So how do you get Google to like your website content for a set of keywords? Well, one way that is just starting, and looking into Long Form Content.
Get to writing Long Form Content!
Start with the topic cluster approach. It’s the idea of creating content that points users toward a page that has more information that hopefully has a call-to-action on it.
So start creating a pillar page on the target topic. It’s going to be over 1,000 words, so no shortcuts creating this for starting on SEO.
This is sort of an ultimate resource for your audience and is highly valuable. Optimizing this page for SEO is to make it a target of your backlink acquisition efforts. Those that are in your website (on-site), and off-site.
Pillar Content
Create about 6-12 blog posts that link to this pillar page, and make sure the pillar page links back to them. These articles (or blog posts) should contain words in your links like, “read also (key search term here)” or “you may also like (your key search term here).”
This type of content is, of course, related to the topic of the pillar page. This expands on the information that’s been provided.
Now, promote the pillar page.
Send it to your email list as a newsletter and use each post to be a new episode of your newsletter.
Recommended for You
Webcast, September 17th: 10X Growth & Relationships with Community Building
Share on social media and start getting readers by including backlinks to the article you created. These readers will also go through the related blog posts, stay engaged on your website, increasing the time per session. Google loves seeing this signal.
What Google Likes
Google uses that to measure engagement, relevance, and trust of the information available on your website. Quality backlinks bring authority to the page which will influence the blog posts to rank too.
Google wants to see that people like your website for the keywords you’re targeting on the pillar page. These blog posts are not easy to write, so if you need to content a writer that is a professional, is familiar with your topics, and hire them. Look for a technical writer, they have the proper training to create articles that have a great readability score (important for SEO) and for readers.
You can repurpose this pillar page into a content offer like an eBook later. Or create an email course or video series. The possibilities are almost endless. You can nurture readers using the blogs as a touchpoint. It builds an audience for inbound marketing.
Frequently write on a basis you can manage. Don’t set a goal that you cannot meet. One pillar page and supporting blog posts every 3 months should do. You can easily scale and optimize this kind of implementation.
Long-Form Content
This is not a new technique. But if you have limited resources, you should invest time in this. Long content is a strategy to create a massive piece of content. Such as a video, blog posts, or set of images, that can be stretched out to micro-content. Smaller chunks essentially for sharing on social media to point back to your pillar pages.
Make sure your social media content is taking advantage of traffic. That is to say, sharing links properly to show Google that users are interested and getting you those click thrus.
This is not a comprehensive strategy. There are things such as formatting of your articles, images for the articles, and technical SEO implementation. But it’s a beginning.
