You’ve heard it a hundred of times, when it comes to SEO content is king. This term gets thrown around a lot because it is true. Content on your landing pages is the best way to help direct search terms to your website. While it may sound simple writing a landing page or an article about your industry there are actually a couple of things that you can do to improve your overall SEO results.
The main thing to consider is that you are writing for a human but the content should be optimised for the crawling bots. Continue reading as we lay out some very important tips to help you write SEO friendly content.
Length
The first factor you need to consider when writing content is how long you are making it. The length is very important as there needs to be an adequate amount so that a bot can recognise its authenticity rather than just a couple of sentences. For blog posts and articles hosted on other sites it is recommended that the length is approximately 600 words. This gives you enough wiggle room to include 6 to 8 keyword references which is the sweet spot for the density.
For landing pages the optimal length is about 2000 words but if you can’t manage to fit that amount in 1000 should be your target. The large amount of content is important because the bots crawl it to make sure that it is relevant for what people are searching. If you were to only include a couple of words, the bots will deem it not to a high standard as some of the other websites out there.
Keywords
Keywords are your biggest friend when it comes to content and SEO. Ideally you would have already done your keyword research before you started to write your content. Once you have your keywords you should be aiming to include them about 1 to 1.5 percent of your total word allowance. That means that the 2000 word landing page should have mentioned the specific search term 20 to 30 times. This is the sweet spot when it comes to keyword density as it is telling the bots that this is the main topic of conversation while not doing it too much and stuffing the content.
Keyword stuffing is a thing and should be avoided. Search engines including Google look down upon websites that use black hat methods and keyword stuffing and invisible text are punishable offences. With that in mind it is recommended that you keep within the 1 to 1.5 percent guidelines.
Format
You may be surprised how important it is to format the content that you have on your website. The main thing to keep in mind with SEO is that while you are doing it for a robot and algorithm it also serves to benefit the users looking for a website. If your landing page is just a wall of text you can be sure that people won’t find it engaging and will be getting out of there as quickly as they can. Well the same goes for bots. If they see that you just have walls and walls of text you won’t rank as well as other websites.
Using the H1, H2 and H3 headings are a great way to optimise your content for SEO. Take this blog post for example. The title is H1 while the subheadings below it are H2. These functions are easy to use and are present within Microsoft Word and are on WordPress.
As our marketing manager, James takes on the responsibility of overseeing the creation of original, persuasive and high quality content that is an integral part of how we achieve success for our clients. Through his experience working in the SEO field, James has developed a robust understanding of core digital marketing principles and has a particular interest in the growing importance of sincere and engaging content in world where issues like ‘fake news’ have become a major talking point.