their Goals
Good content that drives traffic to your site means knowing what your audience is looking for. Provide content that informs your audience and is a service in itself. Choose topics relevant to your goals and your audience’s goals. Research what keywords people are searching for and create answers to those questions.
Finding Topics for Content
While striving for completely original ideas would be ideal, this is likely impossible. Any content you produce there will be hundreds of similar entries providing similar content. Make your content stand out by personalizing it. Share personal stories, write the way you talk to people, and personalize your message to your audience. Readers enjoy these things and are more likely to make a connection and may become loyal followers of your work.
But what if you don’t know what to write? Try researching trending topics in your field. You might even try searching among current events or pop culture and find the connection between current events and your industry. Sometimes the connection is obvious – other times you might have to work at it. Even finding a tangent link between events and your specific niche could an entertaining read.
Another way to create quality content is to add depth. Instead of articles of 5 basic tips, go in-depth on a narrower subject. It will be more niche but could provide far greater utility. Cater to your audience with valuable information that is harder to find anywhere else.
If your website sells a particular product or service you can use your content to provide additional support. Buyers go to google to find answers to problems – get them to return to answer the questions they might have down the road when using your product. For instance, say your company sells lawnmowers, you could provide content with tips on proper lawnmower and yard maintenance.
Sharing Your Content
When you create new content, it won’t matter much if no one sees it. Make sure links to your content can be found on your social media pages. You can also conduct an email marketing campaign to send to your email list, sharing a link to your content.
What to Avoid When Creating Content
Some people try to create content that attempts to game the search engine ranking algorithm with tricks that make your content annoying for humans to read. You should always write content for humans, not search engines. Not only does it make for poor content but search engines have improved their technology in recent years and are now more likely to downrank these kinds of tricks (i.e. creating unique pages of the same content for every iteration of keywords). For instance, having unique pages for both wedding gowns and bridal gowns that are the same except for the title.
Google now prioritizes comprehensive high-quality articles. Blatantly stealing content from other sites is not good form. Stuffing your content with too many keywords is annoying to read and does little to improve rankings. Likewise, auto-generated content is offputting and low-quality content. While technology is constantly improving, people can generally tell when an article was written by a program and tend not to like that type of content.
When it comes down to it, your content should help potential customers and clients learn more about you and your business.
