Posted on Jul 14, 2015

How to Make Your SEO Content Friendly

When you make your SEO content friendly, the content on your website is more enjoyable for your website visitors. It simultaneously improves search engine rankings and it allows your business to have a strong foundation on the web.

But what’s the ultimate goal for making your SEO content friendly? And how do you do this?

It starts with a solid user experience. User experience is a person’s behavior, attitudes, and emotions about using a particular product, system or service. But it’s challenging to create a solid user experience if users aren’t visiting your website in the first place – this is where SEO is crucial. Content that’s “friendly is more likely to get links and is more likely to be shared on social media. It’s also less likely to send people away from your page without interacting (the industry term for this is bounce rate).

Think of it like a painter who gets invited to display a painting at an exhibition for landscapes. If the painter creates an abstract painting (instead of a landscape), the gallery most likely won’t use it. It doesn’t fit the “user experience” of what their audience is expecting to see.

In SEO you are the painter and the gallery is Google. The Google gallery is expecting you to create content on your website that’s user-friendly. When you do this, you have a better chance of getting seen.

Here are a few ideas to make your content friendly:

Think About The Audience

Before creating any content, spend time thinking about your audience. The first step in doing this is to stop thinking about your audience as an “audience.” You should also stop thinking about them as customers, potential customers, and especially leads. Instead think about them as real people – another human being, just like you.

These humans have problems they’re trying to resolve. To learn more about them, find out what motivates the people who visit your website. You can do this by learning how totranslate audience data to improve your content strategy. This makes your content relevant, engaging and fun.

Use Keywords Properly

SEO content has to have keywords. Without keywords, the content has nothing to do with SEO. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to use keywords.

The wrong way is to stuff your page with them and to use them in sentences even if they don’t make sense.

The right way to use keywords is to sprinkle them naturally throughout the article. Always write for humans first, but include keywords as appropriate.

Don’t Be Afraid Of Length

The length of your content matters if you want it shared on social media. The optimal length for every social media update varies by platform. As this infographic reveals, the ideal word count for a blog post is 1600 words. But if you’re going to have a 1600-word article, make sure that the quality of the article remains intact. More words in an article should never make the quality suffer.

Similar research shows longer posts also get better rankings in Google. This graph is from serpIQ.

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serpIQ looked at over 20,000 keywords and found that, on average, the top 10 positions in Google are pages that have at least 2,000 words.

Finally this graph from the Quicksprout blog shows that posts longer than 1,500 words get more engagement on Facebook and Twitter.

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Make Sure The Content Is Relevant

When your content is relevant, real and engaging, you’ll generate more organic traffic. You can do this by creating content that guides readers to better understand your product or service, or that helps them throughout their decision-making journey. For each piece of content, make sure that you continue to focus on the needs of your customer.

It’s helpful to inject personality into your content but make sure that what you create is valuable and entertaining. Find a way to work a bit of humor into your content (if appropriate) so that your readers stay engaged. Creating content that has humor andinformation may be a challenge at first, but with practice you can get it right.

Make It Informative

The most important thing to remember is to not mistake informative content for sales pitches. They are completely different types of content. While it’s okay to sell your products and services, make sure that you also have other content that’s indirectly related to what you sell. When you get this right, you improve your SEO and make the experience of your readers more enjoyable.

Just like the painter invited to display his or her painting, making your SEO friendly gives you a good position at Google’s “exhibition” while increasing your chances of a real human buying what you sell.

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