Let us face the facts; you have to work hard as a content marketer to get people to look at what you have written. Nowadays, the simple act of brainstorming ideas and creating content based off of such ideas is not enough. You need a process. The process would involve not only creating content for the user but also optimizing it for SEO.
Think about it. You have some wonderful content to display, and on top of that, you have optimized your content. Doesn’t it look like a recipe for better user experience? We think it does.
But how would you go about creating such a process?
You need to work at it. Specifically, you need to research all the trending topics, creating the content, and finally optimizing the finished article. Let us look at some steps that you can follow.
From finding the trending topics within your content niche to optimizing the finished article, here are some steps that you can follow.
Now getting ideas from your team or having a gut feeling about a particular topic is a good thing. But generating topics on the basis of past data is even better.
A good first step towards making such decisions can come from using Ahref’s Content Gap tool. Using the tool is pretty simple, just enter your site and the sites of two of your competitors. The tool then calculates where your site stands for certain pages and where it does not.
The data gained from Ahref’s can give you insights on:
The query rankings for your competitors.
The searches per months for a given query.
Ranking difficulties for a query.
With this information, we are now aware of the content gap that exists on our site. All we have to do now is to bypass the content with the keyword scores, which we can calculate using the keyword analysis tool.
The next best step would be to brainstorm for articles that are focused on the keywords.
Many writers write in a frenzy. They just want to finish their big piece on…let us say, “World History”, get it over with and then publish.
In the world of content marketing and development, that is not an effective mode of operation.
Our goal here is to engage the audience right? But what if the content that we write is not getting the engagement that we expected it to get?
For that, you need to ask yourself some questions. First of all, you need to ask yourself who your target reader is. What kind of person are you writing for?
Your website can have very different types of audiences, some young, some old. What might work for the older audience might not work for the younger audiences.
Let us suppose you are writing an article on the “History of World War II”. If your audience is a relatively younger one, and it constitutes the major part of your traffic, then you would need to lay off the technical historian jargon and write a simple article, using simple English. However, if your blog is being read by people who are more close to history than the average person, then you can go with the flow of technicalities.
In order to write content that engages audiences, you need to:
Rely on your experience with content
Gather research material on various topics from external sources. The research can be from articles all over the internet. Just make sure that they rank well on Google.
Utilize the comment section of those articles to identify questions and look at content requests.
One of the best sources for researching topics close to our niche comes from Quora, which is a site dedicated to questions and answers. Quora has a vast database of questions, answers, comments, and blogs on a variety of different niches. Just search for your niche and check out the top questions and answers related to your niche. The amount of information there will surprise you.
Lastly, you need to think about the search intent. Think from the perspective of the user, and whether or not that user would find a satisfying answer if he types a particular search query.
You need to get a clear and definitive answer. If you fail to do so, there are some holes in your outline that you need to fix. In other words, you need to add more originality to your ideas.
With a detailed outline, you can develop newer content. Highly researched and better than the content you usually posted.
Pro-Tip: To rank your article in the top 10 results of Google, you need to make the article go up to or over 2000 words. According to Backlinko, the average first-page result is 1890 words long.
When you have finished writing your draft, you should focus first on optimizing it instead of publishing it. You can do it later, but it is best to do it when the content is fresh. The editing process, in our case, is not just editing the words, but it comprises of two main components:
1. Content Readability.
2. Optimization for Semantic Search
When you are creating content, you need to be patient and careful about the smallest detail. The biggest mistakes beginners make with content is that they are in too much of a hurry to show the world what they have written.
When you ignore content readability, you are losing a significant share of your audience.
But why does it matter so much?
The following are two paragraphs; and you have to decide which one you would rather read.
"The major cause of the conflict in the Pacific during WWII was due to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese empire, out of spite for the US ban on trade with Japan, decided to retaliate by pushing the US into a conflict that would last for the next 4 years. The United States would go on to not only fight in the European and North African theaters of WWII but would also engage in a prolonged naval conflict against the Imperial Japanese Navy. Historians believe that even though the US was a major world power in the early 20th century, the Japanese still gave them a tough time as far war casualties go. Historians also believe that if the Japanese had not forced the neutrality of the US but established a treaty with them, they could have gone to war for a longer period.”
____
“The Japanese were at an impasse in their war.
When the United States heard of Japanese activities in mainland China, they decided to impose a trade ban on the Japanese. This was the major turning point in the biggest conflict of the early 20th century.
Out of anger and spite for the American ban, the Japanese decided to retaliate.
On the fateful morning of December 7, 1941, at exactly 7:55, a Japanese dive bomber, wearing the symbol of the Rising Sun of Japan, descended on the Island of Oahu. The bomber was later followed by a swarm of 360 Japanese warplanes that slowly descended on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, destroying it.
The United States realized that they could not withhold their neutrality in world affairs any longer. Their national security had been compromised.
A decision needed to be made.
On December 8, 1941, a day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on the Empire of Japan.
The United States had just entered into a brutal war. A war that would last for 4 more years and would change the face of modern history forever.”
We think it is fair to say that you chose the second paragraph. The first one reads like a book and can be ignored unless you are an avid history buff!
In our case, the visual perception of the text was important for readability.
How will you improve readability? Here are some quick tips:
While this might sound condescending, you should write thinking that the reader is a middle-school kid. However, you can go for a higher grading if your niche is an academic one.
Google’s update of its algorithm in 2013 forever changed SEO. The Hummingbird algorithm was focused on semantic search, which is basically just Google crawler trying to understand the relationship between words on a webpage. Better the relationship, better the results.
SEO service providers had to evolve. Even companies that had affordable SEO services had found themselves in a problem. They had to now focus on the new algorithm, which meant that their marketers had to put in more time.
Here is a good outline that you can take when need to optimize for on-page SEO:
Optimize the meta tags. Meta tags include both the title tags and the description.
Optimize the structure of headings and URLs.
Index your articles on all the major search engines.
We talked a lot about filling the content gap for SEO and UX, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other mediums for creating content. They range from infographics, images, videos, and other graphics. Their aim, however, is to engage users.
But written content is still the master, a so-called Holy Grail for engaging users. So try your hand at improving the written aspect. Once you have that in check, you can move on to others.
