Content & Search Engine Success Factors

Content should be your first priority when thinking about SEO. Quality content is how you engage, inform, support and delight your audiences. Creating authentic, valuable content is also critical for search engine visibility. 

Whether it’s blog articles, product pages, an about page, testimonials, videos or anything else you create for your audience, getting your content right means you’ve got a foundation to support all of your other SEO efforts.

Quality

Providing users with substantive, useful and unique content is what compels them to stay on your pages, building familiarity and trust. What constitutes high quality will depend on the nature of the content and varies based on the type of content and industry.

Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (section 5.1) break down the characteristics of high quality content by type:

• Informational content should be accurate, comprehensive, original and professionally presented. 
• Artistic content should be original, unique and convey a high degree of skill. 
• News content should be in-depth, well cited, accurate, and contain original reporting.

Brands creating Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content need to pay particular attention to these standards as Google’s algorithms may give more weight to authoritativeness, expertise and trustworthiness (E-A-T) signals.

Content is the cornerstone of your SEO efforts and not a place to skimp. A clear content strategy is critical to your SEO success as nearly all other factors depend on content quality.

Research

Researching the keywords is perhaps the most important SEO factor after creating good content. It will help you develop content that “answers” what people are searching for. Keyword research can also carry benefits beyond ranking for those queries. It can provide you with insights on the nature of your audiences’ pain points and needs — whether that’s navigational, informational or transactional — their interests, the amount of interest out there (indicated by search volume), the level of competition for those queries, and even the format in which they prefer that information.

Once you’ve evaluated which keywords are viable, use them to inform your content creation and include them within the content itself so that your audience has a higher chance of finding you in the search results. 

Consider classifying keywords by their intent: informational, transactional, navigational or local. Cross-reference your potential keywords with what currently ranks in the search results to see the types of results Google chooses to display for each query. Google may assign a different intent to the keyword than what you expect. Understanding what type of content Google displays for the various keywords you’re researching helps clarify what type of content you’ll need to build and which of your pages will be eligible to rank for those terms.

Keywords

After you’ve researched the keywords your audience is using to find you, include those keywords within the body of your content, your subheads and your titles — but not at the expense of readability or other compromises that prioritize search engines over readers. 

To put it simply, consider the words you want your page to be found for and use them naturally. 

Always keep in mind that you’re writing for users first and that search engines are getting much better at understanding natural language. Throw out any notion of “keyword density” formulas to improve your rankings. 

Freshness

Search engines love timely, up-to-date, “fresh” information.

This does not mean you can make minor updates to your pages, update the publish date or continuously churn out new, low-quality pages to get a freshness boost.

If you have a library of aging content, you can update it or retire obsolete and expired pages. Doing so will make your site more useful to viewers and also indicate to search engines that your content is well maintained.

Google has also long applied what it calls Query Deserved Freshness (QDF) as a content ranking factor for certain types of queries. If a search query suddenly becomes popular — “hurricane” when there is an active hurricane, for example — Google will apply QDF to those searches and the results will change to reflect the stories, news and information about the topic. This is true for featured snippets as well.

You may be able to harness a freshness boost to increase your visibility on the results page by creating content relating to popular trends, upcoming events or holidays and breaking news. 

Pro Tip

Looking at news, Google alerts — things like that can help give you topic ideas that are fresh for your industry. When news is fresh, most likely not all of the topics/areas have been covered as usually the story is developing. That gives you the opportunity to write about a specific angle that hasn’t been covered. 

Answers

There is tremendous value in explicitly answering users’ questions on your pages. For one, you’re creating content specifically designed to meet your audiences’ needs. Two, search engines are increasingly trying to show direct answers in the search results. If you answer questions well enough, your page may be displayed as a featured snippet or returned as a voice search result on Google Assistant. 

Research indicates that more than half of Google searches end without a click to other content, and that’s partially because search engines are looking to satisfy users by resolving their searches right on the results page. Some of those answers are licensed (as is the case with music lyrics) and some are drawn directly from web pages with a link for attribution.

A featured snippet is sometimes included, as is the case here.

Optimizing your content for featured snippets and direct answers may yield more visibility than a standard organic search result, and doing so may also increase the chances that it gets returned as a voice search result.

Pro Tip

Whenever you write a post relating to a specific question,  try to make the answer as accessible as possible to the reader by adding an H2 within the post. Accessibility is important, but making sure the reader sticks around is where it really counts.

Depth

The content on your site should be deep enough to answer the user’s question in a ‘substantial, complete or comprehensive’ manner:

• Are you providing insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Does it contain original information?
• Is that information researched and factual? 

You want to make sure your content provides substantial value when compared to other pages in search results, because that is exactly what type of content Google wants to rank at the top of its results.”

Take the query, your audience’s preferences and your competitor’s offerings into account when deciding how deep to dive.

Multimedia

Not only text formats can provide exposure in the search results. Consider using images, video, audio or other formats that appeal to your audience and set your brand apart from competitors.

After you settle on the format that’s best for your users, optimize your multimedia as well as the pages you embed it within to make it more discoverable. One way to do that is by using a content delivery network (CDN) to serve your multimedia and take some of the load off your servers. This can keep load times down, which is great for site speed and your user experience.

Whichever formats you go with, you’ll still want to use descriptive text to supplement your content and provide context to search engines and users alike. If it’s a video or a podcast, you can add a transcript. If it’s an image, make use of alt-text and captions. You can also mark up your multimedia with structured data to increase the chances that it gets returned as a rich result.