The Importance of Content in SEO

SEO isn’t straightforward by any means. With such a range of factors that go into SEO, it shouldn’t surprise you that content plays a massive role. Let’s discuss the importance of content in SEO and why your site shouldn’t be going without it!

Defining Content

The general definition of content is ‘the things that are held or included in something’. In digital marketing, content refers to the things created and used across different channels.

To further define content for SEO, content refers to the information and copy you add to the site within service pages, blogs, and resources.

How search engines view content

It’s a huge myth that websites don’t need content. I urge people to stop believing it immediately!

Content supplies search engines with context and connections to elsewhere within your site.

By writing relevant and high-quality content for your site surrounding what your business does, you add context to help search engines further understand what you do. Without this, it’s almost a little bit of a guessing game as a search engine crawls through the code on your site, trying to decipher what you do or sell.

How Can Content affect SEO

Content and SEO go hand in hand, so your SEO and content writer better buckle up and prepare to be besties!

Now that we understand the importance of content in SEO, there are a handful of ways that content can affect SEO. The key to seeing these effects is creating content for your target audience, not just the search engine.

Wider Ranking on Search Engines

By writing content and focusing it on long-tail and informational keywords, you can increase the number of keywords you rank for by providing relevant content.

This allows your business to appear on more of the search engine results pages for queries related to your industry or niche.

Increased Traffic

By increasing your site’s online visibility across search engines, you can increase your organic search traffic. By ensuring that you target relevant keywords that have high search volume, you can provide valuable content that will increase your site’s organic traffic

Building content clusters

In addition to getting content to rank by itself, you can also use your content to help increase the visibility and ranking of your service/commercial pages.

Through content creation that relates to your business’s services or products, you can then link between content and that service page.

Search engine crawlers will then use the context given in those blog posts to understand that you are a thought leader in the industry and, in turn, rank your content highly for users.

Check out ROAR’s unique cluster content strategy The SEO Bomb.

5 Steps to Creating SEO Content

There is no straightforward guide to getting you ranking #1 across search engines (if there had been, we would have done it). But there are some best practices you can follow to help your content support your SEO.

Best practices vary slightly depending on the type of content you’re creating, so we’ve highlighted the general practices that will help your site be visible in search rankings.

Keyword Research

To put it simply, you can’t support SEO without a keyword.

Let’s run through the top considerations when it comes to keyword research.

• Keywords – for blogging content, we’d recommend focusing on long-tail keywords. It makes the content you write more specialised and perfect for what the user is looking for.

• Volume – don’t target keywords with no volume; make sure users are actively searching for the keyword before you write the content.
• Intent – Ensuring keywords have the correct intent is crucial; for blogging content, keywords should be informational to make sure the content you’re pushing out matches what users want
• Relevance – I cannot stress this enough: make sure any term you use is related to the content you’re writing and the value of your site.

SERPs Research

The SERP is your friend and your enemy. Use it to find out which content from your competitors currently ranks at the top of SERPs. To do this, open an incognito tab and search for your target keyword.

Often, there’s a common theme sometimes, this can be listicles (highlighting a collective number of items or steps) or recipes. Other times, they’re just blogs, and you have free reign over what you choose to create.

Write like a pro

In all honesty, you don’t need to be a full-time writer to create high-quality content. The best advice we can give is to know what you’re talking about and make it realistic and personable.

Since Google rolled out the Helpful Content Update, the need to write content for users instead of solely for search engines has increased drastically. Following that update, Google added the E-E-A-T system, which isn’t a direct ranking signal; however, by optimising for it, you can improve performance over time.

Consider SEO

Now you’ve written an article made for your readers specifically and included all the relevant information to answer the question. Let’s look at the factors you can consider for SEO.

• Keyword Density – Have you included your keyword within your content? If not, you definitely need to. We’d recommend including the keyword within the title and introductory paragraph, but overall your keyword should be included between 0.5% – 1% throughout your content with 2% density maximum, but don’t try and force it.
• Headers – Don’t write one long post without any breaks or sub sections. Break it up with h2 and h3 headings. This will benefit both users and search engines.

• Alt Text – For any images you add to your content, don’t forget about adding alt text. This is both for search engines to develop a better understanding but also for accessibility needs for any visually impaired users.

Don’t forget about it

SEO is a continuous process; one thing you can’t do is forget about your content. Keep an eye on the organic rankings, and after 6 months, if you aren’t seeing the results, you can go back to the drawing board and reoptimise.

Our blog covering ‘How to Run an SEO Content Audit’ gives you all the key points to make sure your content isn’t forgotten about.

Enhance your content further

There’s always a little bit that you can add to your content to enhance it and make it more appealing for both users and search engines. Here are a couple of things we’d suggest adding to make your content stand out.

Infographics

An infographic will not affect how a search engine views your content, but it can make it more appealing to users.

You can use visual content like infographics as visual aids to help you break down topics or to highlight key facts throughout your content. This can split your content up into more manageable chunks and give users some visual content to take in amongst the reading.

*At ROAR, we include at least one infographic for each blog we create to break up the content and make it easier for users to digest.

Links

Both internal and external links are really valuable for written content. Our blog, The Importance of Internal Links, highlights why they’re so valuable.

Internal linking provides further context and connects your different pieces of content for search engine crawlers. This means that as a search engine crawls your site, it uses the internal links to get from one page to another.

External links are within your content and point out to another site. For external linking, we recommend using high-quality and high-authority sites for your reference. This shows users that you do your research and gives substance to any statistics and factual points you make.

Video

Video is the future – or so we keep being told.

And it is partially true as video has an average click-through rate (CTR) of 3.5%, compared to 0.2% for text-based content.

It depends on the relevance of the video; for example, we often link or embed videos from the ROAR YouTube Channel. To video related to the topic or sometimes even videos based on the blog for those users who prefer video media instead of text.

Our final thoughts

• Content and SEO should be best friends because they support each other.
• Using content within your SEO strategy could help you rank widely across your niche.
• Creating SEO Content can be pretty easy by following 5 simple steps.
• Always enhance your content to make people want to come back to your site.

Maximise your online potential with our Content Writing and Optimisation Services.