How Do You Improve Your SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) is how you market your website so people who are searching for information about your products or services can find it using a search engine like Google or Bing.
One of the best ways to improve your SEO and generate more ‘organic’ or free traffic involves how you write and format the content on your website and the keywords you use.
The keywords are the words and phrases a person will type into a search engine to find what they’re looking for. If these keywords match the content on your website, the search engines will direct people to your site.
FREE Checklist: SEO For Beginners
8 Ways To Use Content to Improve Your SEO
Content marketing is the best way not only to find your audience but also to demonstrate your expertise. You can use content to build trust, create awareness and develop a relationship with your audience.
Even if you aren’t actively trying to use keywords, the search engines think you are. The search engines use the titles, headers, and other information on your webpages to assign relevance to your site based on the search terms your audience uses to find you.
You can make this all work better and improve your SEO by planning to use keywords and content strategically. And you can only be strategic if you have a plan in place.
1. Conduct Keyword Research
Don’t just go into creating content blindly. Instead, you want to craft a plan, and that plan starts with the keywords you want to rank for.
The keywords that you want to help you get customers are based on your niche, your audience and your products and services or the problems you solve.
2. Create High-Quality Content
Don’t just publish any content. You need to have high-quality content that not only search engines will like, but your audience likes too. If it’s written or created halfway, your customers won’t be impressed enough to get their credit card out and buy from you.
3. Pay Attention to On-Page SEO
When you put the content online, you need to pay close attention to on-page search engine optimization. That includes creating the right types of titles, headers, and including internal linking and source linking to ensure that your website looks authoritative
4. Promote Your Content
Just publishing content to your website isn’t going to get you the results that you want. Instead, you need also to promote your content. Promote across your social media networks and in email it to your email subscribers to ensure it gets looks.
5. Repurpose Your Content
Take your most popular content and create more of it by repurposing it into new forms. For example, a popular blog post can become a popular YouTube video. A popular webinar can become a popular white paper or case study.
6. Ensure Your Content Is Readable
While search engines are fantastic and send you customers, the most critical person who reads your content is your customer. Ensure that the content is easily understandable and readable by them. Check your grammar, your punctuation and white space to make sure it looks good and is easy to read and consume.
7. Develop Topic Clusters
Keywords are awesome, but there are other ways to come up with content ideas that will improve your SEO. A topic cluster is a central topic or focus, which is often called your pillar or epic content. You can use mind mapping to come up with content clusters by starting with a core topic and the developing subtopics and then finally links from there.
8. Develop More Long-Form Content
Search engines like long-form content. The reason is that it looks authoritative. Start with pillar or epic content and then work your way through the topics to create content that is in-depth and full of research and proof.
Free Checklist: How To Improve Your SEO
Without SEO, you’re just hoping that Google will somehow stumble across your website, figure out what you’re writing about, and then hopefully send relevant and targeted traffic to your website. You’ve put a lot of work into your website so it makes no sense to just pray for luck where traffic and success is concerned. For more information on how to improve your SEO, download my free checklist, SEO For Beginners.
