5 Insider Tips For Creating Great Seo Content

5 INSIDER TIPS FOR CREATING GREAT SEO CONTENT

In today’s day and age, consumers rely on search engines to assist them in finding everything from products and services to restaurant recommendations which means that regardless of your business niche your target audience is most likely searching for your products/services on a search engine.

SEO (or search engine optimisation) is the process of optimising a website in order to improve rankings for specific search queries in search engines such as Google & Bing. The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase quantity and quality of traffic to your website.

SEO forms the foundation of all other digital marketing strategies, and unlike other digital marketing strategies such as paid (Google ads or Facebook ads for example) the website traffic won’t disappear once you stop adding funds to your account.

1. TAKE CARE OF THE TECHNICAL SIDE

In order to help search engines crawl and index your site more effectively it is important to implement website and server optimisations that ensure you have a secure, fast loading, mobile friendly website with no duplicate content. Technical optimisation ensures that your website is at optimal performance.

On-site SEO is likely the aspect you are most familiar with if you have had any experience with SEO prior to reading this. This is an optimization performed on your website pages, focused on increasing keyword rankings as well as improving the user experience. There are 7 key onsite elements that an SEO specialist will look to optimise:

1. Page URL structure
2. Page load speed
3. Mobile friendliness
4. Quality content
5. Internal & external links
6. Structured data
7. Page meta data

On site SEO is about creating the perfect user experience; from both a technical and a non technical point.

2. ON-SITE EXPERIENCE IS KING

Site Structure & UX

User experience is an important ranking factor thus keeping an eye on bounce rate and how long a user spends on your site is of utmost importance. The site structure of your website should be easy to navigate and be straightforward so that users easily find what they are looking for and stick around longer to explore your website.

Mobile Friendliness

Most users will access your website via their mobile device, Google has implemented mobile first indexing in order to provide a better user experience in search engine results pages. Responsive design should be a main focus point when building your website.

Website Speed

Users today are impatient and won’t wait for a website to load if it takes too long. The longer a website takes to load the more likely a user is to leave and go to an alternative search result.

3. UNDERSTANDING THE BIGGER PICTURE

SEO is more than just what you see on your website. Google appraises aspects outside of your actual site that will still influence your website ranking such as off-site SEO and local SEO.

Off-Site SEO

Google places a lot of value on a website’s relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. This authority stems from quality backlinks from reputable and trustworthy sites as well as mentions of your brand, sharing of your content on other platforms such as social media, essentially any form of popularity that stems from outside of your own domain. There are 7 factors that influence how much equity is distributed:

1. Authority of the domain/page
2. How trustworthy is the domain (what is the spam score?)
3. The anchor text used to link to your domain
4. The number of other external links on the linking page
5. The relevance of the page linking to your domain
6. The “freshness” of the link
7. The popularity of the linking domain

Local SEO

As the name suggests, local SEO is important for businesses who serve a certain area or that have a geographical location. Google often shows local results first and you want to ensure that Google knows where your business is located to increase your local rankings. Below are 3 basic local optimisation techniques that will assist you in increasing your local rankings:

1. Google My Business: Create or claim your local Google profile and add as much information to this profile as possible, the more detailed the better.
2. Local Schema: Create “LocalBusiness” structured data, visit Schema to get started and use Google’s structured data testing tool to ensure that there are no errors.
3. Online directories & citations: A citation is any mention of your business on the web, a combination of your company name, phone number, address, postal code, and website address. Citations help Google verify that your business exists, when multiple credible sources have the same information about your business, it signals to search engines that your business is legitimate.

4. CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT

High quality content is imperative to the success of any SEO marketing strategy. Content tailored to your target audience that answers their questions and provides them with valuable information is ideal. Your content should display a high level of Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (commonly referred to as E-A-T). Your content strategy should always start with thorough keyword research to identify and understand your target audience.

5. FREE TOOLS EVERY SEO-EXPERT NEEDS

1. Google Analytics: It is important to measure your website’s performance to gage if your marketing efforts are working and to see which areas need improvement.
2. Google Search Console: Monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your website’s performance in Google.
3. Google Data Studio: Extract data from various sources and create visual dashboards for reporting.
4. Google Tag Manager: Integrates with Google Analytics, this tool allows you to implement more intricate tracking as well as deploying and managing third party tags on your website.
5. Google Structured Data Testing Tool: This tool allows you to develop, test and modify your structured data.
6. Google Lighthouse: Google’s open source speed performance tool, this helps you evaluate your page performance and identify areas of improvement.

SEO is always evolving, the best way to learn and grow is through practice, trial and error. At eComplete our online marketing specialists have already experienced the highs and lows of the SEO world, and are well equipped to assist you in growing your online presence from organic, to PPC, to Social Media, and more. Our approach is a complete end-to-end online marketing solution that will ensure that your business transcends.

eComplete is focused on providing eCommerce solutions tailored to your business needs, if you are interested in learning more about our services and becoming part of the eComplete family get in touch with us.

WRITTEN BY NIKITA MYNHARDT, SEO STRATEGIST