Content Marketing Best Practices
If you and I have ever talked about your website, Content Marketing, or even how to get your website to rank better, then you already know that I’m big on content and normally against “optimizing content for search engines.”
That approach gives you the wrong idea about the process: as if you are supposed to write for humans and then, constrainedly, optimize it for bots.
This is a very common practice that many content marketing writers do.
But let’s keep it real, these days you have to keep the requirements of SEO in mind before and while you are creating your piece of content. This doesn’t mean you should make your content machinelike – it’s about understanding how your article’s vocabulary and structure can influence your rankings.
We’re going to talk about four aspects a writer should consider in 2018 in order to write a good piece of content that will also attract more organic traffic.
- Topic research
- TF-IDF
- Featured snippets
- Mobile-focused keyword research
Topic Research
This may seem like a trendy name for good ol’ keyword research, but there are some really important differences between topic research and keyword research.
First of all, topic research is a logical response to how Google is interpreting search queries these days. The Hummingbird algorithm, which is based on semantic approach, has changed the SERPs dramatically. Here’s an explanation provided by Danny Sullivan:
“Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.”
As an example, the word “fix” is highlighted even if it’s not present in the query. This means that semantically, it has been interpreted by Google as relevant, matching the meaning of the query and, thus, the searcher’s intent:
Many people don’t know this, but in many cases, over 70% of blog traffic comes from words you didn’t optimize for.
In topic research, keyword analysis is just one part of a bigger challenge you’ll need to face when putting together your content strategy. Let’s see what else is important to succeed.
Market Analysis
Define (or update) your buyer personas, focusing more on their background and the content they would potentially prefer. When it comes to your target audience, remember that the preferences of 18-25 and 35-45-year-olds will differ regarding the vocabulary and content formats they use, as well as the platforms they can be reached through. Dive into the communities your target audience is present in, adapt to the way they speak and analyze thoroughly the problems they face – this is the best way to make your content authentic and compelling.
Expert SEO tip: explore autocomplete suggestions. These are probably the most exhaustive source of real people’s questions, pains, and problems. You can use many of them as ready ideas for your articles:
Competitors’ Best Practices
Take a closer look at those who are successful in your niche. What makes them dominate the minds and the SERPs? (SEO Glossary) Sometimes, these similarities can be identified at a glance, like with the query “best road bikes”:
- Lists and guides rule the SERPs
- Adding a year to a title definitely helps
Also, we can quickly identify semantically related words that Google considers identical to your target keywords – “best road bikes,” “best race bike” and “best commuter bike”.
Collecting these data manually can take a lot of time. There are tools that scrape, organize and sort related words and Google suggestions: check them out in the “Tools to Use” section at the bottom.
Evergreen Core Content
Jayson DeMers from Audiencebloom recommends developing a set of regular frameworks that are repeatable as evergreen content after you’re armed with insights on your customers’ behavior, needs and pains and your competitors’ strategies.
“The key here is to find some frameworks that are repeatable as evergreen content. When your topics are semi-repeatable, you’ll be able to produce a greater volume of content to increase your relevance for those terms, and when they’re evergreen, you know they’ll stay relevant indefinitely, rising in rank as your overall domain authority grows.”
As soon as you have a set of your core articles, you can support them with newsjacking content, videos and other formats that drive engagement and virality – and, thus, traffic to your website.
TF-IDF
You’re probably asking yourself at this point: OK, I’m sure that words like “and”, “the” and “with” are certainly used by my target audience and can be found on every page in the Google top 10. Does that mean I should use them to get higher rankings?
Not at all. And this is where TF-IDF comes in.
The term TF-IDF is an abbreviation of “term frequency – inverse document frequency.” The two parts of this abbreviation are two separate metrics used to calculate how important a word is to a specific document.
TF (term frequency) defines how often a word is found inside a document; IDF (inverse document frequency) stands for how often the word is encountered in a larger set of documents, often called a “corpus.” IDF is meant to reduce the weight of words used frequently within the corpus that have little importance (articles, prepositions, etc.). This way, less weight is given to terms with a high TF and IDF, and more weight is given to terms with a high TF and a low IDF.
So why is this concept essential for a writer these days?
