Here’s a tip. If you find creating content painstakingly difficult, try SEO content creation! It makes a world of difference in both the ease of creating content and the results you get.

Wait … what the heck is that, you ask?

It’s simple – SEO content creation just means using SEO to guide your content creation plan. 

See, SEO is all about improving your website’s rankings in popular search engines, such as Google and Bing. So focusing on that when creating your content means …

  • Understanding how your product or service solves your audience’s pain points
  • Creating content about your product or service that builds brand trust and recognition
  • And structuring your content in a way that means something to search engines

We all know search engines are simply bots made up of algorithms and rules. And if you know how to play by those rules and understand how your audience uses search engines? You’re already halfway there.

So, let’s dive a bit further into how you can use SEO to guide your content creation.

SEO Content Creation

When it comes to content creation, the very first step is to assign a specific purpose to each piece. Which is easily done when you keep your ideal client or customer at the core of your content planning.

Begin with your ideal audience

Ask yourself …

  • What questions does your ideal audience have that your content can answer?
  • What immediate and specific problem can your content solve?
  • What step do you want your reader to take when they finish viewing your content?

Confirm what you think you know

Confirm your answers to the above questions with SEO data, which you can gather by doing …

  • Keyword research – use tools to identify the actual words your audience uses to find content online
  • Social research – use tools to determine if the topic is popular on the social media channels used by your audience
  • Online research – use online tools to discover what content already exists on the topic and where it is returned in searches

Evaluate your findings

Remember, data is better than your intuition and more accurate than a hunch. So, always use data to inform your content creation.

Your goal is to target relevant keywords with high search volume but low competition. Now, it may take some time to find these keywords (hint: go for long-tail keywords).

But it’s definitely worth the effort because these keywords are highly targeted and will deliver your content directly to your ideal audience.

Once you have some keywords in mind, look at similar or related content you see being shared across your target social media platform (be picky about the social media platform you target because your ideal audience most likely isn’t hanging out in all the places. Choose wisely).

Pro tip – during your online searches, you’ll likely notice some popular topics. Avoid creating content around keywords you don’t see showing up in many searches – they probably aren’t searched often enough to warrant your content creation efforts.

Choose content format

Once you hone in on your topic and the problem you solve for your audience, it’s time to create some epic content! What form will it take? It could be a …

  • blog post
  • web page
  • product description
  • social media post
  • infographic
  • video
  • and so on

There is a multitude of content types. And some types will impact your SEO more than others. So check out this article about content types for more inspiration.

Be different (and better)

Now that you’re ready to create, make sure you differentiate your content from all the other content you discovered during the planning and research steps. You want your content to stand out as EPIC compared to what others in your industry are producing.

To do this, we like to focus on design, drama, data, and depth to ensure our content is relevant to our audience and build trust and authority in our brand.

Here’s what we mean.

  • Design – create visually stunning content by using colour, images, and diagrams to support the words on the page. It isn’t always about the word count.
  • Drama – use storytelling to speak to the emotions of your reader and create intrigue and interest. Every single piece of content should either engage, entertain, or educate your reader on your topic.
  • Data – real-world data can paint a better picture (especially if your competition hasn’t used any in their content creation). Use statistics to back up what you know and prove your authority in your niche.
  • Depth – go deeper into your topic and explore it more than your closest competitor does. Review more products, provide more tips, or give more insights to make your content more epic.

Optimise Your Content

Once your content is complete, you want to give it its best chance to rank high in search results. And the way to do that is to optimise the SEO elements within your content.

When ranking online searches, Google considers over 200 factors. But don’t worry – we’re not going to get into all of them here.

Instead, let’s focus on these 5 absolute must-dos to give your content a fighting chance:

1: Title tags

A title tag is the clickable link that you see in the search results, like this:

SEO title tag example

In this example, you can see that our title tag is Dream Team: 10 Things You Need To Delegate For Success. The title is displayed fully in the search results (hasn’t been cropped because it is too long) and clearly outlines what the content piece is about.

2: Meta description

The title tag is also supported by a meta description. This brief description outlines what your content is about and should be written in a way to entice your ideal audience to click to read more.

In the example above, the meta description is the description you see beneath the title tag. You can see that our meta description is short, sharp, and engaging. It also includes some keywords that appear in the title tag. This is important for SEO.

3: Headings

Headings explain to search engines what topic your content covers.

There are a number of different heading tags that can be used within your content. The most important are your Heading 1 and Heading 2 tags (<H1> and <H2>).

It is very important to only include one Heading 1 tag in any piece of content (usually the title). But you can include as many Heading 2 tags as your content warrants.

Duplicate <H1> tags confuse search engines, so avoid this at all costs.

4: Image alt tag

The images you use in your content are there to engage your audience or keep them interested.

But search engines can’t see images. So you need to describe the images using words. That’s what the image alt tag does. For best SEO results, it should also contain a version of your target keyword.

5: User engagement

Yes, search engines can tell if your content is engaging to your audience.

When someone lands on your website and leaves quickly, it tells search engines that your content – although enticing in the search results – didn’t deliver on its promise.

When that happens, it may cause your content to not be returned in future related searches. Your content may drop in the results. Avoid this by creating better, more epic, content.

Tie It All Together

Okay, that was kind of a lot. So, let’s recap the basics of SEO content creation:

  • Always focus on your ideal audience when planning content
  • Research content ideas using SEO tools and evaluate what your competitors are doing
  • Make your content stand out by going above and beyond other bland content on similar topics
  • Optimise the important SEO elements on the page so your content gets its best chance to succeed

Yes, an SEO expert would also consider a host of other elements. But you can use these SEO content creation strategies starting right now to start building a strong foundation for success.

Want Some Help?

If you’d like to learn more about using SEO to maximise your content results, we can show you exactly how to analyse, tweak, and monitor your website and content performance. 

Or, consider letting our SEO experts do all the research, planning, and content creation for you so you can focus on delivering your core product or service.

Book a call with us now to find out how we can get your website and content delivering the results you’re after.