Relevance is the KEY to Writing High Ranking SEO Content
If your customer could only see the title of your last blog post, what would she know about your brand? Would the title alone be compelling enough to make her click through to find out more? Is the title clear and descriptive? Would a stranger know what the text was about without any other context? This idea of context and clarity is important to think about when you’re creating content for your website, blog, and social channels. Remember that Google, like other machines, cannot read—it can only try to guess what your content is about, from the way you lead into it—with titles, meta descriptions, headers, and keywords. Experienced SEO copywriters know how to help Google guess correctly.
Customers want relevance. With so many messages in the marketplace, the average person isn’t going to click on a link that isn’t descriptive. It’s the difference between “shoes” and “young boy’s ballet shoes.” Shoes is a broad category that really doesn’t explain what is behind the door. “Young boy’s ballet shoes” is directed towards a specific category of shoppers who can determine if the link is relevant. The more descriptive you are about your content, the more relevant it will be towards your audience.
What Is Relevant Content and Why Should You Care?
Relevant content refers to how likely the content matches the user’s intent. If you’re shopping for ballet shoes for your son, you don’t want to sort through pages of shoes for women or girls. Relevancy directs the right readers to your content. Relevancy can be the difference between users who click on your page and users who actually make a purchase. Search engines base relevancy on elements of SEO. Users who read your content aren’t concerned about SEO, but about high quality content. You need to marry SEO and quality copywriting for relevancy to users and search engines.
Good Copywriting or Just SEO?
Skilled copywriters create content that makes people want to take an action, whether to buy something, maybe to take a test drive or simply to come into your business. Bruce Bendinger, a well-known Chicago ad executive, calls copywriting “verbal carpentry,” “words on paper,” “scripts to time,” and “salesmanship”. Good copywriting is an art. Writers with a gift to entice people to act must be part researchers, artists, psychologists, and marketers. High quality content resonates with readers.
SEO is the process of optimizing content for search engines. This is handled through many avenues, such as researching keywords, building links to main pages and backlinking from other authoritative searches. These tactics tell search engines which pages to use in search queries. SEO writers always keep Google and other search engines in mind when creating content, but it’s also important to ensure that the human readers find that content relevant and meaningful.
How to Create Relevant Content
Many copywriters try to create content that checks all the SEO best practices without considering relevancy to the audience. Content marketing success isn’t only ranking high in search. Success is about getting the customer to take an action. Success relates to your bottom line. No matter how successful your SEO is, it’s the audience that determines your profits. Your audience consumes your content. Search engines can’t make purchases. They don’t read. High quality content that gets the attention of your customers will begin to rank for SEO.
Here are 6 tips for creating content with relevancy for your audience.
- Know your customer. Relevancy depends on who is reading the content. What is relevant to one person may not hold true with someone else. When you know your customer persona, you can address their problems.
- Understand user intent. User intent drives keywords. You can’t develop a list of keywords without knowing why your user is searching. Most users want to do something, know something, or go somewhere. Understanding the goal of the user can help you use keywords that are relevant.
- Use keywords to develop and create content. Although keywords are the basis for SEO, your users use keywords to find information online. Keywords need to relate to the user, and using good SEO helps your content get found by search engines.
- Put your keywords into your meta descriptions. Meta descriptions tell your reader what your page is about. Using keywords in the meta descriptions help the reader know that your content is relevant. Use some style and pizzazz in your meta descriptions to entice your audience to click through.
- Solve a problem. Great marketing solves a problem for the user. When you show your audience how you can help them, they’ll find your content relevant. You’re not creating content to showcase your brand, but to solve problems.
- Relevant content is timely. Content that was relevant a year ago is out of date. Customer behavior has changed over the past year. Customers have different priorities. Even in the same year, customer focus changes. The customer who wants your product for their own use in June may be looking for gifts for their friends in December.
Creating relevant content keeps good SEO elements in mind, but ultimately, it’s about the reader. Readers want to know what they’re going to read about. Relevant content improves the user experience. Search engines want to know what to rank for and relevancy
to your audience helps them understand your content better.
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