Our top tips for creating SEO friendly content

Quality content and technical SEO strategy...the greatest love story of our time. Working together to satisfy the needs of users longing for answers and the search engines longing to provide them.

Alas, the world of digital marketing is a fiercely competitive one, and ranking high in search results takes meticulous planning and monitoring – on-page content, off-page content, site speed, mobile friendliness…the list goes on. With so many plates to spin, it can be bewildering knowing where to start and what should take precedence.

In this article, we’ll explore the best ways to ensure your content is SEO-friendly and give you the knowledge you need to outrank your competitors.

 What is SEO friendly content?

Content that is SEO friendly has been carefully created using a variety of SEO techniques in order to help search engines understand the content and rank it highly.

There are, however, misconceptions about SEO-friendly content. For example, some digital marketers believe stuffing a load of keywords and links into your content will do the job. This is simply not true. While these are important aspects which help with page rankings, SEO-friendly content should be written for readers first, search engines second.

Content should adhere to Google’s E-E-A-T guidance, i.e., demonstrate experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. In other words, the content presented should fulfil the reader’s requirements, not simply provide a page full of links to fool search engine bots.

Tips for making SEO friendly content

1. Conduct keyword research

Keywords are an essential part of SEO, helping you on your quest to make it to the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Here a few things that keyword research can show you:

• What people are searching for - pinpointing the exact phrases people are using when searching the web.
• Search volumes - how many people are searching for that particular keyword or question.
• Competition - how difficult it may be to rank well for certain keywords. For instance, the keyword ‘shoes’ has a monthly search volume of 110,000 and is highly competitive. Therefore, targeting a more specific keyword such as ‘yellow shoes’ (which has a much lower monthly search volume of 2,900) gives you a better chance of ranking well.

There are some other things to keep in mind to ensure that you are selecting the best target keywords. Try to:

• Focus on long-tail keywords. A long-tail keyword is a search phrase with three or more words that is very specific and gets a small number of searches per month. They’re often used to target niche audiences and generally have higher conversion rates because the browser already knows what they're looking for.
  

• Take a strategic approach. Identify which keywords your top competitors are not currently ranking for and seize the opportunity to get in there first! Use tools such as SEMrush to compare domains and look at keyword gaps. See where you're edging ahead of your competitors and focus on increasing your keyword coverage in that area.
  
• Think about the user’s intent. Consider why the user is searching in the first place so you can tailor your content to meet the user’s requirements.

The five main categories of intent are:

1. Informational: Is the user looking for information? This usually takes the form of a blog or guide.
2. Navigational: Is the user wanting to go a specific place on the internet (i.e., specifically a contact page)?
3. Transactional: Is the user wanting to do something (e.g., purchase a festival ticket)? This usually takes the form of a product or service page.
4. Commercial: Is the user looking to compare products in order to pick the right one for them? This typically takes the form of a review, 'best' article, or ‘vs’ guide.
5. Local: Is the user looking for something in the local area (such as a restaurant)?

When you find your keywords, you will then need to fit them in the following places:

• The content’s title (H1 header tag), main subheadings (H2) and subsections within the main subheadings (H3, H4, etc).
• Meta title and meta description (we’ll provide tips on how to make your meta titles and descriptions SEO friendly later in this section).
• Image names and alt image tags (more about these later).
• The page’s URL.

So, as you can see, there are a whole host of things to consider when researching the best keywords for your content. That said, it’s just as important not to overdo it, as this can negatively impact readability and search engines can interpret your content as spam. A useful tool for you to use is Google Keyword Planner which is a great place to start your search for keywords!

2. Make sure you use SEO-friendly URLs

An SEO-friendly URL is simply a web address that's easy to read, to the point and captures perfectly what your content is about.

For example, if your product page featured yellow shoes, your URL would need to include the words ‘yellow’ and ‘shoes’. If you have a main shoes category, the ideal URL will read: yourdomain.co.uk/shoes/yellow-shoes.

