How to Write High-Quality Content Optimized to Rank

thank you [Music] let's begin with establishing what exactly is content-led SEO it is strategy where you write high quality copy that is helpful and optimize to rank on search engine results Pages or search during topical Authority through carefully chosen content is also a key focus with content-led SEO now before I move along I want to Define some key terms relevance to content that SEO first what is a keyword keywords are words or phrases you type in a search engine to finance us for example if I wanted to look for a scheduling tool I may search

best scheduling tool on Google if I wanted to know who won the Oscars for best actress in 2022 I would search best actress Oscars 2022 however some keywords are more popular than others which makes them more valuable what is your topic I like to think of a topic as a more ambitious form of a keyword rather than trying to rank for one phrase you attempts to rank for all phrases related to that keyword with a group of content pieces related to the topic for example if I wanted to run for the topic of scheduling soul

I know it won't be possible with one piece of content so I would conduct research to find other words related to the main topic such as social media scheduling tool best scheduling tool group projects scheduling tools what is a scheduling tool how to use a scheduling tool free scheduling tool when watching this content spaces I'll link this topic together using hyperlinks to show the relationship between each content space some might say potato potatoes and they are not wrong but we're moving away from keywords to topical Authority and it's important to get in that mindset early

we will cover topical Authority in more detail later but for now think of it as developing and organizing related content pieces together to demonstrate the search engines that your brand is knowledgeable on this area and that you provide extensive information on the topic now let's get back on track how do you lead with SEO when creating contents remember the goals of content-led SEO include creating helpful content that can drive traffic from search engines rank for keywords build topical Authority improve internal linking so let's run through the six steps needed Step 1 is determining your audience

you need to conduct audience research to determine who is the Right audience for your content if you wish to discover your audience include analyzing the markets industry or competitors with the same Rush want to Target tool conducting market research like qualitative research such as surveys and focus groups social media listening which is observing and studying discussions on social media related to your company sector and topics linked to your company that enables you to gain an insight into your audience and make your content and marketing tactics better check your audience analytics on Google analytics to learn

more about who is currently engaging with your content you can discover their age group location and other demographic information okay on to step two conducting keyword research once you know your ideal buyer the next step is to identify what people search for when looking for a solution to find a keyword think of a word or phrase you would search in Google or binge around that problem or solution for example if I wanted to find a tool to help me schedule meetings I would search meeting scheduler with that being said let's pop over the same rush

and use the keyword magic tool to see if this keyword has a decent monthly search volume let's click on SEO on the left side of the dashboard and select the keyword magic tool from the drop down menu enter the keyword meeting scheduler in the provided box and click search we want to see the search volume for this exact keyword and in this exact order so click on exact match you can see the keyword meeting scheduler has a monthly search volume of 5400. the exact match also shows you other keywords that contain meeting scheduler that you

can add to your keyword list another method is to type in the keyword in the keyword overview section you'll find this feature on the left side of the dashboard under SEO there are several features on the results you'll see next if you're doing keyword research reproduct or service that is in location bound you can use a global volume in the middle as it shows search volume throughout the world if you're doing research for allocation based service you can filter the keyword information by country I've set the results for the US the keyword difficulty tells you

how difficult it will be to rank for the keyword the higher the percentage the more unlikely you'll be to rank for that keyword the intent tells you the search intents for the keyword an informational keyword means the user is either at the top or middle of the funnel and they are setting for information or constructing a decision an example would be mountain biking benefits in navigational keyword means the user is looking for a particular product or website they already know about they are searching with intents to go directly to that webpage or websites an example

is Brand X mountain bike or Brand X mountain bike under one thousand dollars a commercial keyword happens in the consideration stage right before the user is ready to make a purchase and need help deciding an example would be best mountain bikes a transactional keyword is a money keyword the user is ready to make a purchase and has narrowed their options examples would be mountain bike shop near me or by mountain bike finally we have post purchase keyword which is rarely talked about but a great way to build Customer Loyalty its content you create to encourage

repeats purchases help your customers get the best out of your product and solve the shoes they may encounter examples would be mountain bike gear bike problems and mountain bike troubleshooting Trends show how such volume changes over time as the global set volume of 16k is high it's unlikely it would run for this keyword if you run a small website or don't have a lot of existing content around the topic in which case you want to find a similar keyword with the same intent but with less competition looking at the keyword information you will notice that

the question section shows keyword within this difficulty so I'll click on view all to see if there's a profitable keyword with no competition and reasonable search volume this should take us back to the keyword magic tool which we just looked at a great tip to Hasting the process is to look at competitors and see what people search for around these brands for which we can use the semrush keyword Gap tool so let's stick with the keyword of meeting scheduler as an example and assume that our client is cervical I'm going to enter them as the

first domain we get to also have three competitors to compare now semors does a good job of Auto generating competitors in your Market just in case you're not sure who to Target I'm going to go ahead and add doodle colander calendar and I would also like to add chili pepper as a final competitor now the location is set to us by default well you can change it to your country location if you want and I'll click on pair I'll scroll down to all keyword details and you'll find information for shared missing weak strong untapped unique

