Content is vital to your marketing strategy. The quality and volume of your content help drive your SEO rankings. The thing to remember is that SEO is just a skeleton without content. Content without SEO is just pretty fabric without a purpose. Many businesses produce content for SEO purposes. After all, you want your website to rank in search to gain customers. But if you forget about the human audience, your content won’t get consumed, shared and re-consumed. When you focus on your user first, making your content relevant and useful, your audience wants more, leading to better SEO rankings.
SEO is the Structure
Technical SEO relates to how search engine spiders index pages for search. Meta descriptions, headers and other coding details tell spiders what your page is about and how to navigate your website. It’s the architecture of your online presence. Content is the furniture and décor. When your content is inviting, users want to come in and explore. Your SEO may be strong and sound, but without the dressing, users won’t care. If you have good content, users will come. When your content is well-organized within a sound structure designed with users in mind, the spiders will read it correctly, and as a result, more people will find it easily.
Content is Window Dressing
Google indexes online information to make it easy for the user to find. In order to provide searchable content, you must think about what makes sense to the user. Users generally search for one of these three reasons:
- Transaction – the user wants to do something, such as buying a vacuum cleaner or going out to eat.
- Navigation – the user wants to find a particular page – for example, finding a particular YouTube video
- Information – the user wants to know something, such as “is it better to create in-house content or hire the best SEO writer?”
Once you ask yourself what the user wants, you can write content that is relevant to the user. When you provide content based on the user’s intent, you have a better chance of getting that user to click on your link.
It doesn’t matter how robust your SEO is on the technical side of things. If you aren’t providing relevant content, the user isn’t going to go to your page. If a user does click on your page, but doesn’t spend much time on it, the search engines relate that to mean that your page doesn’t meet the goal of the search, i.e. the spiders don’t want you in their web! This reduces your rank. User behavior directly relates to SEO. When you write with the user in mind, search engines picks up your intent and understand your content more effectively.
Write for Users Using SEO Content Best Practices
Good content should drive your online marketing strategy. Your SEO strategy needs to include the technical aspects of SEO, such as page load speed and headers, but these things are also good for users. Kick your content marketing plan into high gear with a dedicated team of copywriters and SEO specialists from MintCopy. Contact us for more information on how we can help you provide relevant, useful, and engaging content for your business.
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Resources:
https://www.tkg.com/insights/learn/why-users-not-search-engines-should-be-your-top-priority
Sheetal Pinto is the founder of MintCopy, a content agency that has been helping businesses communicate effectively since 2008. With a passion for words and a knack for SEO, she’s worked with companies around the world to craft copy that not only engages but ranks. Whether it’s blog posts, website content, or social media updates, Sheetal has a talent for turning complex ideas into compelling stories. When she’s not optimizing content or editing for clarity, she’s probably daydreaming about the perfect headline or debating the Oxford comma. With over 16 years in the business, she’s seen the digital marketing and SEO content landscape evolve and grow. Sheetal’s mantra? Fresh copy, refreshing results!
