Creating SEO Content
Video
What is SEO?
Search engines are powerful tools and with ever more powerful artificial intelligence they’re able to search (crawl) the entirety of the internet, continuously adding websites and web pages to an ever growing library.
Google is the worlds largest search engine processing 3.5 billion searches every day! 86% of searches worldwide are made on their platform so it’s important to invest the time understanding what they’re looking for.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) refers to improving your content to rank higher on search engines. SEO can be broken down into 5 topics to improve your sites ranking:
- Use of Keywords
- Use of HTML
- Content Grade & Site Architecture
- Trust (domain age, links, SSL)
- Social Media
Copy in Content
Online content is any information available on the web including text, images, music and videos.
Online content is typically broken down into categories such as:
- Blog
- Social Media Posts
- Articles
- YouTube Video
- Podcasts etc.
Copy refers to the writing within content and it’s a vital element both for your audience to resinate with as well as for search engines to take note.
It’s fairly clear a blog or article is going to include the written word but don't discount text on videos and podcasts as well. Videos and podcasts have titles, headers and descriptions that are written content, i.e. copy. Ensuring this copy is filled with the right words and phrases is vital when looking to make sure search engines pay attention.
Copy
Copy, short for copywriting, is arguably the most important component on your website.
Whilst a great visual and slick graphics are also essential for audience retention and perception, it’s text that gets picked up by search engines. The time required to make sure your content has been created for both your audience and search engines will have a great payoff, especially if you plan to write multiple pieces!
SEO Example
Here’s an example front page of a website we threw together below.
We can make an educated guess that website is selling pizzas and claiming they’re “The best in the world!”
Now let's take away the main image. It now becomes obvious that there’s nothing in the text to let me know the website sells pizzas. In fact if it weren’t for seeing the image prior we couldn’t guess what they’re selling.
When writing copy for your website you need to help search engines catalog your business. A search engine is trying to find the best results for its audience so they come back time and time again. You also want your business to appear when potential customers are searching a problem you can solve.
Although intelligent, search engines aren’t mindreaders. Fortunately helping them index and understand isn’t rocket science.
Once you’ve finished reading this article you’ll have the knowledge and confidence to produce structured written content for the web. We want to ensure your website can be cataloged properly by search engines such as Google.
Images
Images play a vital role in keeping users engaged and adding interest to any online content.
An image might say 1,000 words! *Not the one above, but when building an online web page the creator needs to understand one-thousand text based words equates to a very small file size - in the kb. Whereas an image can significantly slow a websites load speed!
All the effort crafted into your keywords and structure is greatly diminished if the images on your website are too large a file size.
Experte has a free website speed test where you can understand if anything is slowing your page.
Before uploading an image to your website we’d recommend optimising that image for the web. There’s plenty of free online tools but we enjoy Image Resizer Online.
TOP TIP: Most images are in the file format JPG or PNG. WebP is a more modern format providing superior compression and still allowing for transparency.
SEO Title Tags
A Title Tag is the text shown to users in search engines. It also shows on your browsers tabs at the top of the page. The one place it doesn’t appear is on your actual webpage!
Although not on the page itself the significance of title tags are paramount. We’ll be researching what your own title tag should be when looking at keywords below, however understanding how formatting title tags can effect search results is important to driving more traffic to your page.
Ahrefs demonstrate the importance of title tags with a great blog post example.
Ahrefs had a 37% increase in traffic when they altered their title from:
Before: “Rank Tracker - Ahrefs”
After: “Rank Tracker by Ahrefs: Check & Track Keyword Rankings”
How to… Title Tag
Google cuts title tags off around 50-60 characters so it’s important your title doesn’t overrun. There’s lots of free online tools to check your tag fits such as Mangools search engine results page simulator.
You must also ensure you’re writing for your audience, not for the search engine. A title tag is to be read, not a list of keywords. We’re looking to be clever but completely out of the box isn’t going to work. No all caps titles please!
Header Tags - Blogs and Articles
HTML is a language used for web creation. HTML is used so your browser can determine a websites font, colour, graphics etc. We can also use HTML to point to important keywords on our page using Header Tags.
Thankfully, this isn’t a course on how to write in HTML but understanding the basics is a necessity when building an article, blog post or any long form written content for the web.
Unlike Title Tags that are used off the page we can draw search engine attention to our pages headlines and structure.
When posting blogs and articles you’ll be able to label text with headings, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6. This will be an option in Wordpress, Webflow, Wix or even if writing in HTML <H3></H3>.
If a search engine like Google is a library, Header Tags provide a table of contents.
Headings and Subheadings
Breaking up large blocks of text is important. This can be achieved with Heading and Subheadings in addition to images.
H1 Tag
A H1 is the primary heading on a webpage. Typically the H1 tag is larger, bold text, that draws the users attention.
It’s important to note that a web page only has one heading/ H1 tag.
H2, H3, H4 Tags
An H2 tag is a Sub Heading. They’re the second level of heading on your page. Typically a web page will have 1-3 H2 headings.
An H3 Tag is a Sub Sub Heading and so on. This can be seen in the picture below. It’s rare that pages expand to need H4, H5 and H6 tags.