keywords I like to start with missing keywords because it shows me all of the keywords that my competitors rank for but I don't rank for so once and here the next thing I can do is to decide on what type of keywords I want to be targeting if I'm doing reset for bottom of the funnel keywords then that is what I am going to be picking so I can decide to export commercial keywords high volume keywords or keywords release difficulty and I can filter the results by word of first to narrow the list of keywords

and make it easier to choose a topic for example a word associated with bottom of the final keyword is free you can narrow down that results and then click everything here and add it to a keyword list since I haven't created a keyword list I just come down here click the plus sign and type it name for my project and I'm going to use sarikal just make it easy to remember and then I click this and my keyword list has been created and all of these keywords have been added all right another word associated with

bottom of the funnel is the word best I click that and I add all of the missing keywords in there to my keyword list I can also look at untapped keyword to see what my competitors not all of them or one or some of them have have a ranking for but I don't rank four and add that to my keyword list productivity apps best planner um yeah let's just pick three of this and add it to our keyword list or cervical and now once I have all of those keywords I can come in here and

export my list click and that's it the list has been exported now on to step 3 cluster your keywords and group them with such intents a long time ago in the land of SEO you could write one piece of content add the keyword twice on the page and that would be enough to rank on search engines like Google and Yahoo however set algorithms have evolved and today you need more than one piece of content or keyword placements to run for a competitive keyword we call the group of contents a topic cluster let me put it

this way when I write some more piece of content that only ranks for a keyword you can rank for hundreds of keywords where you build your topic cluster correctly a few benefits of clustering include build Authority for the topics you want to be known for improve your internal linking structure provide content for the user whatever they are in their search Journey avoid covering the same topic twice by grouping subsections correctly secure the topic cluster export your keyword Research into a CSV file in my field of Avail me looking through a long list of keywords but

don't worry I have a strategy to help you make sense of all that information let's start by looking for commercial and transactional keywords at the bottom of the funnel your beautiful keywords but for keywords signify that the visitor is either contemplating or purchase or is ready to convert if you are writing for e-commerce your commercial Pages include keywords like discount code promo code coupon code products Pages if you are writing for a digital product your money Pages include keywords like demo free trial pricing Pages products Pages personalized landing pages best X tool if you are

writing for a location based company or service based business your money Pages would include keywords like keyword X Services keyword app service in London how much does keyword X cost what to look for when hiring keyword X how to choose the right keyword X best keyword X in the US for example if the keyboard with SEO agency a money page would be tapasu agency in New York what to look for the tech SEO agency once you have your money keywords move on to the middle of the funnel people use more full keywords when they're in

the consideration stage and weighing their options examples include downloadable offers such as a case study or white paper to help them make a decision free templates best X keyword competitor Pages such as Brand X alternative blood X competitor or brand 8 versus brand y reviews personalized landing pages mentioned in the tablet audience examples include meeting scheduler for project management or scheduling tool for education finally you have top of the funnel or TOEFL keywords for people who are still learning about the topic and need beginner friendly contents examples of TOEFL keywords include what is how to

tips strategies mistakes business keywords and checklists as you group your keywords into funnel stages be careful to avoid keyword cannibalization where you have multiple pages with similar search intents I like to manually plug each keyword into Google and use the search results to group all related keywords with similar search intents together all right so let's assume I've done the keyword research I have taken all of the keywords I needed I've put it inside this keyword manager and I have exported everything into this Excel spreadsheet now I want to determine how many pieces of content I

need to create to rank for the keyword of content writing tools so what I usually do is that I can take the top keywords here the top key was at the top here and then I can search for them to see if it's possible to rank all of these different keywords keywords with one page or if I need different contents to rank for different keywords so let's use this keyword of best free content writing tools you can see HubSpot here with Spotify free content writing tools um let's see what else again we're just looking at

what we're seeing here in terms of sites that are ranking and what we're going to see across the other keywords similar keywords so I can see brand watch content assistance Blaze today HubSpot LinkedIn yes all of all these sites ranking now let's look at content writing software we can also see um content Harmony and HubSpot and copy Smith these three websites are also here or like yep content Harmony and hubspots are here so that tells me right off the bat that this keyword best free content writing tools and content writing software I can rank both

of them with one piece of contents now can I also do the same for this keyword of websites contents tools okay is there any website that I've seen before that is also here yes I can see HubSpot is here too so if I see even one or two website that already tells me what I did to know that I can rank this page I can run that keyword also I can rank all of these three keywords with the same page so I'm going to group them together and make sure that I mention the keyword I

use them in the subheading I use entities related to them in the content maybe I built up backlinks using them as anchor text whatever I need to do to get these three keywords to rank with the same page now what about AI content writing tools when I look at AI content writing tools yes I don't see the same contents which tells me that if I want to run for AI content writing tools I need to be creating a separate piece of content now as a rule of thumb you want to write the cluster first and

the tofu keyword lasts that's because tofu keywords have a ton of search volume and competition which makes them harder to rank for more full and buffer keywords have less competition the pillar page is a final piece of content you write because it ties the entire cluster together moving on to step 4 Create a Content outline let's assume you've done the keyword research and you decided to start with the best meeting scheduler you're not going to start writing all the top of your head no you need a structure to guide you this structure is what we