At first sight, TF-IDF may seem like a scientific explanation of why keyword stuffing is important. You identify a nice keyword (for example, “road bike”) with a clearly low IDF, you put it into every paragraph of your article and show Google that your content is super-relevant compared to your rivals’. But it doesn’t work like this. Google’s algorithms are trained to identify pages stuffed thoughtlessly with keywords and penalize them.
There are several SEO tools that use TF-IDF for keyword analysis. For example, the Spade Design SEO Checker and the SEO Content Template by SEMRush rely on TF-IDF to provide you with a list of words to use in your content – your list will be sorted automatically according to the number of documents each word was encountered in.
Featured Snippets
So you gathered a beautiful set of semantically related words, made sure these words have a good TF-IDF, and you expect your content to make it to the first page of Google and boost your organic traffic.
But there’s a risk that almost no one will click on your properly optimized snippet with a catchy headline because there is someone who monopolized the first screen and captured all the searchers’ attention.
This “someone” is what call a featured snippet.
Featured snippets — so-called “zero positions” — are the boxes shown right below the number of results found for your query. The goal of featured snippets is to provide you with content that fulfills your request without your having to click on any search result.
Most featured snippets actually monopolize the first screen. As a result, the click-through rate of the content within it increases drastically – some studies report a four-fold CTR growth– and the other pages in the top 10 don’t get as many clicks as before. This is why organizing your content to appear in the featured snippet is crucial.
How to Optimize your Content to Earn a Featured Snippet
There are actually no sure-fire recipes to get your content into this box. However, some tactics have worked for us and are worth trying.
Identify Your Pages That Already Rank in the Top 10
If you start by figuring out which of your website’s pages are already ranking well and concentrating on those, it will save you dozens of hours. Sad but true, only a miracle can make you appear in a featured snippet if you are currently in the 98th position. Google tends to pick the pages from the top 10 for featured snippets. If you are in the top 5, even better.
Target Question-Based Keywords and Provide Structured Answers
It’s easier for Google to understand the searcher’s intent from the query “how to draw a dog” than from the query “dog drawing” (are you looking for beautiful drawings of dogs or do you want to draw a dog yourself?). Besides questions, there are words that narrow down a search intent quite a lot: “best”, “recipe” and “instructions” for example.
When it comes to answers, write the way you speak. The easier it is to understand, the better. “How to cook spaghetti? – Start with boiling water…”.
If a query starts with “how to” breaking your article down into steps is a must: use numbers or subtitles to divide your content logically.
Make Sure to Use Header Tags Properly
Search engine bots love clear markups and flawless code. If they can easily scan the structure, extract the most valuable information and index it properly without spending any additional crawl budget, it definitely helps you get higher rankings. A correct use of H1-H6 tags is crucial if you want your content to be included in the featured snippet. Some SEOs, including Barry Schwartz, recommend also using Schema.org Markup.
Keep Working to Take Snippets From Your Competitors (and defend your spot once you got one)
Nobody can guarantee that once a page gets into the featured snippet box, it will stay there forever. Google can remove your website and replace it with another one, or just leave the page without a snippet (which actually happened to me when I was writing this article and tried “best city bike”):
Analyze what you could make improvements to on your website and keep working. When it comes to highly competitive keywords, it is really worth the investment.
Mobile-Specific Keywords
Creating content that keeps up with mobile requirements isn’t just another trend. The truth is, more people access your content from mobile devices than from desktops. So if you aren’t making mobile optimization one of your top priorities, then you’re doing it wrong. (More about Mobile Responsive Websites)
A mobile-oriented approach is not only about specific technologies like AMP. It is also necessary to keep in mind the differences in how people search for information from desktop and mobile devices. Let’s see some examples of how you can rethink your content and keyword strategy with a particular focus on mobile:
Consider the Search Intent
The query “how to repair a tire” has a very different intent when googled from desktop and mobile. The latter one, most probably, implies that the person needs urgent help and isn’t just curious about tires.
If you have an article covering this topic in your blog, analyze the traffic coming to it using the ‘Audience > Mobile’ report in Google Analytics (filter by URL to see traffic coming to a specific page).
If you see that visitors come to your page mostly from mobile, you’ll probably want to change the article’s content. In case of tire repair, you’d probably want to stick to a down-to-earth, nuts and bolts explanation rather than heavy videos and reviews on how resistant different types of tires are.
