SEO is one of the trendiest digital marketing techniques in the last several years. In 2020, it will continue to be so, as more and more marketers and webmasters are planning to invest more resources into their search engine optimization campaigns.
Since SEO is the number one source of targeted and organic traffic, the competition for the first search result spots will continue to grow in 2020.
While there are lots of known and unknown “ranking algorithms”, content remains king. Brands are differentiating themselves through the content that they produce. Whether its website content, blog content, video content, or any other type of content, webmasters should never neglect the SEO aspect.
If you create a high-quality piece of content that’s designed to serve the needs and problems of your target audience, why not optimize it for the search engines to skyrocket your SEO results?
That’s what we’ll cover today. Let us explore 10 insightful tips for creating your perfect SEO content in 2020.
Establish the Objective
Here are three of the most important questions to ask yourself before planning to create a piece of content:
- What is the purpose of this content?
- What is the exact result that I’m expecting it to bring?
- What’s the most important message that I want to convey?
The thing about SEO articles is that they often lack a specific purpose and aim. You need to think about your human reader first and optimize for the search engines second.
The search engines have a purpose too: they are looking to define what exactly you’re trying to convey. If your content doesn’t have a specific direction, there might be adverse effects.
Target a Specific Audience with Specific Keywords
The most common advice you’ll hear in the digital marketing world is: “know your audience”. When it comes to SEO, this piece of advice is gold. You need to plan and create your content in a smart way. To do that, you first need to establish your target personas.
For example, one of your blog posts might aim to capture the attention and interest of young males, while another post might aim to collect more female leads. The two posts speak to different audiences, therefore, the style, the voice, and the keywords that you use must be different.
I’d highly suggest you get used to perform keyword research before planning any piece of content. Before you write, you must identify the specific keywords and key phrases that your specific target audience is frequently using.
Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahfrefs Keywords Explorer, or Moz Keyword Explorer can help you simplify and automate your keyword research process.
Make Your Content Readable
By making your content more “readable”, you’ll manage to improve the reading sessions of your readers, thus improving your website performance metrics. But what does readable content mean?
- A clean structure, plenty of white space, specific sub-headings
- Short sentences and short paragraphs
- Clarity, organization, logic, simplicity
- The content must convey information in an understandable fashion. Simply put, you should make your information easily digestible so that any type of reader can understand it.
I’d suggest you leverage HemingwayApp. This is a great tool that helps you define and improve the readability score of your text.
Go Deeper in Your Content
In 2020, people will prefer content that goes very deep into the topic. A few years ago, 800-words articles were trendy. Nowadays, content that exceeds 2000 words is currently the most popular. Today’s content consumers are looking for real solutions. They won’t spend a second on your content if they don’t trust you to bring them real value.
“Since Google’s all about quality, you need to start perceiving your content strategy exactly the same way. Rather than writing ten five-hundred-word blog posts, write two comprehensive and amazingly useful blog posts.” – Mark Cuban, CEO at Assignment Help UK.
Write Amazing Titles
The titles of your content – whether text, audio, or video – are the first element that draws the attention of the reader. Call this the first “barrier” towards interaction.
You need to learn how to write amazing titles that people can’t resist. To do that, you need to use emotional words. We call them “Power Words”, and they are a set of words that directly create emotions in the reader’s mind. Here’s a huge list of power words that you can use to create your blog post titles, text headings, sub-headings, or email sub-headings.
Don’t Overstuff Your Content with Keywords
Google doesn’t want you to use as many keywords as possible. Google wants you to be natural. That means you should never focus on keyword optimization more than you focus on your user.
A good exercise you can use is to imagine that you’re speaking to a person, face to face. According to Safari SEO Brisbane, your content should be conversational, meaning that your reader should feel that you’re dedicating your entire work and message to him. The purpose should be to provide value and relevance rather than to look good in the eyes of Google.
Leverage Writing Tools
Creating SEO content becomes much easier when you start leveraging some of the available resources that sit around us. There are plenty of useful software that can help you automate or even perform certain processes that you wouldn’t be able to do manually.
If you’re using WordPress to host your content, you can take advantage of SEO plugins like Yoast. If you’re having problems with grammar and spelling, start using Grammarly. If you need to check your content for plagiarism, leverage Copyscape. There are plenty of writing tools that can improve your SEO performance, you just need to seek them!
Provide a Lot of Value
Value, value, value. That should be your aim for 2020. Rather than focusing on following the algorithm or even cheating the ranking algorithm, focus on adding as much value as possible. Your readers should be glad to hear that you’ve posted another piece of content. They should love your work. If you manage to do that, your SEO rankings will exponentially increase.
Improve Your Page’s Loading Speed
Your content needs to load quickly and without problems. Today’s internet users are extremely sensitive to waiting. If your page is slow-loading and your images are barely buffering, you’ll probably lose a lot of potential readers along the way.
That’s just one of the problems. The second problem is that Google sees everything that happens on your website. When users enter and leave your site immediately, Google will understand that your page isn’t bringing value or is not suited for high rankings.
Provide a Lot of Value
Value, value, value. That should be your aim for 2020. Rather than focusing on following the algorithm or even cheating the ranking algorithm, focus on adding as much value as possible. Your readers should be glad to hear that you’ve posted another piece of content. They should love your work. If you manage to do that, your SEO rankings will exponentially increase.
Final Words
Taking care of the above points can be a bit of a hassle to do on your own; I’d suggest you leverage online paraphrasing tools such as Paraphraser to improve the readability of your text. They can do the above in a matter of seconds and save you from all the hassle.
Whether you like it or not, SEO is here to stay. As a reputable business, it’s your responsibility to adapt to the marketplace and outgrow your competition. If your competitors are ranking higher than you, that means you’ve temporarily lost one of the big battles. The won is not over, but you need to regain your “position” and outrank their content.
Take advantage of today’s tips and tricks and start implementing them as soon as possible. Test, track, and measure your results and continue using the strategies that are the most suited for your campaigns!
