CONTENTS


In 2024, content designed to get SEO results will be all about targeting the audience correctly. The only way to see return on investment through improving your content marketing is by using practices which will benefit your target audience.

Content which is designed to increase leads and traffic must always be user-focussed in order to achieve a higher Google ranking. Recent changes to Google algorithms have seen informative pages given higher rankings. That’s why our tips for creating the best content in 2024 are all centred around informing your reader as well as you possibly can.

If you write to the right target audience, in the right manner the results you see will surpass your expectations. In order to help you get a better understanding of what you need to do to get the results you need; we’ve compiled a list of the key steps you want to undertake to improve your SEO content.

Researching Keywords

In order to get the best results from your SEO content, it’s crucial that you fully optimise your content by including and targeting the correct keywords. Targeted keywords are essentially the keywords which your particular target market is actively searching.

This helps you to make sure that your target audience is reading your content. In order to find out what these search terms are, you need to understand:

  • Who your audience is
  • What information are they searching for
  • Why they need that information
  • What keywords they are searching in an attempt to find it

Although this may seem like a daunting task to work out exactly what your target audience wants, you’ll realise it isn’t once you begin undertaking the research.

The first step that you must take is by researching your audience. Gain an understanding of the type of audience who is wanting what your business offers. Then, go and survey and communicate with them. Find out more about them, what their hobbies are what their demographic is and other information like that. This will help you lay the foundations for the creation of effective SEO content.

Once the foundations have been laid, you can then start researching keywords for SEO you are going to use. Find relevant keywords which relate to your company’s service or products and match it up with your audiences most likely search terms.

Once you have an idea of what keywords you are going to target, you can then come up with content topics which relate to what your audience wants to know or learn.

Go Into Detail

In 2018 Google announced that its algorithm was changing to now judge the quality content of a website. Ever since then, Google has been intensifying its ‘focus’ on content quality.

That’s why in 2024, its going to be more important for SEO content to go far more into detail than it ever has before. Sites which provide remarkable depth on subjects are much likely to boast far higher rankings on Google.

“How do I write more detailed content?” The standard SEO content which is published is around 500 words. As you can imagine, such a small word count doesn’t provide much scope for exploration or detail.

In order to create more detailed content there are a few things you should be aiming to do:

  • Writing step by step guides to help your target audience
  • Exploring topics which can be assessed from many different angles
  • Aiming for at least 2,000 words on published content
  • Use industry reports or sites like Google scholar to find information, provide useful trustworthy information which the user won’t have come across before.

Make Your Page Load ASAP

This is one of the most important aspects of creating great SEO content. Simply make your page load quicker. Make sure that when a user clicks onto your page, the content loads as quickly as possible and doesn’t frustrate your users by being forced to wait around for it to load.

Unfortunately, the chances are that if the users are made to wait more than just a few seconds they will be back on the search results page and missing all of your great content.

The Daily Egg posted a great article on how to increase your websites loading speed with various tips and tricks, you can read it here. For example, simple changes like not having a YouTube video embedded in your article as that needs to load first can make immediate loading improvements.

Make Content Readable

Readable SEO content is very important in order to help your content shoot to the top of search results. Readable content means that when your audience clicks onto the link, the entire page is easy to understand and is easy on the eye.

Content which is cluttered, and isn’t clearly laid out can rapidly cause people to move away from the page. The four most important elements of readability are: Organisation, clarity, simplicity and logic.

If people aren’t spending a lot of time on the page after they click, this will make Google think the content isn’t interesting or useful.

On the other hand, if people are spending a lot of time on the page this is going to make Google shoot the page up the rankings. Google basically understands that “This page provided the information the person was looking for relevant to this search term!”

The amount of time spent by a user on a website is called dwell time. This is the amount of time that passes from the moment the person clicked on the search result before returning to the search results page. The easier it is to understand and read your content the longer people will spend on your website.

Include Relevant Images

Images are a massive part of how we engage with a website. The human brain is wired to identify images and respond to them, even if it is subconsciously.

That’s why using high quality images which are relevant to your content can make a huge difference in comparison to using generic and overused images. Using the right images will help your content look much more professional.

Investing in images may seem like a pointless expenditure, but it definitely isn’t. Your SEO content will enjoy remarkable results as a result of using images which similar informative pages don’t have.

Be Factual

The internet has provided a platform for anybody to make outrageous declarations without needing to have any data backing them up.

Everybody has fallen foul of reading something on the internet, then saying it to someone and being proven wrong. This means that websites who do provide factual information, with sources and data which they are analysing are able to differentiate themselves very quickly.

There is only one way this can be achieved though, and it’s through more research! Before you write out your SEO content have a clear plan which you plan to go through step by step. That way, for each topic you write about you can go and find sources which you can then introduce into your published SEO content.

When you are creating your content, try to make adjustments to account for the potential of being used as a featured snippet.

Google now absolutely loves using featured snippets as a method of saving users time. Featured snippets are when you search a question, and Google then highlights the answer for you which it has taken from one of the websites answering the question.

As shown above, featured snippets are firmly at the top of the page occupying the first position on the page, which is where everybody wants to be!

Featured snippets actually directly steal traffic away from the number one spot. There are a few tactics which you can use to increase your content’s chances of being selected as a featured snippet:

  • Make your content high quality
  • Answer questions clearly and concisely
  • Include plenty of statistics
  • Use bullet points
  • Use logic when planning the structure of your content

Neil Patel wrote a useful guide on how you can increase your chances of your content being selected as a featured snippet, you can access that here.

Provide New Information

Conducting original research is so important in order to increase the number of websites which are pointing links towards you.

If your content is providing statistics which few people have seen before, it is likely other people posting content will be linking to your page as the source of information which they have mentioned in their content. These links pointing to your page will be a further help to boosting your content as Google will see these other respectable domains providing link ‘juice’ to your page.

Show That You Are An Expert

Due to the amount of nonsense information which now exists on the internet, Google is now placing more importance on expertise than it ever has before.

The creator of the content and that individual’s history helps rank your content. If you don’t have any experience don’t worry! It’s not THAT important, but it helps 😉

Showing evidence that you’ve been in the profession for several years or that you have published literature on the subject before helps Google to verify the source.

Also, if you have any previous positive reviews of your work that you can showcase, this will help Google to realise earlier that you are a credible source. This is why About pages on websites can be so useful in order to enhance your overall reputation in Google’s eyes.

Over To You!

Now we’ve helped you to get a better understanding of what is involved in order to create the best SEO content for your website, it’s up to you to make our tips count!

Quality SEO content can help to catapult any website to the top of search engine rankings! However, that’s only with quality content. A poor quality of SEO content can result in penalties being suffered from Google which are almost impossible to recover from. Fortunately, if you implement the tips which have been discussed throughout this article you most certainly won’t need to worry about that!

FAQ’s

On average around 1800 words is required in order for you to rank first.

An average of 2 or 3 keywords should be targeted on each page.

Research what the most popular search terms are in your industry, this is usually the best place to start.

Yes, extremely important. An increased length of time spent on your website by your audience indicates to Google that the content on the page is informative and useful.

Not necessarily, but if they did leave it would be temporarily to check your source before returning to your page safe in the knowledge that you are a trustworthy source.