If you know anything about the benefits of SEO for small businesses you likely already know that creating, posting, and sharing great content on your website is important. You might also know the importance of ensuring that the content you produce is keyword-optimized, and how doing your homework to ensure that the keywords you target are important, as well.
This is where things get tricky. As you may have discovered already, balancing keyword research with interesting and compelling content is hard. It can be difficult to include the appropriate amount of keywords to reach the density you need to rank for, and it can be just as hard to include the right keywords in your content without it sounding like a jumbled mess.
Fortunately, there are many ways to write content for SEO without sounding cheesy, sales-y, or robotic. All it takes is a better understanding of what’s important and what isn’t. By focusing on what’s essential and neglecting the unimportant, you can write content that reads well and ranks, at the same time.
SEO Content: What’s Important And What To Ignore
Back in the old days of the web (pre-2013), SEO was pretty simple. You could stuff your content with keywords and it would easily rank. You could even trick search engine crawlers with more nefarious methods, such as by pasting keyword-stuffed paragraphs in the background—styled in the same color as your background—to fill your pages with keywords with anyone noticing. As more businesses adopted the same methods to rank, marketers went to even greater lengths to trick Google and other search engines into ranking their content.
And then things changed. Google got smart. And the world of ‘writing for SEO’ was all the better for it. So what’s new about the new web?
First things first—almost every nefarious method you may have heard to trick a search engine into ranking your content is now defunct. Most of them don’t work, and even if they do, they can absolutely shatter your SEO if you’re caught. In short: If you plan on benefitting from link farms, keyword stuffing, duplicate content, or hidden text or links, forget it. And if you haven’t but would like to, you’ve now been warned.
The second thing that’s important about Google’s latest and greatest search algorithms is their relentless focus on what’s called “semantics,” or key-phrases. From the time that Google began as a research project by two Stanford wunderkinder to the search and media behemoth, it is today, Google (and by that we mean the people at Google) has learned quite a lot. And with 3.5 billion searches per day, how couldn’t they?
One of the things they’ve learned is that people don’t often search using single words alone—but rather with phrases. “Best orthodontists in Duluth,” is a lot more specific than “dentist,” just as “website design tips for contractors” is worlds away from a search query like “design tips.” The point is, people are specific when they search for content on the web—because the added context and the meaning behind it matter more to what they’re searching for than the keywords themselves.
As you may have guessed, this is why Google has since gone to such lengths to only rank content that’s both specific and contextually relevant to their users’ search queries, as well.
Writing For SEO – How To Rank For More Than Keywords
What’s this mean for you?
In short, it means there are new rules for the new web. New ways to rank, or more precisely, write content, so that it ranks for SEO. Content matters more than ever, just as ensuring that the keywords you research and use in your content are relevant to the products or services you provide.
What’s changed is the fact that search crawlers are now a lot smarter than you might think. Because of Google’s unrelenting focus on providing the best user experience possible for its users, they’ve taken a slew of steps to ensure that the content their search engine ranks is the very best content their users can hope to find. This includes prioritizing content that’s not the only keyword optimized, but also content that’s well-written, heavily researched, and unique (as in, unlike anything else they might find on the web). In short, it means that content quality matters, and that taking steps to publish content that’s well-written, well-researched, and original can be a significant investment for your business.
So…how do rank with more than keywords? Publish better content, that’s how! Not only by using better language or by hiring better writers—but using images, videos, or infographics, as well as both internal and external links—to communicate your message the best way you know how. Anything you can do to increase the readability, credibility, or comprehension of your content is an investment in content quality, which is itself an investment in SEO.
Invest In Better Content Today!
Not sure how to produce better content that’s not only keyword-optimized but contextually relevant to your readers? Stuck on writing SEO content that sounds natural—like a human wrote it? Whatever you’re struggling with when it comes to writing for SEO, there’s a marketer who can help you.
Hercules SEO is an SEO and content marketing agency that helps small businesses (just like yours) enhance their online presence and attract customers, by way of SEO-optimized content. We can help you bridge the gap between writing for SEO and writing quality content that aligns with your readers’ needs, wants, and goals. Contact us today to learn more about our top-rated content strategy and SEO services and find out what we can do for your business!