20 Jan What makes up the perfect optimised page?
One of the problems that we face when helping clients to build a website is the issue of content. For many there is little understanding of the true value of well-crafted content on website. Some Clients get this and understand the correlation between great content, traffic and ultimately leads or whatever the goal of the site might be.
I thought it might be a good idea to create a series of blog posts to help you understand some of my learnings from my experience with onsite SEO and the content creation process.
You don’t have to be Shakespeare to write great content, you just have to think a little about how you can help the reader find a solution to their problem with your content. This will instil confidence and ultimately business with your readers.
In my experience content that converts the best is content that helps the most.
“Create content that will benefit your readers and you will gain their trust and their business. “
What should I be thinking about when I create content for website
One of the big issues that I come across when optimising a website is that there is a gap between the content on the site and the goals of the site. I am often asking clients to create content around certain keywords, ideas or themes because this is simply missing from the website.
When looking at the keywords it is important to think about what you want to achieve. You should move away from the mind-set that keywords with the most traffic are the best – this is generally not the case as they are usually very difficult to obtain and when you obtain them they bring low conversions, high bounce rates and a general low return on investment.
How does Google measure the success of a page?
It is also important to understand that Google will take into account the site performance as a factor in ranking your site, so having keywords that are not converting or engaging readers on your site can potentially affect your rankings.
These are vitally important to the health of a website, Google thinks so too. Open up your Google Analytics account for the site and the first thing that great you is an overview of the site stats to give you an idea of the health of your site.
It is always a good idea to have a look at how the most important pages on a website are doing. A neat little trick I use is that if you are logged into your Google Analytics account (I’m using Chrome for my web browsing) you can open a new tab and go to your website and you will be able to see the G.A. stats for that page.
Page themes
One of the biggest shifts that I have seen in recent times when it comes to creating content is the move towards creating content around a theme as apposed for keywords. What does this mean?
In its simplest form this mean basing content around a group of closely related keywords – like you would do in a normal conversation or content that has been written for the reader. Content that is written with multiple mentions of the same keyword is no longer useful for SEO and certainly will not help you make an impression on your readers.
Google Also like to group keywords together, there are two easy indicators for this. The first is in the actual search results. Do a search for your chosen keyword and then scroll down to the bottom of the page, there you will see related searches.
I have done a search on dog training and as you can see there are a number of suggestions from Google. When you are writing content this is a great way to see what Google is relating to your content so then you can then create around this.
I have done another search for “dog training advice”, look at the results below. What is really interesting is that google is showing pages whose title tags show Dog training advice, dog training tips and even dog training behaviour.
Google is now able to understand that there is more than one way of saying something in the English language as well the concept that there can be a strong relation between two different phrases. In the case below it understands that “advice “ and “tips” mean almost the same thing when it comes to talking about dog training.
I did this search using quotes which give me an exact match for the search, if you do the search without quotes you get even more variance in the results.
Some of you might also notice that (above image) Google had suggested dog training tips when we did the first search.
So what is this all telling me? When you are creating content you should be spending a bit of time looking around like this as this will help you with ideas for you content. If you are creating pages with a fair amount of content you can use this to find out what else you should be adding to the content.
Search engines are user driven, that is how they stay alive, and this means that they are showing what people want to see. For the observant copywriter this is also the perfect “cheat sheet “that you can use to enhance your content creation and give your readers the answers that they are looking for.
In my next blog post I will be looking to dig a little deeper into what is needed to create better content and giving you some tips and resources that you can use to make this a little easier for you.
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