It’s a common myth that Google and the other search engines only care about 3 main ranking factors. While links and content remain quite important, search engines are getting more complex and are relying more on other factors now.
This means that SEO now involves many different working parts, and every little piece matters–tying into the overall success of your website. For example, link building is useless on a slow site, and content doesn’t matter when your site isn’t mobile-friendly.
In this series of blog posts, we’ll explore the five on-site SEO factors that you should always take into consideration. The first one is content.
Content is Key
Content is extremely important, but simply having some words up on your website is not enough to make it rank for your target keywords. It may surprise you to find out that over 90 percent of online content does not generate any traffic whatsoever. Let’s take a look at how to be certain that does not happen to your site:
Content Relevance
When you’re able to understand what user intent is, it’s easier to know what your content should contain. In the past year, Google has shifted its algorithms to better understand the ins and outs of user searches, and we’ve already begun to see some of the benefits. This includes knowledge panels, answer boxes, and more diversity in the search results.
As a matter of fact, content relevance in relation to user intent may be the most important ranking factor due to the fact that if the content is not relevant to a search, then it is devalued.
How to Do This
- Understand the intention behind your keywords (informational, navigational, shopping).
- Look at the SERP of your keywords and note the type of content that’s ranking.
- Research similarities to those keywords and optimize your content around those terms.
Deep Content
Deep/long-form content thoroughly addresses user concerns, while also providing unique perspectives on a topic. Search engines even seem to prefer long-form content for most of their user searches.
A study showed that content ranging from 2,250 and 2,500 words received the most organic traffic of all. This appears to be the ideal spot with SEO, but creating pages with even more words can also be beneficial.
How to Do This
- Research the highest ranking pages for your target keywords and look at their content.
- Add related keywords to fill out your content with sub-topics.
- Answer all questions any users may have about your topic.
Organized Content
SEO tags do still play quite an important role in your content, in spite of the increase in semantic analysis. The optimization of title and header tags can assist in:
- Communicating intent and syntax within your webpage document.
- Organizing your documents to be simpler for both users and search engines to read.
- Making your pages much more scannable.
- Assisting your page in passing the 5-second rule.
How to Do This
- Place focused keywords in title tags, page titles and URL slugs.
- Create your header sections with related keywords.