Check Mobile Search Volumes
When you analyze how popular a certain keyword is, you most probably check only their desktop volume. It’s time to change it. For example, search volume for the keyword “how to tie a tie video” is 50% bigger on mobile rather than on desktop:
I’m sure you’ll find several keywords in your niche that are searched more often on smartphones than on desktop. Identifying and using them as topics for your content can help you noticeably increase organic traffic from mobile devices.
Tools to Use:
On-Page SEO Checker
On-Page SEO Checker helps you identify semantically related words. But there’s one important detail: it only gives you the words used by your successful rivals from Google’s top 10. There’s no point in analyzing hundreds of SERPs for a given keyword. Why look at those who are ranking lower than you?
You can find insights on semantically related words in the “Semantic Ideas” section:
They come with a detailed analysis of how many rivals use each of these words and how frequently each of them is encountered on their pages:
On-Page SEO Checker will also notify you if any of your website’s pages are ranking in the top 10 and have a good chance of appearing in featured snippets, with actionable recommendations on how to improve these pages:
SEO Content Template
If you just need to optimize the text on a single page without going too deep into detail, SEO Content Template is an extremely actionable yet simple tool. Simply enter one or more target keywords, and the tool will analyze the first 10 pages from Google that rank for these keywords, and give you recommendations on:
- Semantically related words to use on your page
- The readability score you’ll need to achieve
- Text length
- Relevant backlink sources
- Basic SEO recommendations, like length of page title and meta description
You can also get some insights on how to organize your content without leaving the tool – we’ll show you excerpts of your rivals’ texts with your target keywords highlighted:
Keyword Magic
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could type in a target keyword and see the semantically related words separated into groups, get quick estimations of search volume, keyword difficulty and competition level in one tool? Oh, and how cool would it be to see the SERP features triggered by each keyword as well.
WELL GUESS WHAT?!
Such a tool actually exists.
Obviously, we’re a big fan of SEMRush but their Keyword Magic tool does all of these things. It makes this task much easier by showing you all the information in one tab.
If you need more data, for example, the click potential or average difficulty for a keyword group, use the “Export to Keyword Analyzer” option.
Moreover, the new “Questions” filter allows you to collect hundreds of ideas on how to get a featured snippet in no time.
Topic Research
This tool is still in closed beta, but will soon be available for everyone. Here are a few words about its main functionalities:
It gives you examples of the headlines your SERP rivals once used. Take a look at them to find common patterns (for example, everyone is using lists or mention the word “video” in headlines).
It helps identify popular questions and related searches in your niche. This allows you to kill many birds with one stone: you’ll get a chance to earn a featured snippet; you’ll gain insights into real needs of your audience; you’ll get valuable keyword ideas in no time.
Finally, when you simply need new ideas on what to write about, mind maps will come in handy, allowing you to create multiple sought-after content pieces, using just one seed keyword:
Don’t forget to check out our Content Marketing Strategy Guide
How to Write Content That Succeeds in 2018: Content Marketing Key Takeaways
- Spend time on keyword research and defining an SEO-friendly structure before you actually start writing. Stuffing ready articles with keywords and adding subtitles just because you need to will seem unnatural, both for humans and search bots.
- Focus on adding valuable words associated with your topic instead of repeating the same keyword throughout your article.
- Use multiple sources to enrich your list of related keywords. Explore your and your competitors’ social media pages for keyword ideas and questions to answer. Conduct a TF-IDF analysis. Ask your technical support to observe and note the terms your customers really use.
- Make good use of tools to automate the research processes.
- Many actionable takeaways can be easily found by simply looking at SERPs. You can discover which content formats are used by your top 10 rivals or borrow some nice ideas for headlines.
- Use lists and “step-by-step” formats to increase your chances of earning a featured snippet. “Keyword-based question + direct and concise answer” is another proven format for getting into the featured snippet box.
- If you write an evergreen piece of content (a guide, for instance), don’t hesitate to mention the current year in the title. You’ll eventually get back to this article to update it, so a “2016 guide” can then be renamed a “2017 guide” when you add new valuable information to it.
- You can’t earn a featured snippet unless you’re already ranking high. To get results faster, start by optimizing the pages that are already ranking in the Google top 10 for your target keywords.
- Pay careful attention to your formatting, tags, and markups. Make sure these are used correctly and make your content clear, structured and easily crawlable for Google bots.
- If your competitor has already earned a featured snippet for your target keyword, it’s not written in stone. Any other website can replace theirs sooner or later, so why not yours?
