SEO Content: A complete guide for Beginners

It is a comprehensive guide to creating SEO content. The tips I will share have helped me rank higher in Google for highly competitive keywords such as "SEO campaigns".

• Google SERPs - SEO Campaigns And on-page SEO.

• Google SERPs - On-page SEO

Let's start at the beginning.

What is SEO Content?

SEO content is designed to rank high in search engines (e.g. Google). In addition, content written for SEO is usually optimized for specific keywords. Make no mistake when it comes to Search Engine Optimization:

Google even states that content is a very important factor in SEO success. In particular, it confirms that content is one of Google's top three ranking factors.

The search engines are watching us. And I can tell you from experience that content marketing can help you get a lot of organic traffic.

I regularly publish content on my blog with the specific purpose of ranking in Google.

Backlinko - content collage

This SEO-oriented content strategy is one of the main reasons why my site receives 449,058 visitors per month from search engines.

Backlinko users.

With that in mind, here's how to create content for SEO.

How to write content for SEO

Step: Choose a Topic

The first step is to find a topic for your content.

Specifically, it would help to cover a topic that interests your target audience.

Here are three easy ways to find good content ideas. Reddit: Search for active tiers where your target audience is. Then look for topics that come up regularly. These are good topics to cover in a blog or video.

Competitor blogs: Look for the most popular articles, videos and infographics on your competitors' blogs. What do your competitors have in common? What can they learn (and improve)?

Personality: Personality can help you determine the type of content your target customers are looking for online if they are not looking for your product or service. Here are some examples:

Basketball buyers.

For example, my target audience is full-time marketing professionals.

A while back, I saw the following discussion about SEO.

Reddit SEO backlinking issues.

Step: Keyword Research

Now it's time to do keyword research for your content.

Keyword research is a very broad topic. So we can only tell you some of what you need about keyword research.

However, I can quickly explain how to do keyword research, which is very effective now.

First, use Google Suggest to search for longer keywords.

Google Suggest is a paleo diet.

This technique is interesting because it lets you see which keywords people are searching for. It means that there is less competition for these words.

Secondly, you can use Uber Suggest.

This free keyword research tool can help you develop new keyword ideas. You can also use this tool to see how many people search for these keywords on Google each month.

Uber Suggestions.

Finally, enter a few different words or phrases into Answer The Public.

Unlike many other keyword research tools, Answer The Public is 100% query-driven. If you want to create keyword-optimized content based on a query (for example, Why is content marketing important? This tool is a gold mine.

Answer The Public - Paleo Queries. If you want to see several of these strategies in action, we recommend watching this short video.

Step: Write Complete Content

Here's a little secret about SEO content:

If you want to rank well in Google, your content has to be great.

More is needed to have great content. Your content must be the best result for a specific search query. Otherwise, it won't rank.

How do you achieve this?

Write comprehensive content.  

It means publishing content that offers everything a person searching for a particular keyword needs.

For example, a few years ago, I published a comprehensive guide to mobile optimization.

Backlinko - A guide to mobile search engines

But I knew great content would rank better in Google than short articles.

And I was right.

A few months later, my guide ranked 1 for the search keywords:

Google search: mobile SEO.

A study of Google's ranking signals showed that the top 10 results for most keywords averaged 1,447 words:

The average number of content words in the top 10 results is evenly distributed.

Why does longer content rank higher?

Longer content provides Google with more information about the subject matter.

Step: Optimize For The User

Once your content is written, it's time to optimize it for the user.

In particular, you need to make your content user-friendly.

After all, if your content is not easy to read and understand, it is not easy to understand. That's because Google now uses user experience signals (in addition to traditional ranking signals such as backlinks) to determine which results deserve to be at the top of the SERPs.

In other words, if users like your content, it will give you a ranking advantage. With that in mind, here are some SEO writing tips you can use to create content that will appeal to both users and search engines.

First, the first few sentences of your content should be very short.

Studies have shown that people prefer to read short sentences, and readers don't like long sentences stretching from one end of the screen to another.

Therefore, the first sentences of every article and landing page on your site should be very short.

Also, limit the first 5-10 sentences to large blocks to prevent readers' eyes from rolling from one side to the other.

I apply this rule to all my articles: the first sentence should be short.

Guide to creating a landing page - first

Second, I recommend including lots of multimedia in the content.

It means using video, audio, charts, tables, diagrams, interactive tools, quizzes, games and infographics.

If your content is multimedia and high quality, it will satisfy more people who arrive at your site via Google.

Video lovers will watch your videos on YouTube.

People who like to read will browse your blog posts.

Audio lovers will plug in their headphones and listen to your podcasts.

Google's quality guidelines indicate that raters should consider pages with "additional content" (such as calculators, downloads, and images) higher quality pages than pages with only text.

Additional content from Google

In summary, using multimedia content is worth the extra effort.

Finally, use subheadings with an H tag to break up the content.

It is especially important for longer content.

A good rule of thumb I follow is to include at least one subheading every 200 words.

As an example, you'll see that I use several subheadings in each article: subheadings.

Step: Backlinks Subtitles

It makes it easier to read (and navigate).

Secondly, the number of internal links to other content on the site has increased.

Internal links to the article. My keyword on this page is SEO. This keyword is searched 24,000 times per month ($15 CPC).

Ahrefs - SEO Strategy.

As you can imagine, ranking for complex keywords takes time.

That's why I always optimize my pages for the long-tail keyword SEO Strategy.

This way, I can rank quickly for the most competitive keywords:

Step: Google SERPs - SEO Strategy

This way, I can link to my site and rank in the top 10 for the most important keywords.

Step 6: Share on social networks

How you promote it depends largely on your niche.

For example, if you have a food blog, you can share your content on social media in the following ways.

If you have a food blog, you should focus on Pinterest and Instagram.

Platforms like Twitter are even more important if you are doing digital marketing.

In my case, I like to share articles on Twitter the day they are published.

SEO Copywriting - Twitter boosted

I also use the Extended Post feature on Facebook to get my content out to a wider audience.

Facebook Posts - Extended

Step: Link Building

There's no doubt about it:

Link building is extremely important.

A  study on search engine ranking factors found that links remain very important to Google rankings. Search engine map - graphic

The question that arises is this:

How do I get people to link to my content?

In this video, you'll learn about the strategies I use to build site links.

Here is an example of how I use one of the strategies in this video (broken link building) to get bloggers to link to my content.

I recently published a list of over 190 SEO tools.

Backlinko - SEO Tools

Then I discovered dead links on blogs, SEO sites and social media.

Dead links.

I emailed each of these bloggers to inform them of the dead links.

Brian's intervention dead links.

As you can see, this method worked very well.

The solution to the dead link problem.

Step: Analyze the results

The last step is to analyze the performance of your content.

To do this, it is advisable to check the ranking of your page in the search engines at the following address

SEMrush - ranking by crawl.

and the organic traffic (via Google Analytics):

Analytics - Organic Traffic.

You can also check the impressions in the Search Console

The Value of Impressions in Search Console

Remember that SEO takes time.

Even if you follow these steps to the letter, SEO can take two to three months to work. So don't expect your new content to rank in Google the next day.

For example, I recently published this SEO case study.

Post-Baklinko technology - Scratch 2.0

The content was optimized for users and SEO, but it took about 60 days for this page to rank on the first page of Google. Summary

I hope you learned a lot from my guide to SEO content. Now I'd like to hear your feedback.

What's the number one tip from today's article that you'd like to put into practice?

Are you going to create longer content? Or will you experiment with broken links?

Let us know in the comments section below.