Online content is typically viewed as supporting SEO efforts. I suggest as marketers, content writers and SEOs we should flip our thinking. SEO should support and inform content creation.
Does Content Serve SEO or Vice Versa?
Searchengineland’s excellent SEO guide defines SEO as “the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.”
Practically speaking, for the SEO (and marketers too), it’s all about getting on page one of the search engine results page (SERP). When your content appears there you clearly get the best results in terms of revenue, clicks, and engagement.
In this sense, content serves SEO. Content is only one of many elements needed for good SEO. There are also technical SEO elements, page speed and more. However…
Content alone isn’t enough. You need great content. Google itself says you need “high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do.”
Search Engine Journal identifies 7 key ranking signals for SEO. At the top is, you guessed it, high-quality content.
What Makes for High-quality Content?
As marketers, we talk about the need for content to engage, be relevant, and prompt positive responses for your call-to-action. Presumably, content that does this is high-quality.
You can use metrics to monitor engagement such as:
- Low Bounce Rate. Readers clicking or “swiping” back from your page.
- Time on Page. How long a reader spends on the page.
The challenge for content, however, is not the measuring of it. Direct response marketers have been doing that for decades, long before digital marketing. Rather, the challenge is to define what constitutes high-quality content and then create it.
For online content, there are three elements needed to create successful, SEO-rich content.
- Technical. There are specific structural elements online content must have such as content between subheads, a mobile-friendly site, site security (HTTPS), good page speed, and on-page optimization like meta-tags.
- Appearance. Your layout, graphics, and images should make reading and engaging with the content simple and desirable.
- Relevance. The content must both address the purpose of the user search and it must also do so in a way that appeals to the reader.
As a writer, I’m always trying to get inside the mind of individuals in my audience. The better I know, understand and like my audience, the better I can create content that they will understand and like.
This, then, is why I say SEO should inform and serve content creation.
SEO Data is Writers’ “Gold”
Writers provided with detailed SEO data have immediate insight into the mind of their audience.
- With SEO data like bounce rate and time on page, you can see which of your content works, and which doesn’t.
- Keywords, especially search terms and long-tail keywords, tell you what’s on the mind of your audience.
- Links on top sites reveal what your audience views as authoritative sources.
Using all of this data, a writer can craft well-structured content with all of the details that address the intent of the reader. It can also help the editing process in the removal of extraneous content that while it might sound good in conversation, adds unnecessary words that clutter and distract from the immediate purpose of the piece.
SEO makes such a deep understanding of the audience possible that it should be viewed as a tool of content creation. For businesses at least, SEO data today is the foundation for great content.
Final Thoughts on High-quality Content…
Data alone doesn’t make for high-quality content. There’s as much an element of art in writing as there is the science, where SEO data fits in. The science part of writing – data, and the insight it offers into the mind of the audience – however, is half the battle (as the saying goes) in creating relevant and engaging content.
The artistry of writing involves storytelling, a conversational voice, but of all the possible elements I might mention, the most important is clarity.
Clarity alone resides at the heart of the art of writing and what ultimately separates most content from the highest-quality content. SEO data helps to achieve this clarity. Use it and you’ll create awesome content.
Need high-quality content for your marketing and communication? Contact me and let’s talk…