There are many factors that determine a website or web page’s ability to rank successfully in search engines. In this article, we’ll take a look at a few tips to ensure your On Page Content is leading to higher rankings.
Understanding Your Audience
Before you begin writing content for your website or blog, start with your potential users in mind. After all, it doesn’t make sense to rank for a keyword or phrase that no one is searching for. But how do you do this? With Keyword Research.
There are many tools that do this (Google AdWords for one, Moz is also great), and by starting here, you are ensuring that your content is giving the people what they want. It’s important to take the guesswork out of what you think your potential customers are searching and make sure you are certain. There are two reasons you’ll want to conduct research: For starters, we are often incorrect in our assumptions. We find that Keyword Research reveals search queries that were not on our radar. Secondly, by uncovering a non intuitive search query, there is a high chance that there isn’t much competition for that key phrase.
For example, a Medical Practice (ENT) wanted to rank more highly for terms like “ENT” and “Ear Nose and Throat Doctor”. These are great keywords to rank for, and we implemented a strategy to go after them, but after performing keyword research, we determined that there is also good search volume and very little competition for other terms such as “My ears wont stop ringing” and “Nose is always stuffed”. By uncovering this, we can put efforts to highly searched, less competitive queries that will allow us to gain rankings (and leads) much more quickly and efficiently.
Content Quality
The one thing you have complete control over when it comes to SEO is the quality of your content. That’s the good news. The bad news is that creating amazing content is incredibly hard. Let’s start by asking what does amazing content look like? Well, like most things, you’ll know it when you see it. There are 2 surefire ways to produce amazing content: present ubiquitous information in a new, exciting way, and present new information that is not commonly known (researched based). Additionally, presenting content that is huge in scope and detail (see Wait But Why’s Elon Musk series of articles for a great example) is a way to move the needle. The bottom line when it comes to creating amazing content is that you can’t do what everyone else is doing.
Rand Fishkin of Moz created an incredible post about 10x content, and in turn created an amazing piece of content in and of itself. If you look at the link I listed above, you’ll see he was able to create a piece of content that contained new thoughts and ideas, has some of his older ideas included, and by making the post a video session, he presented the info in a very exciting (and shareable) way. Additionally, the page contains a transcript of the video along with an image of the whiteboard that is easy to go back and reference. It’s a fun, original piece of content that teaches something and is very useful.
Internal and External Links
Trusted SEO resource Backlinko says that internal and external links are a huge factor for ranking. And it makes sense if you think about it. Every page should help the bots at google (and yahoo and bing) determine what the page is for. By linking to external web pages with a high domain authority, you are showing that your website is relevant to theirs, and is also a good resource for users. By linking to internal pages, you’re telling google that the other pages in your website are important, and making it easier for the bots to find those pages. It’s a win – win.
By implementing just these three simple steps, we can go a long way to creating web pages and content that will rank high in the SERP and give you the traffic you need! Happy Optimizing!