A massive part of being a good entrepreneur or a good business owner is an ability to engage with audiences. In fact, it’s *the* most important thing of all. If you don’t have an engaged audience, what do you have? And when it comes to engaging digitally, SEO, or search engine optimisation, is key. SEO is what helps potential prospects find your business amongst all the possible options, and it’s what gets you top on Google.
SEO is an incredibly broad area, and Google’s ranking algorithm is notoriously complex. How Google determines which websites get the coveted #1 spot, and which are shoved down to the second page, is a blend of hundreds of different ranking factors. Google takes into account everything from page speed and domain authority to URL length and site architecture… but we’re not going to delve into all that right now. Instead, we’re going to focus on the role that content plays in search engine ranking.
Content & SERPs
Content is undoubtedly one of the biggest ranking factors that Google uses to create search engine results pages (SERPs) for each query. But simply throwing a few words together and publishing it on your site isn’t going to cut it. A good content strategy is one built around the number of different factors that make content SEO worthy:
- Keywords
The obvious starting point is keywords. Incorporating the phrases that your audience are most likely to search for into your content is one of the best ways to boost your visibility. And if you want to go a step further, studies have found that adding a keyword or phrase into the first 100 words of your content could help to improve your ranking.
- Links
If you mention any facts or figures in your content, it’s important to link back to the source. This isn’t only to give credit where credit’s due, but also because Google likes to see links, especially when they direct to high authority websites. Link location matters, too, with studies finding that links higher up in the content have a greater impact.
- Content Length
Contrary to popular belief, Google doesn’t prefer longer content. However, it does prefer content with more linking domains, more social shares, and more organic traffic… which studies show are more likely with lengthier content. Overall, research shows that the highest ranking pages tend to have between 2000 and 2500 words.
- Content Recency
As part of Google’s aim to deliver the most relevant results to its users, it will naturally prioritise the most recent of two otherwise similar pages. This means that you should be posting new content regularly to maintain a strong position in the SERPs. HubSpot suggests that small blogs should be posting between one and four times per week.
- Layout
Google likes content that’s easy to read. Therefore, it tends to prioritise content that’s broken down into simple bite size pieces, with short paragraphs, clear subheadings, and other style features that make absorbing the content easy. Numbered lists and bullet points work well, which is why you’ll find many businesses post ‘listicle’ type articles.
- Multimedia
A big mistake that many people make is that they think of content just as blog posts, articles, and other written messages. It’s not. The content umbrella includes absolutely anything that you put out there, including images, videos, and other types of multimedia. Using these experience-boosting tools could help to improve your rank.
Creating Content That Delivers
There’s much, much more to it, of course, but these 6 aspects all help to make your content a lot more SEO worthy. To finish off, we’ll also take a very brief look at what Google *doesn’t* like. Some things that could actually hurt your rankings include:
- Duplicate content
- Useless content that doesn’t provide value
- Auto generated content that lacks readability
Avoid these common pitfalls, and you should be on your way to creating a top SEO strategy that gets your website in front of the right eyes, at the right time.
