Content Development Tips

Posted by webigg on December 4th, 2017

As Google makes their updates and other search engines come into play, it’s a great time to think about how you can stay ahead of the game in 2018. Do you know if you’re producing quality content? If you’re selling a product that can be bought elsewhere, how do you separate your approach from your competition? Do you offer real value that consumers won’t find anywhere else? What do you do to get people to read your content? These are some questions you should be asking yourself when it comes to SEO content development. Check out our 5 tips for SEO content development below:

1. Keyword Research

Before you start creating great content, the most important factor is performing keyword research. There are online tools that you can use to find out what people are searching for online in your local area. Make sure you do thorough research of keywords to find out how often those words are searched in an average month. With this information you then want to use those keywords to produce content that effectively “answers” their search query. These are now called your target keywords.

2. Use of Keywords in Page Content

No matter if you have the quality content already written or if you’re going to start creating, you should look for opportunities to implement your target keywords within the content. The key here is to make sure your content is original and sounds natural. Be sure to not keyword stuff or use any other black hat SEO practices. Write for the reader, not the crawler.

Be sure your website has the following pages and include your keywords within these pages:

• Homepage – The content on this page should include your main goals and what your site is offering.
• Category Pages – You should have separate pages for each of your services. If you combine them onto one page then it makes it harder for Google to understand what that page is about, which can affect your ranking.
• Product Pages – Be sure to include separate, SEO-friendly landing pages for each of your products.
• About Us & Contact Page – Include a page that has your business hours, directions, locations and any contact information. This page should be easily found on your website.

3. Page Layout

Remember good content is great, and more of it is even better. Longer copy not only gives you a chance to talk about your services or products, it’s also good for search engines. The more information, the greater the opportunities search engines have to crawl the content on your page. But keep in mind – quality always comes before quantity! If you don’t have quality content, then you’re wasting your time.

Also, keep the reader’s attention span in mind; focus on being clear and more conversational than over the top informative. Using bullet points and lists can be a great way to help organize your content and keep it to the point. When it comes to laying out your page, make sure it first and foremost makes sense and it’s easy to read, but also make sure to include the following when applicable:

• Keyword-Rich Headers – Separate the content with keyword-rich headers and use H1 or H2 tags. Keyword-rich headers further help search engines identify what your page is about.  When writing headers, it’s important to make sure they are engaging, influential and keyword-rich. This will also help the reader quickly identity what the content is about.
• Image Captions – Entering a caption and ALT text for your images is a great way to add more copy on the page. Ensure that you include your target keywords in the captions and that those target keywords match the keyword strategy for that specific page. This is yet another great opportunity to optimize your webpage.

4. Keep It Fresh

People are online every day reading articles, searching for information and looking for products. The only way to really attract people and to stay ahead of the game is to provide new fresh content. Make sure you continue to improve the content on your website; this is an ongoing process. Also, be sure to include a blog either within your website off link to it from your website. Blogging is a great way to stay on top of sharing fresh content.

5. Tracking Engagement

How engaging are you? What do you do to get people to actually read your content? Ultimately, you want to make sure the interactions with your content on your website are meaningful. You’re probably thinking, what does that mean and how do I know? An easy way to track engagement to your website is by using Google Analytics.

When it comes to measuring page engagement, there are two important metrics to watch for, your bounce rate and your pages per session. The bounce rate is a percentage of single-page visits; which tracks the visits in which the person left your site from the arrival page without interacting further with the site. A high bounce rate could be a sign that your page content or layout is not engaging or user-friendly. A good way to measure how people move around your site is by tracking how many pages a person visits per session. If someone visits multiple pages on your website you can most likely assume that they’re engaged and interested in finding out more information.