When creating online content, optimizing web copy with keywords is an essential piece of the puzzle.
But the question is, should that be your primary focus as a content creator?
Although optimizing your content is essential for generating more website traffic, it’s also crucial that you’re getting that traffic to convert. When traffic converts, you know your content is doing the work to get people interested in your business and can make them customers.
It can be easy to laser focus on weaving keywords into your copy, but that can distract from giving your readers a useful experience. That’s why it’s time to make creating quality content for your existing human reader your primary mission and use optimization as a secondary asset to attract more traffic.
Prioritize Solutions Over Keywords
With the Google Helpful Content Update’s launch, the tech giant encourages creators to focus on creating people-first content. This means offering your readers a satisfying experience while creating content that meets their expectations.
Do this, and you stand a better chance of ranking high in the SERPs. Don’t do this, and you’ll find your content will generate less organic traffic.
Creating and consistently posting content that offers solutions to your audience’s biggest pain points will allow you to achieve the pinnacle of helpful content. Even without Google’s update, you should craft content that positions you as knowledgeable and passionate. But since they encourage creators to write content that leaves the reader feeling like they’ve learned enough about a particular topic to achieve their goals, you might as well utilize this in search engines. Then you can be authoritative on a subject and market yourself in the SERPs.
So, where does keyword optimization come into play? Can I still optimize web copy with keywords? Google suggests writing to your human reader first, then directing your attention to SEO best practices for keywords. You avoid the typical lackluster, robotic, and unsatisfying content that comes from focusing only on search engines – which won’t bring in the conversions you need anyway.
7 Ways to Create Quality Content for Your Reader
Now that you know your human reader should always be your primary focus, how can you create quality content people enjoy reading and sharing with others? There are several things you can do to get started:
1. Focus on Their Unique Needs
Your readers search for content that addresses their unique problems. That’s why you should get to know your target audience because then you can identify the topics that will offer answers for them. And connecting on this deeper level reveals more about their interests and pain points — you humanize your business and build trust with the people you want to reach.
Once you know more about your readers, you can start doing research to determine what they search for on Google. A way to do this is by checking Google Analytics to see which search terms land people on your website. After finding those, take the successful topics from your site and reflect them on social media for further optimization. You can also use your content across multiple channels, saving time and effort.
Take things to the next level by studying your competitors. See what topics they use for their content to see what’s generating interest from their audience. Use it as inspiration, then dig deeper into the topic and put your own spin on the information.
2. Write Captivating Content That’s Easy to Read
All of your site content should be well-written and easy to consume. If it isn’t, your ideal reader could disappear from your pages. An easy way to start incorporating steps that will make your content captivating? Write a catchy, attention-grabbing headline. Headlines should be short and sweet and communicate the point of your article. Make sure this headline is relevant and avoid clickbait-y titles that can turn readers off.
From there, write an introduction that will set the overall tone for the article and leave your audience wanting more. In your introduction, highlight the problem you’re addressing so readers know what to expect. Sharing statistics or fun facts is one way to increase interest here. But make sure your stats are well-researched. You may opt to introduce your article with a fascinating story instead. Experiment and see what fits your style and audience’s attention span the best.
Make sure the body of your article is easy to read by checking for flow in the editing process. Formatting is another big step. Keep the post simple to follow through subheaders that break the blog post into sections. Additionally, numbered and bulleted lists help with readability because your audience can get the gist of a section without much effort. Basically, avoid big blocks of text that are visually hard to absorb and keep the blog dynamic.
3. Add Visual Interest
Visuals are another powerful way to up-level your blog posts. By adding images to your blog posts, you appeal to those readers who are visual learners. By incorporating images, you can help them understand complex topics through customized infographics and other images. Additionally, stock photos are helpful because they help you break up text and include humans to help make connections.