3. Your meta titles and descriptions need to be SEO-friendly too

Meta titles and descriptions are showcased on the SERPs so it’s important they contain the main keyword, highlighting to the reader what they’ll find on the page whilst also creating a sense of intrigue or encouragement to click. For example, if you specialised in sustainable shoes, your meta title and description could be:

Yellow Shoes | Sustainable and Planet-friendly | (Business name)

Get your wardrobe summer-ready with yellow shoes that are fab for you and friendly for the planet. Buy online, next day delivery!

4. Use E-E-A-T techniques to make your content even more attractive to search engines

E-E-A-T derives from Google’s Search Quality Rating guidelines and is used as a hallmark of quality, highlighting to both search engine and user that your content is top notch. The four elements that make up E-E-A-T can be demonstrated in the following ways:

• Experience - the content creator has direct, first-hand experience of the topic they are writing about, such as a travel blogger writing about a place of which they have visited and have in-depth knowledge.
• Expertise - the content creator has credibility and qualifications in their field, e.g., a medical article written by a health professional, as opposed to someone working outside the profession.
• Authoritativeness - the website is recognised as an authoritative voice in its area, building backlinks from reputable sources. One example could be a fashion retailer gaining mentions and links from leading fashion magazines, influencers and bloggers.
• Trustworthiness - the website has clear and accurate information about who is responsible for the content, such as the author’s name, credentials and contact details. Sources, references and citations are provided and content is written by humans, not AI.

5. Make your content user-friendly

Ensuring your content is as user-friendly and easy to read is essential. This is particularly helpful for users trying to read your content on a mobile device where small screens make reading more difficult. Here’s what you can do:

• Use smaller, punchier paragraphs
• Use accordions to reduce the amount of scrolling needed on mobile
• Include lists and bullet point key information
• Use subheadings for new ideas/sections
• Highlight or bold key information

Formatting your content in a clear and presentable manner will make life SO much easier for your reader. If the first thing they are greeted with is a swarm of tiny words, chances are they’ll head straight on over to your competitors...and nobody wants that (apart from your competitors)!

Take the example below from our blog What is an SEO audit?. Note how the content is broken down into bitesize, easy to read bullet points, with bolded headers:

Now look at the same content again, written as one paragraph:

Would you stick around to read content formatted like that? We know we wouldn’t!

6. Optimise images

Including relevant and interesting images to accompany your pages can go a very long way. You can optimise your site’s photos by adding keywords to the image files and through the ALT attributes. It may also be necessary to compress your images using tools such as Optimizilla, as large images can actually slow down the load time of your page, damaging SEO in the process.

According to Adido’s very own Senior Frontend Developer Mengna Zhu, 2560px is the perfect pixel width for web images stretching full-screen. Anything smaller could cause the image to appear blurry to the user. File sizes should be kept well below 20MB – exceeding this could dramatically impacting site speed.

With this in mind, it may also be a wise move to include image descriptions, so in the event of your images struggling to load, users can see what would have been there, providing them with context and hopefully persuading them to remain on your site.

7. Link like a pro

Including internal links can help page rankings when linking together a group of related content. Let's say your category page features yellow shoes and you've written articles on popular yellow shoe styles. In this case, it would be advantageous to link these articles back to the yellow shoes page. This strategy informs Google that you're a recognised authority on...you’ve guessed it... yellow shoes. It can also encourage users to spend more time on your website, helping to increase engagement rate and potentially lead to more conversions.

8. Check out the competition

Do a little digging around your top competitors’ content and note down what they are doing that you think may be useful to include in your content. It should hopefully go without saying that lifting or copying content from another site is a big no-no, but there’s no reason why competitor sites can’t provide inspiration for good SEO practices.

For example, have they included a FAQ section which has allowed them to further utilise keywords and answer questions with high search volumes? Introducing more content such as a FAQ section can be a simple, yet effective method to improve page rankings.

