What Is Content and Why Is It Important for SEO?
The short answer to this question is yes. Content is important for SEO (search engine optimization) and the two go hand in hand.
If you want your website to appear in the search results and drive traffic to your website, you will need to continuously create high-quality and optimized content. Without content, the search engines do not have enough information to index your website pages properly and rank your website. Without an SEO and content strategy, your content will never be found online.
Many marketers see SEO and content marketing as two different strategies but they are connected and complement each other well. Without creating high-quality content, you will never fully benefit from it.
So, let’s have a look at what content is and why it’s important for SEO.
What Is Content?
Content is any high-quality information that provides an answer to customers or a solution to their problems. It should be presented in a contextually relevant way with the goal of engaging your website visitors or driving them to take action. Whether it’s text, image, video, or audio, it’s all content that can provide information to your target audience.
Your website will host product or services pages that provide details on what you do, as well as a blog page that will provide relevant information to your website visitors – this is all classed as content and will help your web pages to rank in the search engines but it can appear in other formats on your website too.
Content includes:
- Blog posts
- PR pieces
- Case studies
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Whitepapers
- Audio content
- Images
- Infographics
Why Is Content Important for SEO?
Search engines like Google want to provide search results that are valuable and relevant to those who are searching.
Search engines like Google want to deliver search results that are valuable and relevant to the user. In fact, Google’s algorithms are constantly updated so that users can be provided with the most useful information quickly and easily.
Google ranks and sorts useful pieces of content on the internet which are ranked based on their relevancy and usefulness to the user. For your content to be beneficial for SEO, it needs to be optimized and beneficial to your readers. A strong digital content strategy is essential to ensure your content is not only relevant and engaging but also optimized for search engines.
Here are just some of the factors that mean the content is important for SEO:
- Increases visibility online – when you regularly create content that’s optimised and useful for your audience, your rankings will increase, meaning that you’re more likely to be found when people are searching.
- Generate a high click through rate (CTR) – CTR is important when it comes to your website ranking in the search results. The more users who click on your website, the better your chances of getting better rankings on search engines.
- Helps to generate backlinks – links between your website and other relevant and authoritative sources indicate credibility and trust for your own website. The more high quality links you build, the higher you are likely to rank in the search engines. Other websites are likely to link to your content if it’s useful so this is a key part content will play in your SEO strategy.
- Target keywords – content is the only way you can get important keywords onto your site and make sure you’re found online when customers are searching for your products or services.
- Improved user experience – creating high quality content, optimising your content and generating backlinks means you will create a website hat is easy to navigate and will provide customers with the information they need.
How to Optimise Your Content for SEO
When creating great content, you’ll need to make sure it’s optimised for both the keywords you’re targeting and for user experience. Here are our tips for optimizing your content for SEO:
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Understanding your customers will help you to research the right keyword and create content that resonates with them. To know who you’re targeting, look at your existing customers and create buyer personas that tell you gender, age, interests, and the problems customers have when they come to you. This will give you a better idea of how to write your content and what to include.
Get your sales team to make a note of FAQs they’re asked for over the phone or by email and use these to guide your content creation. To stay relevant you should also comment on the latest news or trends in your industry.
2. Perform Keyword Research
Before creating any content for your website, it’s important to do keyword research around your products and services to find out exactly what your customers are searching for and what their questions are. Make sure you create content around these keywords and optimize the content for these words and phrases. You can do this by adding the target keywords to the title, headings, and metadata for your post.
3. Focus on Long Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are the keywords that searchers use when they’re searching for answers or when they’re closer to purchase. These terms have lower search volumes but they tend to be more specific and have much less competition than more general terms so you’re more likely to rank for them.
4. Stick To Your Topic and Keyword
When you’re writing a piece of content, always stick to the keyword and topic you’re targeting. Don’t try to write about a range of topics or themes in a single piece of content and don’t try and include dozens of keywords. This will confuse Google (and your users!) and can work against you when it comes to ranking. You will not be creating the most useful and relevant content on the topic if you’re mixing in too many topics or keywords.
5. Make Sure the Outline and Format of Your Content Is Optimised for Readability
To make your content as readable as possible, make sure the content is broken down into small chunks with no long paragraphs. Online readers have short attention spans so they won’t stick around if your content is just one big paragraph. Make sure you use subheadings and bullet points to break the text up as much as you can.
6. Include Backlinks
When it comes to ranking signals, backlinks are important for the credibility of your site. When creating content, make sure you link out to other relevant, trustworthy, and authoritative sites to signal that your content is credible.
For more information on how to create an SEO strategy that will drive traffic to your site, please read our guide.
