Creating SEO-friendly content is an amazing way of engaging your audience. Well-crafted SEO-friendly content can escalate the customers’ journey from brand awareness to increased sales.
The online marketplace is all about GREAT content. People at every stage are craving informative, well-written, easy to read & understand content. And, most importantly it should be SEO-friendly content so that your audience discovers it effortlessly.
In addition that your content is well-structured, easy to read & marketable — it must be a piece of SEO-friendly content and should be written in a way that Google finds it credible.
There are a number of factors on which Google evaluates your content. If you want to establish whether a writing piece is SEO-friendly or not before hitting the publish button, you have to evaluate all of those factors.
Gone are the days when SEO-friendly content was just about inundating it with links, keywords, and anchor text. Today, the quality of your content is one of the major factors that decide the fate of your content and whether it’s going to be noticed or not.
In nutshell, it is not about just populating your website with content rather it is about putting up something that is relevant, adds value to the readers’ knowledge about the product or service, and most importantly something that your reader will not find anywhere else. And, you have to make all of this happen keeping with all the SEO criteria.
While there isn’t any tool to evaluate SEO-friendly content, which adds value to your audience, you can always self-evaluate & compare your content with that of the competitor to get to the core of it.
In this particular blog, we’ll help you go back to the drawing board and evaluate whether it is a piece of SEO-friendly content or not. We are going to list certain factors that will help you evaluate your content. Let’s get started:
- Your content must answer your audience’s questions.
So, the end goal should always be — if the content you have crafted answers your audience’s question or not. To read more on how to craft content that matters click the link. The quality of content is a subjective matter for marketers to discuss today.
The goal must always be to make sure that every piece of content that you are creating is:
Useful
Adding value to your audience
And, is authoritative.
In addition to that, you must understand that adhering to Google’s guidelines and following SEO best practices should be a top priority. But, of course not at the cost of compromising with what the user wants to read at a particular point in time.
The best way is to plan out a content strategy that establishes a balance between optimizing your content for search engines and for your audience.
After all high-quality content is only that which answers the user’s queries.
- Readability
Readability is one of the important factors that decide whether Google will like your content or whether it is SEO-friendly or not.
Several readability criteria like grammar & spelling mistakes will not only affect the ranking, but it will also make your content look less credible.
No need to say, this can ultimately affect the credibility of your organization, your products & services.
Make sure you are writing error-free, grammatically correct & structured sentences & the content.
- Understanding the Difference between measuring Ranking & content.
This is particularly for those who are doing business blogging or business writing. If you are writing to increase your organic search & traffic then you have to make sure that ranking & content requirements are fulfilled individually.
Content is for humans while the ranking is for the search engine. While crafting every single piece of content, make sure that it is fulfilling both human & technical requirements.
- Shareability
While Google has not defined social media shareability as a criterion for SEO-friendly content — it definitely helps your content reach a larger group of audiences. It indirectly helps your content add to its SEO value in the following way:
- Link building takes place when people share your content.
- Search visibility gets a boost with social media share.
- When more people are sharing your content there is obviously better traffic & better conversion.
- Visual Appeal of the Content
Rich content is one that contains high-quality text, images, videos, infographics & more. You cannot ever reach the standards of converting content if it is only created with text.
Images make it easy for your audience to understand and sticks them to the content. Video and infographics help in breaking down even a complicated concept into easy to understand pieces.
In fact, most of the top-ranking pieces of content would contain multiple images, screenshots, videos & graphical representations. You can use keywords in the Alt texts & file name to optimize images and by reducing their size.
This is the easiest possible way to enhance the SEO value of your content.
Some other ways to evaluate whether it is SEO-friendly content or not:
- Considering the off-page metrics including Keyword rankings, Click-through rate (CTR), Backlinks & traffic.
- Looking at the conversion your content is bringing & its page-level metrics. The performance of your content can be evaluated by looking into the number of new visitors, new interactions, and conversions through the particular content page.
- Looking at the keywords & keyword choices.
- Keyword intent is an essential factor, which means having the idea of where your audience is through his buyers’ journey.
- The content should be written in a natural way without giving the impression that it has been intentionally designed to drive traffic.
- Make sure that the meta description is relevant to what you are talking about in your content. If you want to read more on how to create better meta descriptions, click the link.
Takeaways.
Content is one of the most relevant techniques when it comes to building the foundation of your SEO strategy.
Creating content is a craft! And, when you are creating a piece of content with a particular business goal it has to be a way more time taking and consuming task.
Irrespective of what you are writing and who you are creating your content for — the quality of content is the most important criteria that can help it rank.
There are a number of factors that will decide whether it is SEO-friendly content or not — as we have mentioned in this blog.
While focusing on SEO & ranking is undoubtedly important, if you are too consumed by the idea of ranking, you’ll lose the value of content for your audience.
And remember, it is your audience who decides the fate of your content — whether it will be thrown away into the trash or will be placed on search engine top pages.