Over the past 25 years, search engine optimization has evolved considerably. You can no longer expect your search engine rankings to increase by publishing lots of thin, low-quality content. In today’s world, SEO is both an art and a science. For digital marketers to be successful, they must understand the factors that determine search engine rankings, prioritize searcher intent, and create valuable, high-quality content suited to users and Google’s algorithms.
In this blog post, we will discuss five tips for writing SEO-friendly content. Prior to getting started, we have a PSA for digital marketers and content writers: When devising a strategy to drive organic traffic to your website, remember content writing and SEO are intertwined. There is no magic to SEO; only technical people can implement it correctly. The most important aspect of SEO is creating better content than your competition-and utilizing on-page and technical SEO best practices.
Therefore, without further ado, here are five tips for outranking your competitors in search engines.
Let’s get started!
Use Right Keywords
Digital marketers have debated whether keyword research is dead, but keywords still play an important role in SEO.
Keyword research helps you:
- Analyze the topics that are being discussed.
- Analyze the number of searches for topics.
- Identify the difficulty of ranking for a topic.
The content you create should include LSI keywords (natural variations of your primary keyword) throughout and have a unique primary keyword target. Create a topic list based on what your buyer personas are interested in before writing. The next step is to conduct keyword research to identify the best-ranking opportunities. Your keyword selection depends on the type of content you’re writing.
Long-tail keywords should be targeted for blog posts with medium to low volumes and low competition. However, comprehensive resources, such as pillar pages, can focus on high-volume, high-competition short-tail seeds. Long-tail, low-competition keywords convert better and are easier to rank when used in blog posts.
Understand Search Engine Ranking Factors
Before you outrank your competition, you need to understand the foundational signals search engines look at when evaluating and ranking content. Content, links, site structure, and HTML tags are the four most important ranking factors.
Content
According to Google, content is the most important ranking factor since the Panda algorithm update in 2011. In order to build a successful content marketing campaign, content that covers a specific topic in depth, is well-written, and provides value to readers is crucial.
The following seven factors are heavily weighted by Search Engine Land in its Periodic Table of SEO Factors:
- Quality: Well-written and valuable
- Research: Demonstrates authority
- Keywords: Incorporates search terms appropriately
- Freshness: Is timely and relevant
- Multimedia: Contains images, video, or audio to enhance user experience
- Answers: Directly answers the search query
- Depth: Covers a topic thoroughly
The first step toward writing competitive content is to understand each of these factors.
Links, Site Structure, and HTML Tags
In addition to content, links, site architecture, and HTML tags are the next three most heavily weighted ranking factors. During the crawl and indexing process, search engines also analyze non-content factors such as inbound links, outbound links, URL structure, page load speed, and time spent on a page, as well as keywords used in tags.
Using search engine algorithms, users are able to access the best content on the best websites. Your website content will be easier to crawl and index if you use linking, site structure, and HTML best practices. Rankings and traffic increase faster when search engines crawl and index your content more quickly.
Be Creative and Unique
You should pay particular attention to the creativity and uniqueness of the content. Your content must be free of plagiarism and stand out from the competition, regardless of the niche you target. Organize your content differently from other relevant blog posts not only in terms of wording, but also in terms of its organization.
To write unique and creative blog posts, follow these simple steps:
- Make the required information clearer and more understandable
- Make your content stand out from the competition by organizing it differently
- Create headings that emphasize the intent directly
- Use a paraphrase tool
- Put your ideas into action
Uniqueness and creativity in your blog posts are primarily determined by the information you include in your posts as well as the wording and structure you use to convey it. It is therefore important to be careful when writing blog posts.
Update Old Content
Google prioritizes fresh content in its search results. Aside from that, freshness is also one of the factors heavily weighted in content rankings. By adding better, more helpful, and authoritative information to old blog posts, traffic and rankings can be dramatically increased.
As a result of HubSpot optimizing multiple posts a week (updating old content) it received an average of 106 percent more organic search views.
Here’s how to execute this strategy yourself:
- Identify blog posts that have high potential to rank for keywords with a significant amount of traffic.
- Improve the accuracy and thoroughness of the post by updating or rewriting it. To update your content regularly you can use a paraphrasing tool.
- Ensure that the on-page SEO practices are followed and that you optimize for conversion by including relevant calls to action in-line and at the end of the post.
- Change the publish date of the optimized article so that search engines will re-crawl and re-index it.
Prioritize High-Quality Inbound and Outbound Links
Search engines and users rely on links to determine your content’s value and reputation. Make sure you link to trusted, quality websites in your blog posts and pillar pages. You should aim to gain backlinks from websites that are authority on the topic on which you are writing.
There is no doubt that backlinks to your content are one of the most heavily weighted ranking factors in Google. They determine 20.94 percent of what ranks and what does not. You can rank better with high-quality links, just as you can rank worse with low-quality and spammy links.
Conclusion
As we all know that there is very high competition of content writing out there and it is very challenging to make your content SEO-Friendly to outrank your competition. But, we hope that after reading this article, you can easily write easily outrank your competition.