In this blog, I will share my experience with creating SEO content, which delivers organic traffic and conversions. I will try to add a lot of actionable, practical SEO techniques, which you can immediately implement and get more traffic. SEO isn’t easy in 2019 and beyond. These days, it is a super competitive area.

Here are top 7 tips for killer SEO content.

1. Keywords

A lot of beginner bloggers and writers use this technique: “put some sh** on the wall and hope it sticks”. It means, writing dozens of blogs and hope that some of them will work out. If you have limited time and resources, I would advice you to focus your efforts and try to be more data-oriented. There are countless free keyword research tools, also you can use Google autosuggest or Google Ads keyword planner. Blogs, which are based and optimized for specific (especially niche and long tail) keywords, tend to perform much better in Google.

2. Comprehensive content

Ten or so years ago, writing content, which ranks in Google, was relatively easy – you just produce an ok quality copy. After RankBrain, and many other algorithm updates – producing content is much harder.  Obviously, you need to write original, non-plagiarized, high quality content. But, that’s not enough anymore. With your copy, you need to give a comprehensive answer to a specific search query. Google really likes, when user finds a complete and ultimate answer to his question. If he bounces and leaves to another site – either not satisfied with answer or for additional information – that’s a bad sign for Google.

How to write comprehensive content?

• Don’t create many posts on related keyword
  create one, long-form which touches all similar keyword phrases.
• Target whole keyword clusters, not just single keywords with your blogs.
• Target all additional aspects of a specific topic in your blog.

3. Long-form content

There are tons of opinions about how long your posts should be, anything in the range from 250 to 5000 words per blog. According to research by Co-schedule, posts with about 2500 words typically rank best. Hubspot puts it in range 2250-2500 and Buffer suggests that blogs should run around 1600 words. In my experience, long form blogs do really bring much more organic traffic. Instead of writing 10 short 300-500 word blogs, produce one long form 3K article.

4. Visual content

Make your content more than just boring text. In 2019 content browsing your blog should be similar to Netflix binge watching – a lot of visuals, infographics, graphs, videos and so on. If your blog is only words – people might leave, but if there are a lot of visuals – users might stick for more.

5. Rich content

Also, include rich, interactive elements – embed tweets, videos, podcasts, quizzes. All of these will improve users session time on the website and visitors will get more value. For example, on one of the sites, one of the most popular blogs was with biggest companies in every country and with embed Google map and Infographic. It was ranking on the first position in Google and collected 2-3K social media shares.

Below the embed Google map, I have hidden additional information for these companies under email. So, this blog became a lead generation tool.

6. How often should you write?

A lot of beginner bloggers are super impatient and want results in first 30 days or 3 months. Therefore, they push 30-50 blogs per month, just blog after blog, after blog. I did that as well and it might work out. But, what I found out works better in long term, is focusing on quality, instead of quantity. Instead of publishing 30 short blogs per month, write 5 long forms per month – that is enough.

A lot of high traffic and popular blogs – for example, Backlink – only have around hundred of blog posts. And still, are one of the most popular blogs in Google.

7. Link building

Getting backlinks is one of the most mystified and complex areas in SEO.  May webmasters and bloggers just completely ignore it, others instead really on black hat link building techniques and risk to being penalized by Google. My suggestion is to be in the “golden middle” – don’t ignore link building, but do it carefully and only get high-quality backlinks.

In fact, quality link building is vital to getting Google traffic to your content. In my experience, I’ve seen many sites with great content (and no link building), which doesn’t get a lot of Google traffic. On the other hand, similar sites, with even a bit worse content quality, but more backlinks – get more Google traffic.

The bottom line is: without active link building your content might reach a traffic plateau or grow really slowly.

Andrew Gorh – I like SEO, with more than 10 years of experience.
Check out my blog – Online Hikes and get some inspiration at Museuly.