9. Optimise the length of your content

Google tends to prioritise content which is greater in both quality and quantity as this is likely to give users all the in-depth answers they need. That said, if you find yourself struggling to write an article, do not fall into the trap of padding out and watering down content - it all needs to be relevant and to a high enough standard to impress both your audience and the search engines! To get an idea of how long your content needs to be, check and compare the word count of top-ranking competitors.

10. Aim to get a featured snippet

A SERP’s featured snippet is one of the highest honours you can bestow on a SEO professional for their content. Optimising your content for a featured snippet is another way to rise to the top, as Google perceives it as a quick way to answer a user’s query. This can encourage users to click onto your website, read through the rest of your content and spend more time browsing what else you have to offer. So, how can you identify an opportunity for a featured snippet?

• Use a SERP analysis tool such as SEMrush to discover if there is already a featured snippet for your target keyword. If there isn’t, no need to action...if there is, you need to make your snippet-targeting better than the current reigning website!
• Make sure you include the question that the featured snippet answers in your article’s title or subheadings and answer it directly beneath the heading. It is crucial that you provide a concise answer that can outrank the other featured snippet if you are going to see success. Try to use a similar structure to the current featured snippet as this was clearly done well in the eyes of search engines.

There are five different types of featured snippet, including paragraphs, bullet points, tables, and videos. The most common is a paragraph. In order to give your content the best chance of winning a featured snippet paragraph, you need to:

1. Choose your keywords wisely - target long-tail keywords that indicate specific intent.
2. Harness the power of FAQs - include contain relevant questions that users may ask, then provide a direct, relatively short and sweet answer.
3. Format your content effectively - use clear and straightforward language, structure your content using headings and subheadings and include relevant keywords naturally within the content.
4. Focus on quality and accuracy - provide informative, well-written and accurate content that satisfies the user’s query and helps to builds trust.

Writing an SEO friendly blog article

Let’s put all of the above techniques into practice.

Picture the scene: you are a shoe retailer specialising in yellow shoes. You want to tell Google that you’re an expert in yellow shoes. That way, it’ll rank your yellow shoe category page higher. To help you do that, you need to create blog content relevant for anyone looking for yellow shoes.

Firstly, you do your keyword research and find there is search volume for best yellow shoes summer 2023.

You then carry out competitor research to see what content they’ve created and whether you can do it better.

You start off with the main title (h1), URL and meta title and description. These all need to include the keyword so:

• Main title (h1): Our favourite yellow shoe styles to rock your summer 2023.
• URL: The first part of the URL should contain your domain name and the name of the subfolder where you wish to keep this page. A lot of the time, this is just ‘blog’, so the URL would look like this:
  

Yourdomainname/blog/favourite-yellow-shoes-summer-2023

• Your meta title and description would then look something like this:

Our favourite yellow shoe styles for summer 2023 | Your Business Name

Looking for some fab yellow shoes to make you stand out from the crowd this summer? Discover our favourite yellow shoe styles for summer 2023.

• Have each of the different shoe styles as h2 titles on the page and make sure the information you provide for each shoe is as good as, if not better, than your competitors. If you have relevant products, make sure you link directly to them. This makes it easier for the reader to continue their buying journey once their initial query has been satisfied.
• Make sure you sign off the blog article with a call to action. What do you want the reader to do now? The next logical step would be to explore your yellow shoes, so make sure you link to the yellow shoes page and prompt them to get in touch to find out more.

A final note on SEO friendly content

A final tip is to just try and put yourself in the user’s shoes. Ask yourself the following:

• What might they be looking for?
• What would they expect your content to provide in relation to their query?
• Is the content user-friendly? And does it facilitate a smooth user-journey through naturally placed links?

If you’re looking to optimise your website’s content and improve your online visibility, our SEO team is here to help! Take a look at our SEO services here.