call a Content brief it will detail metal information internal linking the content outline external links and thematic entities meta information for your content includes meta description this is a brief text describing the content it should be actionable and include the primary keyword you are as long the UI text is usually the primary keyword or a variation page title this is a title of the article or web page you want it to be descriptive simple and Punchy aim to include the primary keyword in the page title and keep it under 66 characters what counts the length

of the article is based on the contents outline and what you plan to cover a good tip when determining word count is to look at the step and review the length of the top ranking contents content outline the content outline is the meat of the brief it's all the subheadings replied to cover when writing you can break down your content outline into H1 H2 H3 and H for subheadings subheadings the H1 subheading is a title H2 is the first subheading H3 and H4 is the explanation under the dissolved header these are words and phrases that

provide context for the keyword and help search Bots understand the page run index in it it's a noun that describes elements around the primary keyword so how do you determine what goes into your content outline thankfully you can automate part of the process of creating a Content brief with semless SEO contents templates on the left side of your dashboard click content marketing and select SEO content template to find this feature enter the primary keyword let's stay with our example of best meeting scheduler and semrush auto generating detailed content bridge for you the brief includes FC

recommendations like analysis of the top competitors ranking for the keyword semantic entity recommendations readability score text lens if you click on real time if you direct to the SEO writing assistant which is a helpful resource to ensure your content is optimized for search engines more on this later when creating your content outline remember to do it with empathy in mind what do you know about the reader where are they in their search Journey how much information do they have and what do they need to know right now so review competing content and look for recurring

subheadings that you can add to your brief ideological Next Step you want the reader to take but on this skyscraper technique is a great method to get started but don't add to the echo chamber by regurgitating what already exists think of how you can go deeper with more context more helpful information and actionable tips the reader can increment on their own for example if you review the top ranked content for the keyword of best meeting scheduler you'll find recording subheadings like teachers to look for in a meeting scheduler and best meeting scheduler for X function

remember your content outline should tell a story make sure you provide context for your working topic with the first H2 then go into details with the H3 the fifth step is to write the contents people assume that writing for FCO means stuffing content with keywords arbitrarily in reality he couldn't be farther from the truths you can use SC optimized content to create a compiling argument appeal to readers that prefer a conversational style of writing help Google understand your content and provide value to the reader now let's run through some tips to help you write content

optimize for search and the user write a compelling headline that entices the reader to click true add an offer to your headline to get an edge of our competitors where possible add secondary keywords in H2 and H3 subheadings to help you rank for more keywords break text with images sentence variety and bullet points add alt text to your images to Rank 4 Google image searches adopt storytelling to engage your audience and hold their attention each sentence should connect with the next avoid disconnected sentences that break the flow and do not add value avoid flow find

the shortest route to communicate value right like you're having a conversation with someone web content is not academic content so use easy to understand words teach your reader something new that no one else has mentioned they should come away feeling like they've learned something use thematic entities as anchor text to link internally to relevant content use Google's people also ask to answer questions in paragraphs the final step in this process is optimize when you finish writing copy and paste the content into semrush writing assistance the readability score shows how easy it is to read your

content there may be exceptions to the audience but usually a good practice is to keep the score under 65 for the most parts SEO shows if you've used the primary keyword and thematic entities in text you will also find recommendations for anchor text and possible link issues you can check your text for plagiarism with the originality future and use the refresher to rewrite plagiarize sentences the tone of voice shows whether you've maintained a consistent tone it also reviews problematic sentences to write for clarity once you've implemented the suggested recommendation the next step is to self-addicts

I advise you to edit ruthlessly what words that don't add value rewrite on clear sentences and ensure every paragraph has flow have you answered the question for each subredded in a way that refuse the reader's intent look for grammatical errors and ambiguous words that require a dictionary finally read the text out loud if you run out of breath when reading a sentence it's too long if the word makes you stop and think find the same class in your name when you're satisfied with the text check that you've added all the meta elements in step four

then Richard detect slowly and look for words or phrases you can use as anchor text to link to existing content or the websites internal linking is just as important as backlinks they help to provide context to the reader and the search engine they also encourage readers to spend more time on your website and guide the reader along the buying process think of a claim of sentence you've made that could be supported with Statistics from a reputable websites put in the work to find the original source of the stats and avoid linking to websites where you

can verify orders you can refresh soft leaders or industrious parts known for sharing credible content around the topic you can also share statistics from non-computing websites such as statista or editorial sources like the New York Times here's an example what counts is a highly debated Topic in SEO so I wear first credible sources like John Muller from Google and an original study by HubSpot to support my claim okay let's recap consent let SEO involves using content to flow your SEO strategy it begins with understanding your audience doing keyword research to find profitable keywords grouping and

clustering the keywords based on search intent and user's Journey creating a Content brief writing the content and optimizing for search engines now that you know what is content letter SEO I'm gonna see you in the next video so you can learn how to create a contents marketing plan [Music]