Grow Your Business: An Introduction to SEO Content Creation
April 11, 2019
Starting a small business in 2019 is much different than it used to be. With almost every industry progressing into a primarily online presence, there is more opportunity for growth than ever before. Thanks to the seemingly infinite wealth of information readily accessible to everyone online, starting a business has never been easier. Unfortunately, this has resulted in an oversaturation of marketplaces and has created a highly competitive atmosphere. This makes the dedication, commitment and ability to gather knowledge more important than ever before.
Understanding the Basics
Before beginning the process of SEO on a website, it is important to understand the key concepts behind focusing the structure of your site. While there are websites that thrive without the need for an excessive amount of SEO, the vast majority of websites will require a large amount of SEO content to begin generating organic traffic.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization often referred to as SEO, is a method in which web content is stylized and created in order to provide organic traffic to a website. Thanks to the dominant position held by Google, SEO centers around their ever-changing algorithm which determines what users will likely see when they perform searches online. Adapting and creating quality content centered around Google’s standards will allow websites to rise to visible search relevance. Though, there are many factors to consider before SEO can begin generating your traffic.
Content
Regardless if your website centers around selling small novelty items, or if you offer your expertise for an at home installation service, content will be the driving force behind your site’s traffic. This is due to the offering your site provides to individuals looking for information to consume online. Unfortunately, just putting content on your website is not enough to gain much traction. This is why it is important to understand how to improve your pages SEO to maintain relevancy.
Research
Research will always be the first step when it comes to creating SEO content.
Creating original content with unique ideas is something most sites strive to offer, and writing to cater to search relevancy will provide a more fruitful.
Keywords
Keywords are words or phrases that individuals enter into a search engine in order to find information relating to the topics they are looking for. While the words alone not particularly special, the number of times the search query is put into Google each month defines the relevance of these keywords. Knowing these keywords allow you to target your content to a specific group, providing you relevancy to a defined area of interest. Keywords are often gathered through the use of a keyword research tool.
Two of the leading keyword providers are:
- Semrush
- Moz
Though, keywords can be found from a number of free keyword tools, such as:
Images
Images are not only important to the aesthetic of your website or blog, but they also provide an opportunity to increase your sites SEO. When uploading an image to your website, it is important to rename your image to coincide with a keyword present on your web page. This will define your image under that keyword, which provides the opportunity for a higher Search engine ranking position (SERP) rating under Google images search. A higher SERP rating will provide you more chances for exposure. This will also increase the overall keyword strength on the page the image is present.
Image optimization and speed will also determine the sites score when indexing. The faster the site’s loading time the better the SEO score will be. In additon, this can increase your website’s domain authority a concept discussed later in this article.
Putting SEO into Practice
Using the concepts provided above, we can begin structuring the foundation of creating content and begin gaining site relevancy. This can be completed in only a few simple steps, and you will be on your way to writing content that holds significance in Google’s rankings.
Step 1 – Research Your Topic
Researching your topic is required in order to become knowledgeable about the topic you are writing about. Gathering research will allow you to hold weight on the subject matter and provide information to your prospective audience. It will also assist in formatting the structure of the content.
Step 2 – Plan Your Keywords
Once research is complete, keyword research is required in order to establish any form of rankings in search engine results. Determining your base keywords will allow you to focus the composition of all your articles to gather strength in that keyword’s relevancy. This is done by composing a list of keywords and long tail keywords that will be used in order to incorporate in your article. A long tail keyword is a phrase or sentence commonly searched in Google. Typically these center around “How To’s” and “Top 5” to provide all of the results with
You will want to begin keyword research with a keyword planning tool. While free services are great for beginners, most will limit the number of keywords given in the search result. These services will also neglect to provide important metrics used for determining the keyword difficulty, the search volume and the competitive ranking of these keywords. These are crucial for building up keyword relevancy, as you don’t want to be capitalizing on keywords dominated by large domains. These terms are defined as follows:
Keyword Difficulty – The keyword difficulty is the difficulty rating out of 100 determining how hard it will be to rank on a specific keyword. The higher the difficulty the harder the chances your website has at obtaining relevancy under that keyword.
Search Volume – The search volume is the average number of monthly searches for a given word or phrase. These ranking accrue over a 12-month period.
Competitive Ranking – The competitive ranking determines the difficulty of obtaining momentum for a keyword when using the recommended cost per click value. This may require higher bidding in order to see any form of results.
