5 Practical Tips to Create SEO-Friendly Content

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

If you want to get significant traffic for your website through SEO, then the content is an integral part of your effort. After all, you rank your website in search engine result pages by using the content that you publish.

However, to get much better SEO results from your content, you cannot just create any content randomly. It will be better if you can create your content according to the SEO best practices. That way, you can be surer that your content has an excellent chance to rank in the top spots of the search engine.

How to write content that is SEO-friendly and according to the SEO best practices? Here are some practical tips you can implement for that.

1. Focus Your Content on One Keyword

It is difficult for anyone to get any real benefit from multitasking. And the same is true when we talk about the content we create for the SEO of our website.

You might think you can save time and get much more traffic if you target many different keywords at once with one content. However, this is often hard to do as it can make your content lacks the necessary focus to be high-quality content instead. The result may even be that you don’t rank in any keyword at all. Search engines might become confused with what your content tries to talk about.

Thus, it is better to write your content around one keyword you want to target. This can help you to create more comprehensive content that satisfies both your readers’ and search engines’ needs. If, somehow, search engines decide to rank your content for different keywords than the one you target, consider it as a bonus.

2. Take Note of Search Intent

Search engines exist to satisfy the intention of their users when they search for something. Thus, they will always try to rank content that can answer their users’ search intent in the best way.

As you try to create content to rank high in search engines, you should understand the intent of the search engine users too. See what those users want when they search for the keyword you target.

Do they want comprehensive content that answers their search query with a detailed explanation? Or do they prefer step-by-step content so they can implement the information that they get easier? Create content based on the search intent of your targeted keyword.

You can check the search intent of a keyword by trying to search it and see the content that ranks at the top. For example, if we search for “how to improve communication skill”, we can see that the top spots in Google are dominated by listicle articles.

Looking at the search results, it might be best if we create a listicle kind of article if we want to target the keyword with our content.

3. Benchmark the Top-Positioned Competitors

Other than trying to understand the search intent of your targeted keyword, you can also search your keyword to benchmark the content of the top search results. Try to see what makes their content useful and interesting before you try to do better when creating your content.

What are the things they discuss in their content? Do they have something special that makes their content stand out? Get the information and incorporate what you learn into your content so it can have more quality than the existing top search results.

Besides improving your content quality, you can also learn more about who your competitors are and the writing style in your niche. Those things should become good additional knowledge too when you try to improve the SEO results of your website.

4. Be Free of Grammatical and Spelling Mistakes

No one enjoys content that has many grammatical and spelling mistakes. After all, those mistakes can disturb people when they try to read the content. In the worst case, they may even cause people to quit reading the content early and try to find another one that is much “cleaner” and easier to read.

As search engines try to satisfy people with their search results, content riddled with mistakes that people avoid can be viewed negatively by them. This may result in significantly lower positions in search results compared to content that is free from those mistakes.

Therefore, if you want to create SEO-friendly content, you should try to check for grammatical and spelling mistakes in your content after you write it. Use tools like Grammarly to help you do that if you need it. Read your content again as well so you can spot the mistakes in it better and fix those mistakes when you do find them.

Doing that should help you make your content become much more readable and potentially improves its rankings in the search engines.

5. Write Naturally for Your Readers

It is easy to believe in things such as keyword stuffing and think that we should create content for search engines and neglect our readers if we want more organic traffic.

However, search engines have gotten much smarter these days. They can detect manipulation to get the top spots in search results in our content. They can even penalize us if they found that we try to game them.

So, don’t do that. Instead, try to write naturally and as well as possible for the readers of your content. Make your content easy to read and add all the useful things you know to give all of the information that the readers need.

By doing that, your readers should get a positive experience and search engines might rank your content higher because of that (especially after the introduction of RankBrain). This should help you to get the SEO impact you want from your content.

Conclusion

Content is an important part of SEO and we should try to create the best one for our website. However, we shouldn’t forget the SEO principles when it comes to content too while we do that.

Implement the tips above and you should be able to optimize the impact of your content for your website growth.