Bear in mind that not all text are labelled as headings. Between heading come paragraphs storing the information your heading describes.
Importance
Headings lend your article a structure that search engines use to catalog. There are millions of webpages being added to the internet every day. Search Engines don’t have the time to ‘read’ through your whole article, instead using titles, headings and keywords to make an accurate calculation on where in their library your content should be found.
How To Find Keywords For SEO
Keywords are words and phrases that users type into search engines such as Google, Bing, YouTube etc. to find the relevant information on their search topic.
What are Keywords?
Keywords are a tool used to aid your websites search engine ranking. Keywords need to be included in Titles, Heading and Sub Headings if you want the page to be found.
In SEO, keywords can be broken down into Head Keywords and Long-Tail Keywords.
Head Keywords - High volume searches use Head Keywords and likely include the subject topic. i.e. if you’re searching for a “stone baked pizza”, “pizza” would be a Head Keyword. Head Keywords are also known as Primary Keywords.
Long-Tail Keywords - Search engines also get a high volume of more unique phrases. Amazingly, 15% of all searches every day are completely unique. These phrases are also know as Long-Tail Keywords.
IMPORTANT: Keywords are both words and phrases.
Finding Keywords
Your keywords will include the object or service you’re marketing and any words that relate closely to your speciality.
Your business might have been running for a decade or a day. If you think you know what your customers are searching think again!
It’s fortunate that searches vary dramatically, users often typing unique phrases. Businesses and creators want their content to be found but with Billion Dollar companies also scrambling to be at the top of search results. Aiming to rank for a head keyword such as “Pizza” is near impossible.
Fraught competition using Head Keywords often means modifying your content to mould a longer keyword that enables your article, video, downloadable item etc. to have the highest chance of being found.
We’re not advocating completely changing topics, nevertheless, if you’re selling pizza in Chicago, a change from “Chicago Pizza” to a less searched “Highland Park Pizza” (location in Chicago we looked up!) eliminates 77% of the competition.
- Chicago Pizza: 225,000,000 Google Search Results
- Highland Park Pizza: 9,750,000 Google Search Results
Even better might be “best pizza in Highland Park Chicago” (1,670,000 results).
Search Engine Research
Whether you're looking to be ranked on the world’s largest search engine, or potentially want a boost on your YouTube video, Etsy offering, social media post etc. You should start by searching the platform and subject you’re looking to grow within.
First, open an incognito window.
Without the incognito window your search results are being effected by many past searches and therefore won’t necessarily produce the same results your potential customers are seeing.
We’re going to concentrate use Google as an example but these principles apply unilaterally.
The research starts as you begin to type. You most likely have a subject idea, so try a couple of variations of what you expect your users to search. The search engine starts to make predictions based on past searches. Take note of words and phrases you find interesting. We can use these predictions to understand the search and start picking out your keywords.
As well as checking out the search results you can also take note of Googles ‘people also ask’.
Lastly the ‘related searches’ section at the bottom can also hold some nuggets providing new ideas you can adopt or adapt.
Free Tools
By consulting free online keyword tools we move from understanding what keywords we can use to what keywords we should use.
There are tons of incredible free online tools to help you gain insight into keyword analytics. We tend to stick to the list below:
Use these analytics to look for keywords with high exposure but lower competition.
Example
When we decided to write an article around search engine optimisation, our headings started off as “SEO Guide”.
Understanding what your article can accomplish is important and it’s unlikely we’ll be ranking on page one of Google for “SEO Guide” in 2022/ 2023. That’s what completing research is here to achieve and after spending time on the tools above we narrowed it down to:
Wordtracker 1
Wordtracker 2
Wordstream
1. Creating SEO Content
2. Top Tips for SEO
3. How To Find Keywords For SEO, 170 monthly searches
Although the search volume for all of these aren't in the thousands there’s collectively 570 monthly searches in the UK which covers our goals and objectives.
Choices
Spend time using these tools and narrow down your options.
From this list you can craft your Title Tag, H1 Header and Sub Headings (H2, H3 etc.). Ensure your title or headline flows correctly. Remember that your content is for people, not search engines so don’t pop a word into places that looks unnatural.
Here’s how we broke down this articles keywords:
Title Tag
“Creating SEO Content: Tops Tips for SEO from Yolkk”
H1 Header
Creating Content for SEO: Tops Tips for SEO
H2 Headers
- What is SEO?
- SEO Title Tags
- How To Find Keywords For SEO
Wrapping Up
SEO specialist is a job title in itself. This guide most likely won’t get you employed by Google but hopefully it’s a start to getting you ranked on their search engine.
Although obvious, it must be said that one of the factors determining your position on search engines is producing great content.
Search engines love to deliver content the user wants. They want to provide their users with the information they set out to consume so you need to be producing content your audience want to spend time consuming.
Despite this, great content is unlikely to be instant. By conducting research, committing time and finally posting online, you can build on your digital home, brick by brick by brick.
We can all idolise our favourite online content and hope to produce something of similar quality but it takes time to reach both those heights and audience numbers.
Check out more insights below and all the best creating!