Using SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool, we can determine what keywords to use for the term ‘small business’.
Above you can see the breakdown provided for each of the keyword suggestions determined by SEMrush. This includes the keyword, volume, trend, keyword difficulty, cost per click, competitive ranking and the SERP results provided from Google.
When determining the keywords to use, it is important to view the volume, as this is the number of times a keyword has been entered as a search query into Google. If the volume is preferable enough, the next metric to assess is the keyword difficulty. The lower the keyword difficulty, the higher the likelihood of capitalizing on its performance. The SERP metrics will provide the determination of how many results are provided in Google once the keyword is entered as a search query.
We can determine from the provided list above that the keywords ‘small business loans’ and ‘small business Saturday’ fall within a preferable range. This is due to their large search volume and middling keyword difficulty. This makes them prime candidates to be incorporated into an article centering around small businesses.
Competitive and CPC scores determine the cost and competition when using these keywords in Google AdWords for pay per click advertising.
Step 3 – Compose and Create Your Content
Now that all of the research is done for both criteria, it is time to being the composition of your article. All text editors can be used for the creation of content, but it is recommended you use Google Docs. This is due to the ability to install add-ons such as SEMrush’s SEO Writing Assistant. SEM’s tool will provide you the best optimization to structure your articles, which will allow for constant SEO proficiency. This great tool provides you the recommended number of words, the best style of writing for your audience (causal, neutral, formal), and the optimal title length recommended for search engine formatting.
Unless you have a paid subscription with SEMRush, you will have full functionality minus keyword recommendations, which will have to be researched separately and kept track of manually. It may be tedious to constantly reference keywords on a separate sheet, but it’s free. Nobody can argue with free.
When you are composing your article, ensure you are using the proper heading tags, with the H1 or title being at the top of your article, and that the remainder uses the proper H2 or H3 tags. Keywords placed inside of heading tags hold a significantly higher weight than those inside the standard paragraph text. These heading variants define the structure of the articles, these are offered in all standard word editing software.
Lastly, ensure your keyword density isn’t overbearing. Do not simply fill an article with keywords, as Google can determine the volume at which you are using your keywords and will penalize you for having too many crammed together. Content should have only 1-4% keyword density based on the total number of words used.
Step 4 – Images and Assets
The last step is to incorporate images, or assets within your content. This will not only add styling to the foundation of your article, but it will also offer your readers contributing information that could provide relevancy to your topic. When including images and assets into your articles it is important to ensure they are optimized for the most efficient site speed. This can be done with tools such as:
There are hundreds of others offered online and finding one that works best for you is recommended. Take some time out and experiment with the multitude of online providers until you find one you can make your standard optimizer.
Step 5 – Upload Your Article
Thanks to the introduction of WordPress and Wix creating and managing websites has never been easier. This also pertains to SEO, as these platforms offer tools that are made specifically to cater to business owners and to grow an online business through the use of SEO toolkits and plugins.
WordPress users can install the free plug-in “All in One SEO Pack” that overhauls the user’s content creation kit. This will provide multiple offerings including an area to place your raw keywords to incorporate them into your site without the need for manual HTML coding. This also provides areas for an SEO compliant title, images, and social media styling.
For Wix users, Wix SEO Wiz is a built-in tool that allows for SEO compliant checklists to be created to ensure you are incorporating SEO effectively and correctly.
Both tools require an established domain before indexing through Google can begin.
If you are going old school and simply hard-coding each of your pages it is important to still declare your keywords within the article. This can be done through the meta tag inside of your websites HTML. The following should look like:
<meta name=” keywords” content=” small business, small business loans, small business Saturday, small business administration” />
Incorporating this tag into your article will inform Google during indexing that these are the defined keywords being used in the website. This will allow you to establish weight with the keywords you are attempting to use.
Rinse and Repeat
While a single content post will most likely not increase any search engine result pages results, a multitude composed over the lifecycle of a website will begin to gain traction. Google requires indexing of a website before any changes in their SERP is determined. This process varies in time, as Google will simply queue these sites in a list and will allow it to run on it own. A general rule of thumb is to wait 72 hours after posting before assessing any changes in traffic or positioning.
Again, content is the backbone of any website, and without which many people will not visit your website. There can never be enough, but there can always be too little. Find your topics, gather your thoughts and begin creating content.
