How to Create Perfect Content to Improve Your SEO Results

Given the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape and the fact that new brands and websites keep popping up, it can be quite difficult to stand out in the online world and make your voice heard. What makes it even more challenging are various SEO tactics that seem to be changing quickly. It’s not uncommon for a lot of those tactics to be obsolete now, regardless of the fact that you used them, let’s say, for the past year and that they actually worked pretty well.

Everything is changing at a fast pace, so if you want to cut through the noise of the competition, you need to make sure you keep up. Aside from updating your marketing strategy and making sure you convey a useful and compelling value proposition, you need to continuously optimize your website and ensure you pull in valuable traffic.

There are plenty of ways to optimize your website, but one of the best and most effective ones still remains creating great content. They don’t say that content is king for nothing. You may be tired of hearing that, but its importance cannot be stressed enough. Content is what sells and what pulls people toward you, but it takes time and effort for it to be truly effective.

Since you’re reading this, you’ve already taken the first and most important step toward creating compelling content that will improve your SEO results. So fasten your seatbelt and join the ride that will take you to perfect content, traffic spikes, and high SEO ranking.

Determine Your Goals

Before creating any kind of content, you need to start with your end goals, which will give you perspective and a sense of purpose. It will help you know what you should focus on to craft content that will resonate with your target audience and make them engage with everything you say.

What is it that you want to accomplish with your content? Do you want to use your website to capture more quality leads and increase your sales? Do you want to grow your traffic to monetize your website via ads? Are you looking to get more email subscribers whom you can convert into customers?

You need to carefully think about everything you want to achieve with your content and clearly define your goals. Determining your ultimate goals will give you a full understanding of what your content should look like and how you can use it to attract your target audience. Only when you know your goals will you be able to take the right steps.

Also, you will then understand what CTAs (calls to action) to create for your content, and those are important for helping you accomplish your goals. Your CTAs should always be created with your goals in mind, otherwise you may not know how to compel your readers to take the actions you want them to take.

Know Your Audience

This is the most crucial step that you need to take towards creating high-quality content. Getting to know your target audience and diving into their pain points will help you effectively address and satisfy their needs. You need to know the people that you want to target with your content, so that you can fully understand exactly what it is that they expect to gain from you.

You need to know precisely who they are and what their interests and preferences are, so that you can make sure that you provide them with real value. What are their primary pain points? What is it that they may be struggling with and what kind of expertise can you offer in order to match it to their needs? What solutions can be implemented in order for their lives to get better?

Once you know exactly who your ideal customers or website visitors are and what questions they need answered, you will know in what direction you need to go in order to meet their needs and entice them to come back again whenever they need your unique expertise.

You can learn about your target audience on various social media channels and forums, as those can provide you with a clear insight into their characters and everything that they happen to need and want from brands in your niche. You can also conduct surveys and directly ask your target audience about their pain points and the ways they would want them to be addressed, as there is really no better way to get to know someone better than to simply communicate with them.

One of the most important things to remember when creating your content is that you should always start with your audience before going into keyword research. This is where a lot of marketers make a mistake, as they do it the other way around, which prevents them from developing content that really resonates with their audience.

If you start with keyword research and base your content strategy on keywords with the highest search volume, you may get a spike in traffic, but will that traffic be the right one for achieving your goals? Not so much. You will definitely increase organic traffic that way, but the majority of that traffic may not be people who are likely to convert, because not all of your target audience’s needs can effectively be captured in search.

Therefore, focus your content strategy on your audience, and then move on to setting a list of keywords that will help you create relevant and quality SEO content that converts.

Brainstorm Potential Topics for Your Content

This step is definitely not a must, but it can be pretty rewarding once you get the hang of it. Brainstorming potential topics for your future content and writing them down, along with headline ideas and any other notes that you may find useful, can greatly help you later when you dive into the whole content creation process.

Since you will know your target audience by this point, coming up with topics will definitely not seem as challenging as before. You will know exactly what your audience cares about and what they are genuinely interested in, so you will be able to easily think of numerous topics that will address their issues and provide them with the right solutions to their problems.

All of this may seem like something you can easily do when you actually sit down and start writing your content, but you must know that ideas don’t always come so easily. Inspiration doesn’t always come exactly when you need it, so it’s always a good idea to keep a list of topics, headlines and anything else that you think of along the way. Having such a list before you even get into writing your content may spark your creativity right when you need it.

Conduct Keyword Research

This is the moment when you should conduct your keyword research, since you already know everything about your target audience and you have a list of the content topics you will write about. Implementing proper keywords into your content will help your target audience find you easier, as those keywords are essentially the terms that they are typing into search engines to find solutions to their problems.

Therefore, in order for you to help them find you, you should find out the exact terms that they are using to find products or services in your niche, or anything else related to the topics that you plan on tackling in your content. When you figure out what those terms are, you can implement them into every piece of content you write, thereby directing your target audience to your website.

Since search engines are actually the ones responsible for directing people to your site, you need to have them at the forefront of your mind as well. Search engine bots crawl your site in order to determine what it is actually about and whether or not it is relevant to your target audience, and the keywords you use help them properly evaluate and rank your website.

Therefore, conducting proper keyword research is an essential step for creating quality content and improving your SEO results. There are a lot of tools that you can use for keyword research, but some of the best ones is definitely Google Keyword Planner. In order to use this tool, you need to create a Google AdWords account first, after which using the Keyword Planner is pretty straightforward, as all you need to do is type in the keywords related to your niche and the topics that you want to cover. The tool will show you the average number of monthly searches and the level of competition for each and every keyword you research, so that you can know which ones are the best to use.

