Infographic: The 10 tips to optimize your content for SEO

While we champion the importance of words, we believe that images are just as relevant for raising awareness among your colleagues about a strategic topic tied to your organization. That’s why today we’re sharing the infographic published by the Blackthorns studio, illustrating our 10 commandments to follow when writing SEO content.

Inspired by our white paper “How to produce, optimize, and measure Google-friendly content?”, discover the SEO experts’ bible in picture form. Guide your colleagues in producing high-performing web content whose ultimate goal is to boost your site’s organic ranking and the conversion rate of your Content Marketing efforts!

1. Choose one primary keyword per piece of content

To rank a text-based piece of content for a query, you must carefully choose your primary keyword. To make the right choice, it is essential to study your audiences as well as the targeted SERP. Of course, taking the different types of queries into account is of paramount importance!

2. Take care with your title and your hook

These two elements are the first ones your visitor reads. Their quality and originality will be decisive for the rest of the read. If they are convincing enough, your reader will gladly continue reading.

3. Answer the 5 Ws

Tested and approved, this rule dictates the main principles of content strategies. It ensures that you are indeed meeting readers’ expectations in a concise way: Who / What / Where / When / Why. To have every chance of working, your final content must absolutely answer these 5 questions.

4. Follow the inverted pyramid structure

Thanks to the inverted pyramid technique, which complements the 5 Ws and whose effectiveness is scientifically proven, you improve the retention rate of your content’s core substance. In practice, the reader’s attention declines the further they progress through the article. This method therefore consists of placing the important information at the beginning of the text so that it does not go unnoticed and keeps the reader hooked until the end.

5. Place at least one CTA

To generate conversions, nothing is more effective than CTA buttons placed at strategic spots within your content. Vary the shapes, colors, and text. The idea is to place CTAs that are consistent with your content. Depending on the topic, they can relate to a request for more information, a quote, downloading a sales brochure, a promotion not to be missed, purchasing or adding a product to the cart, and so on.

6. Write content longer than your competitors’

Writing for the sake of writing serves no purpose. But faced with increased competition and an astronomical amount of content on the web — and by extension on Google — offering a text longer than your competitors’ helps you stand out, notably by appealing to Hummingbird. What’s more, the richer the content, the broader the semantic universe you cover.

7. Use Hn tags

In addition to being unquestionably an SEO best practice, respecting Hn tagging allows you to logically structure your content. Google’s crawler, like the user, can find their way around more easily. As for you, the h1, h2, and h3 tags are meant to house the primary keywords, which helps your content rank well.

8. Add illustrations and visuals

With a view to improving UX, adding visuals, photos, infographics, diagrams, and illustrations makes reading more pleasant. Landing on a page that consists only of big blocks of text does anything but make you want to keep reading. Besides, working on the tags of your image files also lets you enrich your SEO. Why deprive yourself of it?

9. Think about internal linking

From this SEO concept stems, in particular, that of semantic silos, which allows you to build a site’s structure according to the different themes covered on it. Linking ranges from a simple table of contents in a long-read piece, providing access to information located further down, to a complete internal linking strategy. To connect your various pieces of content with one another (pages, articles, product sheets, etc.), you must use internal linking. Good use of this linking technique also helps indicate synonyms to Google in order to broaden your semantic field. And also to make it easier for it to navigate through your site while understanding the logical links.

10. Prioritize UX Content

Think “UX,” both in the way you write and in the visual presentation of your content. While UX Design occupied the spotlight for a long time, we now talk about UX Writing or UX Content. The question of the browsing experience is everywhere, and Google is giving it more and more importance. Finding the expected answers in a piece of content is good. But finding far more than what you initially hoped for is even better!

If you’d like to deepen your knowledge on the subject and evangelize internally about how important it is today to write high-quality, ROI-driven SEO content, please fill out our form below to download our dedicated white paper “How to produce, optimize, and measure Google-friendly content?”.