Usable and SEO-friendly content means articles that provide your readers and potential customers with valuable insights and solutions to their problems. And also such content is highly ranked in search engines, showing up in the first 10 positions. The usability of your content depends on the relevance of your article to the expectations of your target audience. Eventually, the first step towards writing high-quality content is exploring your target audience, their issues that you can help them fix, their needs and requests to your content, and so on.
So we decided to gather the most useful tips and trends in writing usable and SEO-friendly content in order to provide value and correlate with the expectations of your readers.
Select relevant keywords for your content
Keywords make your content SEO optimized and indexed by search engines. Your content has to be visible through relevant keywords to be visible to our target users. Each topic requires separate research in the area and among competitors. The perfect text task consists of several factors. The first one is the freshness of the topic and its suitability to your business strategy and expectations. The next one is looking for all possible LSI keywords for your future article to be ranked in the right positions. Google Analytics and Ahrefs tools will be great helpers in this exploration. And one more tip is to analyze the similar content of your competitors—check out the number of words within the article, its structure, number of headlines and visual content, etc. After all this information is collected, it is time to start writing your own article following the right approaches defined during your research.
Educate your staff on SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a combination of different practices and approaches that are tasked with making your content visible and ranked on search engines. Therefore, your content will attract more readers and potential customers that can convert into real deals and cooperations. Actually, the annual revenue of your business depends on it. SEO strategy requires much marketing investment for paid analytical and task creation tools, advertising, guest posting, etc. The company stakeholders need to have a clear vision of what SEO is and what advantages it will bring for your marketing and sales strategies. It is vital to remember that SEO doesn’t start working right away, especially for unpopular topics related to your industry. After posting the article, you have to wait at least 1-2 months to see the real results. If you have no results, then the analytical tool will show you the lacking information within your content.
External and internal links
The traffic of new content posted on your blog also depends on the links added to the article. External linking entails adding links to trusted and popular resources like Deloitte, Wikipedia, Forbes, IBM, Quora, Medium, and so on. What advantage does this option give to your content, making it SEO-friendly? These links prove the deep research that you have conducted when writing the articles and that your information within the article is true and reliable, meaning you didn’t invent it. Internal linking can be divided into two ways:
- foremost, you need to add links to other articles within your blog to the suitable keywords and topics to refresh your old articles and increase their traffic;
- then, you need to add the link of the new article to the older subject-related articles as commonly old articles receive more traffic and conversion that is able to attract more users to fresh content.
Various types of visual content
It is clear that no article can do without visual elements of different types. It can be images that replaced or duplicated the written text, animated pictures, and videos. However, we do not recommend using the link to the visual content created by your competitors like YouTube videos, pictures from Google searches, and so on. If you don’t have UI\UX designers in your team, then you can find freelance designers to execute the repetitive design tasks for your website blog. Another variant is to hire designers for your company to have constant access to specialists and create as many tasks as you need for your content. Talking about video content, then a good choice is to record educational videos for your readers related to different topics like more details about your services, the latest trends in particular areas, sharing experiences and use cases, etc. Visual content has to be unique, just like the texts of your articles.
Proofreading is a must step for usable content
Proofreading is the process of re-reading your article in order to find all possible mistakes that have a negative impact on content quality and user experience. You can dedicate this task to your content writers, hire a professional proofreader from the custom writing service Best Writers Online, or do it on your own if you have enough knowledge and time. Along with detecting and fixing text mistakes, proofreaders also increase the readability of the article, check the suitability of keywords and links, and add the lacking information related to the subject. Readability includes the number of headings and subheadings, capitalization of all titles, availability of bullets, pictures, videos, statistics, and aims to dilute content with various elements (widget on your website) to avoid plain sheets of text. Commonly, the service of proofreaders is rather expensive, and it would be much more profitable to hire your own specialist.
Crowd marketing
Crowd marketing is the approach of adding links to your fresh article on different platforms where users will find your content useful. One task is to create unique and high-quality content, while another is to reach out to your target audience and make sure they see and read your content, as it can be of great value for them. Crowd marketing also helps to detect whether your content is SEO friendly and usable, as if it is not, then this marketing plan will bring you no results. So here is how it works. You look for subject-related platforms and forums like Quora, Medium, News Y Combinator, Dev.co, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others. Along with adding a link to your article, you can start online chats with users of these websites, and this will be another great way to reach out to your potential customers.
URL Structure
URL is another vital thing that influences the ranking of your article. It has to be also correlated to your article title, but it has to be more clear and short to show the points of this page at once. The correctly selected URL enforces your SEO activities, and we recommend including the topic keywords in it, avoiding long words and phrases, unclear numbers and symbols, etc. The URL has to precisely display the aim of your content. If the URL and the content within the article are different, then the credibility of your website will decrease right away.
Meta Title and Description
Meta title and meta description are not shown on your website, but these indicators are important as they are displayed in search engines. Meta title and the main heading of your article posted on the blog can be a bit different, but the usage of the keywords is a must. Commonly, the meta title should be no more than 60 characters and the meta description has to be no longer than 160 characters. The number of these characters will be fully displayed in Google search, for instance. So you have the ability to briefly describe the point of your content. Meta title and description have to be catchy, unique, and engaging to make people want to click your link instead of your competitors.
Add content regularly
The regularity of posts within your blog matters not only for your regular readers but for search engines as well. If you post several pieces of content per week, like 2-3 long read articles and 1-2 company or worldwide news, search engines will index and rank your content. If you post one article per month, then the visibility of your website will start decreasing and Google will just “forget” your content. The frequent posting doesn’t exclude the need for writing high-quality and well-researched articles. As you are going to post anything just to support the fake activity, you will receive no positive results for the SEO plan.
Track the results
You will never know how effectively your content works for business and if it is SEO optimized if you don’t monitor the results of your activities. As we have already mentioned in this post, you need to wait for at least a month to see the first impressions and clicks on your articles using analytical tools. Each post on your blog has to be rechecked several times to ensure it is displayed by the relevant keywords and contains fresh content like statistics, trends, years, and so on. In the case of positive dynamics, keep monitoring the following activities with your content. If your article is “dead”, then you need to analyze your main mistakes like the gaps in keywords, words, headings, and so on, and update the content according to the defined requirements.
To sum up
We hope the tips we have described in this post will be useful for your SEO strategy. What do you think? Do you follow all of these guidelines or think that some points are lacking? Nevertheless, SEO is a complex concept consisting of different rules and approaches. You just need to define the individual SEO plan that will be effective for your sphere of activity.
Author Bio
Lafond Wanda is a professional content writer, copywriter, content strategist, and communications consultant. She started young with her writing career from being a high school writer to a university editor, and now she is a writer in professional writing platforms— her years of expertise have honed her skills to create compelling and results-driven content every single time.