5 Tips to Improve SEO with Your Digital Content

Intro

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the aspects of Digital Marketing that keeps evolving with the times. Even if you are excelling at it, there probably are ways to get even better at it.

In recent years especially, SEO practices have shifted more towards a ‘quantity over quality’ approach that is more concerned with getting the technicalities right over providing actual value to the readers. This is a flawed approach that may get you immediate results but might not work in the long run.

If you are looking for ways to improve SEO with your digital content, then this post is for you. No matter whether you are a small business or big, just starting out or an experienced professional, these tips will help you get even better at SEO.

5 Tips to improve SEO with your digital content

With a plethora of content now available about the practices surrounding SEO, it can all feel a bit overwhelming and never ending. However, getting the fundamentals right is the best way you can go about it. When analyzing your SEO strategies, pay attention to the basics.

Getting the foundation right sets everything in motion. The tips mentioned below will help you understand how you can implement this. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

1. Create engaging content

This may feel too amateurish an advice, but it is something most marketers find it hard to follow. You may work tooth and nail to get a reader on your blog, but if the content doesn’t engage them enough, then that is an effort wasted.

You can always tweak around your policies regarding the sharing of content and getting traction on your page later. The first and most important step should be creating content your reader cannot take their eyes off.

Blocks and walls of text are out, catchy, dynamic content interspersed with visuals and statistics is in. Here are some ways you can spice up your text:

a) Use infographics

(From: piktochart.com)

An infographic can help people process information six times faster than just text. Infographics offer a creative way to present information that may be confusing or otherwise difficult to understand. Insert them in your text to make it look more authentic, reliable, and engaging to your reader.

You can create infographics as detailed or as simple as you wish with the use of a reliable infographic software readily available in the market. They offer a quick and easy way to create as well as present data.

b) Use more than text

The longer people spend reading the content on your webpage, the higher Google ranks it. To make them stay, keep them engaged. However, people have incredibly short attention spans in this day and age, so you need to earn their attention.

The following tips can help you achieve that:

• Embed videos between text to make the reader stay longer
• Use audio to text converters to generate subtitles that will help make videos easier for people to understand
• Display a time stamp on the top of the post indicating how long it will take to read it
• Keep the posts somewhere around 500-700 words
• Use sub-headings, lists, and pictures to break the text

2. Become a Thought Leader

You may probably know that a Thought Leader is an opinion leader with extraordinary expertise in a given field. They are the ones people seek and listen to when it comes to topics of their interests. If you want people to engage with the content you create, it simply cannot be cookie-cutter. It needs to be highly informational and innovative.

To make your content stand out from your competitors, you need to make it unique. One of the easiest ways to do this is to offer insights based on your personal experience. You can also create a case study or survey that helps you derive unique results.

You can also go against the conventional narrative of your industry. This way, your content stands out because it is unexpected and keeps your audience on their toes. Trust us, no one wants to read copy-pasted content. Be real, be original.

3. Understand keywords and Google

Once you have your content sorted, it’s time to focus on the technicalities. Targeting keywords and acing the Google ranking is imperative to excel at SEO. There are quite a lot of tools that can help you with both. Though you can absolutely use the free tools if they work for the content you create, it is advisable to use paid services if your scale of operations is bigger.

a) Keywords

Keywords are those phrases or words that match with the terms people use for searching in Google or other search engines. In short, keywords are how your content reaches your audience. So, before you create your content, you need to conduct a thorough research on the keywords you are going to include in it. Many marketers make the mistake of using very few keywords that don’t fail to garner enough traction even when they rank well.

Try to use multiple keywords for every piece of your content. This way, even if a single keyword doesn’t perform that well, the sheer quantity of every keyword performing is likely to drive massive traffic your way. SEO tools such as Keyword Finder can help you improve your keyword performance.

b) Google

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a process used by search engines to present accurate results to various queries. Use semantically related terms and phrases in your writing to boost their chances of featuring in the FAQs on Google. It can be related nouns or synonyms, or variants of the primary keyword.

Try to use keywords your competitors are using that rank on your target search query. Additionally, you can use terms like “what is”, “how to” and “why” in the headings of your content as they happen to be the questions in Google’s FAQ section as well.

4. Share it right

Be there for your reader at the right time and right place. How you share your content plays an important role in its performance. With over 4.48 billion social media users in the world, such platforms are undoubtedly the most accessible places to share content today.

Platforms such as YouTube and Instagram are more suitable for video-based content. Instagram along with Facebook is preferred for picture-based posts. As for written content, platforms such as Medium, WordPress, and Facebook work best.

Remember that the goal is to get the reader on your website. Share an enticing snippet of the content with a link that takes the user to your site when they choose to “read more”. It will direct the traffic to your website.

Similarly, mind the time you share your post by looking up the time zones your readers are in. For example, you may be a brand operating in China with most of your social media followers being in Europe and North America. Sharing content at what is daytime for you will be the night for them.

To overcome the timezone issue, you can always schedule your posts. Most platforms provide that feature. Platforms such as Instagram even provide statistics on the level of engagement on your posts. So, you can always tweak the timings of your posts based on them.

5. Stay ahead of the curve, technically

It may seem insignificant, but how technically smooth your website is has a lot bigger impact on your readers than you may realize. Around 40% of the users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. In that light, it becomes important to keep your content as easy to read for your readers as possible.

Something as simple as a clean URL that is easy to type, read and search can go a long way in ranking your content higher. A URL like https://www.company.com/article/388592 tells you nothing about the content. A URL like https://www.company.com/article/5-tips-to-improve-seo instantly does.

Think of it this way: if you cannot understand your URL, how will the search engine and the readers?

The same goes for the pictures used in your content, as they, too, help in driving traffic to your site.

Here are a few additional tips that will help improve the readability of your content:

• Use short sentences and paragraphs to make it readable on mobile
• Remove anything that makes the website slower (GIFs and heavy images)
• Optimize the content to fit all kinds of electronic devices
• Embed relevant keywords in the pictures you use

Conclusion

SEO has been the backbone of Digital Marketing and continues to be a paramount part of it to this day. You simply can’t ignore it if you wish to achieve success with your business.

Most people make it out to be something very tricky and hard to crack, but in reality it isn’t so if you have your basics right. Get your fundamentals right and keep up with the latest trends to stay ahead of the curve.

If you know what content you want to make and who your audience is, then SEO is only the bridge between the two. You just have to cross it.

In the Comments section below, let us know what other content tips you implemented to improve your SEO game.