Content has been a pretty important thing for businesses for many years now, especially since the famous “content is king” speech by Bill Gates back in 1996. There is a lot of discussion within the marketing industry at the moment as to whether this quote is actually true or not, but however, you feel about it you can’t have failed to notice that any business worth its salt has a blog now. Content is something that we as an SEO Agency Manchester are pretty heavily involved in and we value quality over everything. Unfortunately, the rise in the amount of content being produced has led to some poor quality, keyword stuffed articles which provided little or no value to readers whatsoever. Poor quality content is obviously something that we at SEO Manchester have never produced, and it seems to be dying a death as a whole because of the recent algorithm updates by the search engines forcing people to focus on quality if they wanted their content to be seen. But what makes content quality, and how can you make sure it is optimised for the web?
Keyword Stuffing
A lot of the problems in the past with poor quality content have stemmed from the fact that people seemed to think that putting as many keywords as they could into a blog post was the best thing to do to attract Google’s attention. Well, they were right in one way, they did attract Google’s attention but not in a good way – keyword-stuffed content is a great way to get your website penalised! However, saying that, there is no magic formula as to how many keywords is enough and how many is too many, Google is notoriously secret about things like this and so it is really hard to say. The best thing to do, we’ve found, is to try and use keywords in as natural a way as possible – especially in headings.
The other thing to think about is LSI keywords. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Index and it basically means instead of using the same keyword three or four times in your post, you should try and use keywords that semantically related to each other and on the same topic. The search engines are getting much smarter at determining what users are searching for and are looking to provide them with the best answer to their query, so websites which provide a lot of information around the same topic will do better than those who just focus on one keyword.
Keyword Research
As a search engine optimisation manchester agency, a lot of our time is spent on keyword research in order to make sure we have narrowed them down to the keywords that our client’s customers are actually interested in. It is a vital step in any SEO campaign and the importance of it cannot be over-stressed! 3.77 billion people use the internet on a daily basis, and the more of them you can make your content available too for the better! Therefore, keywords are not just important for your blog content, but for all another aspect of your digital marketing as well. The keywords you chose will help determine what your company is known for online, and therefore help to make all aspects of your business more efficient as you know what to focus on.
There are lots of different ways to do keyword research, and we will look at that in a series of blogs moving forward.
Content Strategy
Once you have completed your keyword research it can be quite tempting to just jump into writing and posting content right away, but just hold back one minute. Every blog post you upload should have a purpose behind it, such as increasing brand awareness, driving conversions or even improving your visibility online. It is therefore really important to get a strategy in place for your content, that you can share with everyone within your business who creates content, and then you also have something in place that you can measure your content success against.
Evaluating Success
Most business owners these days are obsessed with return on investment (ROI) and rightly so – there is no point in spending time doing something unless it has a positive and measurable impact on your business. Once you have your strategy in place, you can use this to pinpoint what measurements you are going to look at to evaluate the success of your content. For example, if the aim of a blog post is to increase visibility for a certain keyword then you can measure this using Google Search Console.
How Much Content?
Again there is no definitive answer to this, other than to focus on quality and not quantity. There is no point churning out post after post if they offer no value to customers and they don’t spend time reading them. To stand out from the crowd of content that is produced on a daily basis you need to take a good look at your target audience and how much content they require – as understanding your target audience will give you a great insight into what content you need to produce.
We know that venturing into the world of creating content, especially content that is SEO optimised, can be quite daunting for some, which is why we provide an SEO Manchester service. If you want to know more about creating content then please speak to us today about our search engine optimisation services. You can call 0161 7300 530.
