How to create content for SEO in 2023
Does SEO ever feel like the Wild Wild West? It can feel like things are changing DAILY, and the things we were told to do six months ago can be obsolete today.
It's freaking madness!
But, the one concept that has endured through the past five years is this: You need to create awesome content for searchers. Period.
And most of the traffic you drive to the site is going to come from creating great content. It's not going to be your tech-heavy SEO stuff from the days of old.
And that tends to break peoples' brains because they assume SEO is super technical and black box-ey.
But here's the thing: It's still pretty technical and sophisticated, but those technical elements have been redirected into the right brain side of things: language and communication.
That said, "technical stuff" can cross the bridge into seemingly subjective stuff like "content quality" and "depth of topic coverage" fairly easily now.
So let's explain how Google is turning something subjective, like "content quality" into a technical/mechanical thing.
Step 1: Choosing a keyword to create content for
The easiest way to waste all the hard work you put into keyword research is to use a "keyword target" approach in which you use a keyword you want to rank for throughout the site.
Or, to try to get a piece of content to rank for more than one keyword.
So what we're going to do instead is choose a keyword and create one AWESOME piece of content for that keyword.
After all, Google ranks pages for keywords, not websites!
Open up this keyword research template and add your keywords and data. Choose a keyword that has a solid combination of low keyword difficulty and a substantial amount of monthly searches.
Next, we are going to need to figure out WHY people are searching for that particular keyword, then decide what kind of content to create.
Step 2: Audit the SERP for intent
Arguably, the most important and oft-overlooked aspect of creating content is understanding why someone is searching for your keyword target and how to satisfy that intent.
Remembering that we are going to create an entire page for each keyword we select, we will first need to determine which type of content to create. We will do this by investigating SERPs for the keyword we choose.
When I Google "golf rival tips", I see the following results:
Three videos dominate the first scroll. As we move down the page we see the following:
All told, we have 3 video results, 5 blogs and a link to a social page. If we were to summarize what people are looking for when they search this keyword, it would most certainly be: An informative blog/guide and possibly video content that explains how to play the game "Golf Rivals."
So I'm going to plan on creating a guide-style blog post for this keyword.
The next thing we need to figure out is the type of media (video, graphics, imagery, tools) people are expecting to find when they search this keyword.
The easiest way to do this is by briefly clicking through all the results on page one and observing the types of media people are using.
The results were the following:
So we could technically get away with writing a text-only blog, but we would likely get a bonus by creating a video and/or adding some screenshots.
I want to create something better than any of my competitors, so I'm going to do both.
The last thing we need to figure out...click here to get the rest of these awesome insights.