You should always go for keywords that have the lowest search volume, that is, the lowest competition, as those are the terms that people search for but cannot really find a lot of content related to those keywords. Those are usually long-tail keywords (phrases consisting of three or four words), and it is much more likely that your audience will search for those, because they are highly specific and help them quickly find exactly what they are looking for.

Other tools that are also great for keyword research are Keyword Tool (excellent for keyword research by search engine) and Ubersuggest, so you can check those out as well. SEMrush Keyword Research Tool is also amazing, as you can evaluate the competition and difficulty of particular keywords, see the level of their popularity and even see whether or not they are predicted to grow in popularity, among many other useful features that this tool can provide you with.

Develop an Editorial Calendar

Having an editorial calendar will help you create and publish your content on a regular basis, as it will serve as a schedule where everything regarding your content will be perfectly outlined. With this calendar, not only will you know exactly when you should publish new piece of content, but you will also know what type of content it will be.

It is very important that you include all your relevant keywords and topics in your editorial calendar, so that you can always have a good idea of what your content pieces should include. This is crucial if you have someone else (or a whole team of writers) creating your content, as they will know what it should include in order to attract the right kind of audience.

The best and easiest to use tool for creating an editorial calendar is definitely Google Calendar, and you can easily share it with every member of your team that needs to be in on the whole content creation and publication process.

Conduct Creative Content Research

This is the last step before finally writing your content, and it is very important that you don’t skip it. You may think that you know everything there is to know about certain topics (and you may as well do), but reading a bit more about it certainly couldn’t hurt, could it?

You should always conduct creative content research before your actual content writing, because it will give you an insight into how certain topics that you want to tackle have already been covered. More importantly, you will get a picture of what has actually worked well for someone else, so that you can better understand what to do to pull in your target audience and reach the same, if not higher, level of success.

This definitely doesn’t mean that you should copy someone else, since you should never do that, but simply see how your competitors have done it. Their work may spark your creativity and you may get a lot of awesome ideas. Even if you don’t get a groundbreaking idea, you may be inspired and think of a great way to spin someone else’s content and give it a fresh new look.

Don’t be afraid to do so, but make sure you write from your own experience and from your unique point of view. Take this very post you are reading, for instance. How many posts about creating content are there? Thousands. Therefore, this is not something groundbreaking, but I write it with my own experience in mind, and that is precisely what makes it unique.

Craft High-Quality Content

Here comes the fun part. Now is the time to sit down and dive into the writing process, making sure that all of your previous research actually pays off. You know what your target audience needs and expects from you, you have a list of keywords relevant to a particular topic, and you have an idea of what you want your content to look like in the end.

Armed with all of that information, you can easily create high-quality content that your readers will find truly relevant and useful. What’s very important is to steer clear of too much technical jargon, so that your readers can actually understand everything that you want to convey. Make sure you really engage them in your content, so that they can be compelled to come back again and, more importantly, become loyal to your brand.

You need to find a unique brand voice that will differentiate you from other brands in your niche, as well as stick to your unique content angle, or content tilt, as many marketers refer to it. This means that you should always match your brand’s expertise with your target audience’s primary pain points, so that you can provide them with real value.

Also, don’t underestimate the headlines, because they are actually what will compel your audience to click through and read the content. Therefore, make sure that your every headline is unique and eye-catching and, of course, that it clearly indicates what benefits your readers will be provided with if they dive into the content.

If you create a blog, you need to make sure that you update it on a regular basis, because not only will you continually attract a greater number of readers, but search engines will also love it. They will recognize your efforts and reward you with a higher SEO ranking. Of course, your ranking will be increased only if your content is relevant, useful, informative and creates excellent user experiences, but that won’t be difficult to accomplish if you carefully follow all of the aforementioned steps.

Promote Your Content

Content promotion is a very important part of every SEO strategy because, if you don’t promote your content, you cannot really expect for it to attract a great number of readers, can you? Consequently, if you don’t pull in lots of readers, your SEO results will not be as positive as you want them to be.

Therefore, make sure you promote every single piece of content you write on various social media channels, as they will enable you to significantly extend your reach and build a strong and reputable brand. It goes without saying that you should share your content on the channels where your target audience is, so that you don’t end up wasting a lot of time and effort on networks where the majority of people won’t really be interested in what you have to say.

Besides sharing links to the content on your website, you should be really active on social media and communicate with your followers on a daily basis. Encourage discussions, respond to comments and messages, thank your followers for their feedback and always take into consideration their opinions and suggestions, because they are your greatest source for improvement.

If you run a blog, think about guest blogging, since it is also an excellent method for driving more traffic to your website and increasing your SEO ranking. Also, using email to promote your content can help you significantly increase your website traffic and, with it, improve your SEO results, increasing your online visibility and having even more people flock to your site in search for your unique expertise.

Measure the Results

It’s important to note that it may be several months before you see any results from your new content, but it is crucial that you measure the results. Measuring the results will provide you with a clear insight into the performance of your content, so that you can know whether or not it is actually helping you achieve your goals.

If you fail to measure the performance of your content on a regular basis, you will miss out on a lot of opportunities for success, because proper reports and analytics will show you the exact areas where you can improve your content. Remember, there is always room for improvement, and even the smallest change can lead to something great.

The best tool that you can use to measure the success of your content is Google Analytics. You can keep track of your website traffic and see where it is coming from, measure your conversions, see whether or not you are actually achieving your goals, to name just a few of numerous features that this tool can provide you with, so make sure you use it.

These steps are absolutely essential when it comes to creating perfect content that your audience will love and that will ultimately lead to high SEO ranking, so make sure you follow them. Don’t forget to reassess your content strategy every once in a while, so that you can be sure that you are headed for the right path to success but, again, these tips will help you always create enticing content that will take your brand to a whole new level.