Source: NCN Technology
Whenever possible, you can also consider adding videos to your blog posts. Videos can expand on the topic at hand and provide additional information for your reader to consume. And by sourcing images and videos to complement your posts, your readers will sew how much time goes into the incredible content you produce.
4. Create an Emotional Connection with Your Reader
Content that evokes an emotional response and builds connection is memorable. It’s a great feeling when your content sticks in a reader’s mind. You can create these emotional connections in a number of ways.
For one, you can opt to tell engaging and relatable personal stories. Think about the reasons and feelings that would bring someone to your content, then comment on those and offer empathy. Additionally, consider how you write. Your writing should reflect normal conversations you’d have face-to-face with someone (so it’s more personal).
Since you typically try to get a reader to convert by making a purchase, considering emotions is necessary. Emotional needs often trigger buying decisions, so reel your reader in with content that appeals to that. Then you can showcase that your offer is the solution they need.
5. Show You’re an Authority and a Trustworthy Resource
There is a ton of content on the internet, and if you want to stand out, positioning yourself as an authority in your field is essential. It ensures that people will view you as a trustworthy, reliable resource.
But how can you do that? Pack value into your content by showcasing your knowledge on topics relevant and important in your industry. Then make sure you include statistics and other facts that can be backed up by linking to other reputable sources. Readers will know that you’ve done your research and care about presenting the best info to them.
Another smart move would be to incorporate testimonials into your content whenever appropriate. This is ideal to show leads that past customers enjoy the services or products you provide. It could also encourage them to take action if they’re on the fence about purchasing.
6. Finish with a Call to Action
Part of any of the content you write is making sure those who read your content (whether email, blogs, or web copy) take action when they’re finished consuming what you’ve created. By including a CTA in your content, you instruct your audience about what they should do next. If they don’t know what to do next, they could leave your site, never to return.
Because you have their attention, you want to take advantage of this by getting them to do something like sign up for your email list, make a purchase, or talk to your team. Your call to action should explain what you can offer and the value it provides in their lives. Then, link over to your web store or another internal page so they continue their journey.
7. Keep Your Content Updated
As time goes by, you’ll amass a large archive of content on your website. This is amazing because it will give your readers plenty of quality content to consume. However, it’s only going to be beneficial if you keep that content updated with the most recent and accurate information.
The best way to do this is to occasionally go back through your archives and find old, evergreen content that you can refresh. You may know this, but evergreen content remains relevant to your reader for a long period. Creating these posts is super helpful for broad organic traffic. Then you can update these posts with additional info and updated statistics or links while still utilizing the existing post.
Not only that, but your writing skills will likely improve over time. That means your older content might not be up to your current standards or branding. This is another great reason to freshen up those posts collecting virtual dust in your archives. Then, you can reshare them and generate tons of new traffic.
How to Optimize Web Content with Keywords
Now that you have some tips about creating people-first quality content, you’ll want that content viewed by the masses. This requires keyword optimization. Search engine optimization can seem intimidating when you’re just starting out, but once you check out some guidelines and know that there are tools that can help you, it can be pretty simple.
The more comfortable you get with SEO best practices, the easier it’ll become to optimize content with keywords. Over time, you’ll start to see rewards as Google ranks your valuable, well-written, and optimized content higher in the SERPs. Then you can watch the organic traffic grow.
If you’re still wondering where you can get started, we’ve got some tips to help you out.
Don’t Begin with Keywords
This may feel counterintuitive, but the most successful content marketing strategies begin with setting goals, not whipping out keywords and 3,000-word blogs. You should slow down and think about why you’re driving traffic to your site.
Do you want to build a bigger subscriber base? Do you hope to drive sales through great blog content? Hope to get more folks to schedule consultations with your rockstar team? You can have multiple goals, but you should define them before doing keyword research.
Source: Mightybytes
Having these goals will help you shape your strategy. And once you know what you want to accomplish, you can consider the topics that will help you reach those goals and start optimizing content.
Conduct Keyword Research
Understanding the topics that are trending in your industry and that people are searching for can make or break your content rankings. You can check out the content that your competitors post, make broad searches of your own to find popular terms, or utilize an SEO research tool like Semrush to find competitive keywords.
Once you’ve gathered your thoughts about topics and your niche, it’s time to research. You use the ideas you’ve generated for your business to select a keyword that has a good search volume because you’ll know people are searching for it. From there, you want to check out synonymous keywords to ensure you can still rank for that term.
You’ll find big keywords for your industry likely have a high keyword difficulty, which means that there is a ton of content out there about that subject. Don’t leave a huge gap in your content by ignoring these topics, but it’s more effective to target a less saturated topic when you get started.
Source: Semrush Keyword Magic Tool
As you can see, the keyword “content marketing” gets a ton of hits. But there are only a couple of terms here that have a keyword difficulty that you can target well if you don’t have domain authority and a strong piece of content behind you.
A good rule of thumb is to aim for difficulty scores under 50 – you can still be competitive with a great piece of content and generate traffic a bit faster than with keywords that have difficulty scores that edge toward 60 and higher. Essentially, high search volume and low competition keywords are a sweet spot worth targeting.
Use Keywords Strategically
The secret to successful optimization of your keywords? Understanding where to place them.
Including your focus keyword in your headline, introduction, subheadings, and throughout the body of your copy is essential. Placing these keywords throughout the content helps Google’s crawlers index your content well, especially when you use a complex header system.
When you set up your longtail keyword and then your secondary keywords in these headers, search engines can catalog your content better and put it in front of the right audience. It also means that your content is more scannable for your readers, which makes this keyword focus an asset to your primary goal – creating content for humans first.
Another big place to put your keywords will be in the meta title and description, as well as any alt text you use for images. You can use this SEO practice for a simple boost in keywords, and it’s helpful for screen readers and other devices that make the internet more accessible.
Don’t Go Overboard
You’ve decided on a strategy, you’ve got all your keywords, and you know where to place them. Now, you just need to make sure you don’t stuff your content with the focus keyword. Doing this can cause Google to rank your content lower, but more importantly, your audience can’t enjoy it easily.
You should work your keywords into your content naturally. So, follow grammatical norms and don’t contort a sentence just to make a keyword fit. Sometimes you can even make a keyword happen across punctuation because search engines don’t catalog that period or comma the way they do the words. Additionally, using synonymous keywords and different phrasing will help you distribute your keywords more smoothly.
So what should you keep in mind to avoid keyword stuffing?
- Review your content to make sure it reads naturally
- The ratio of your keyword to avoid being too high
- Checking for complementary keywords
- Stagnant traffic on the page
Review Page Analytics
While content is something that you can publish and leave running to continuously bring in traffic, you can’t just forget about the piece until your next audit comes around. Instead, monitor your analytics regularly after publishing.
You can start by seeing how it looks after a week, then a month, then step it back to quarterly. Make sure the engagement metrics you choose for this page are relevant to your business and your audience. This will guarantee you see how the content functions best. And, if a web page gets regular organic traffic, congrats! You’ve cracked the code for a mix of keyword optimization and authority content.
But if you find that a post or new page for your site doesn’t perform how you like, consider updating the post, double-checking your keywords, and finding other areas for improvement.
This list isn’t exhaustive, but with these tips, you’re on your way to optimizing content with keywords to help your existing readers and bring in new ones via search engines. Now, you can follow these steps and adjust them for your target audience and content needs. You’ll know your readers, and Google will love what you’ve created.
Get Optimized, Quality Content from the Experts
Here at Express Writers, we know it takes time and effort to craft quality content for your readers. Our team of expert SEO content writers knows how to optimize web copy with keywords so we can create content your readers and Google will approve of. Our content writing agency is the done-for-you solution you need to get back to growing your business. We help you reclaim your time with quality content.
Contact our team today to learn more about our content services.
