5 Ways to Write Better, Higher-Ranking Content

Once upon a time, in a digital landscape long, long ago, keyword stuffing used to be a common thing. What is ‘keyword stuffing’, you ask? It’s essentially the practice of loading keywords into a web page’s meta data, copy, or even backlinks from other sites in an effort to get those pages to rank.

Why?

Back before machine learning was a thing, the practice of SEO used to be a little more cut and dry – if your post included many instances of the keyword you were trying to rank for, chances were, you’d rank higher in search results.

However, in today’s day and age, that practice is no longer common – and really… good riddance! Gone are the days of trying to game the system and optimize for computers at the expense of the human audience. As our landscape becomes increasingly more digital, the need for content adapted for a human audience becomes more and more apparent – as evidenced by Google’s recent BERT update and advances in machine learning technologies. (Bottom line – it’s better to write useful and educational content for your audience than to try and game the system with a bunch of keywords.)

So, how do you cater to this evolution and write content that will not only be helpful to the audience, but also rank well and garner search results too? Below are a few helpful tips that will allow you to do just that – create valuable, educational content that builds your credibility and establishes trust and lasting relationships with your audience.

1. Ask questions

If you’re not writing to answer people’s questions, how will they find your content? This simple and fundamental shift in thinking completely changed the way I strategize and produce content. Create content to answer the questions your audience is asking.

Don’t know what those questions are? Listen. Speak to your customer success/service teams – what are the most frequent questions they’re getting from customers? Speak to your sales team – they will have the best understanding of the questions your prospective customers are asking – and help uncover pain points and gaps in content, too.

2. Do keyword research

Sure, writing to answer questions is important (that’s why it’s #1 on this list!) – but to really supercharge that strategy, you’ll need to do keyword research. If you’re not writing in the same language people are using to search for information, you’ll miss out on a lot of good opportunities.

SEMRush is a great tool that I’ve personally used for keyword research, but it can be a little pricey. I recommend Keywords Everywhere, which is a very low-cost plugin that allows you to discover the search volume (how many searches a particular word/phrase gets per month) of a phrase you’d like to write about. You can also sign up for an AdWords account, not run a campaign and use the Keyword Planner tool. Here’s a quick example of how it will help:

The phrase ‘things to do in Illinois’ gets a search volume of 5,400/month while the phrase ‘Illinois things to do’ gets a volume of 320/month. While there are other factors you’ll want to consider to make your decision (like the keyword difficulty or who else is competing for those topics), it can help you get more value out of your work. Optimizing a post for ‘things to do in Illinois’ could potentially give you almost 17 times more visibility than if you were to optimize for ‘Illinois things to do’.

So understanding the exact questions people are asking, in the exact way they’re asking them, will make your content a whole lot better.

3. Examine your competitors’ content and find gaps you can uniquely fill

While optimizing for higher-volume keywords is a good practice, it’s not the only way to write better, higher-ranking content. Sometimes there are niches that may not always get a lot of search volume – but if you can act as a subject matter expert over your competition, optimizing for those topics can really pay off. This is part of what’s called the ‘longtail keyword strategy’ – where lots of longer but smaller-volume keywords can add up to big traffic over time.

A simple example of this? You’re a digital marketing agency trying to rank for larger search terms like ‘digital marketing strategy’ or ‘digital marketing best practices’ because they get a LOT of search volume. But you also specialize in digital marketing for law firms. While there might not be as much demand for this particular topic, offering something that your competitor might not will help you optimize for those who may be specifically searching for that type of content and your services. So, despite there being less volume, your traffic would be more highly-qualified and convert better!

4. Invest in creating one-stop ‘pillars’ of content that relate to your business.

Writing content – blog posts, etc., – is a good step to creating brand awareness and attracting qualified web traffic to your website. However, you can get a LOT more value out of that work if you create ‘traffic magnets’ – one-stop, hefty guides on a single topic that align with subjects relevant to your company or services your business provides, and then link all your blog posts to those ‘pillars’.

HubSpot explains this concept in a simple way (and really got it to ‘click’ for me) that I’ll elaborate on:

Imagine you’re at a grocery store as a shopper, looking for a specific brand of oat milk. But the grocery store doesn’t organize their products by category and you have to go through 6 or 7 different aisles to find what you’re looking for.

Now imagine you’re at a different grocery store that not only organizes their products into sections, they have fully-dedicated aisles and signage for each of those types of products – so you’re easily able to locate the main dairy aisle (aka the pillar), then the milk section (a subtopic), and ultimately your specific brand of oat milk (a blog post).

The way Google operates means that the second way of organizing content on your website with major ‘pillars’ housing lots of helpful information that link to and from the blogs that cover that topic – or even answer very niche and specific questions about that topic – makes it a LOT easier for Google to crawl your site, take stock of your organized content and understand that you are a subject matter expert. Therefore, Google will reward you by pushing you up in search rank. This is the essence of the ‘pillar’ content model and I am a firm believer in it.

So, they might take a bit longer to produce, but it’s a good idea to identify a handful of topics your business can act as a subject matter expert on and create these ‘pillars’. You’ll want to treat them as if the person could come away knowing nearly everything there is to know about the topic and how your company can aid them by reading it. You’ll also want to do keyword research, make sure you’re answering questions and linking out to other relevant blog posts (and that those blog posts link back to the pillar).

5. Get niche

Now that you’ve invested in creating major topic pillars, you’ll want to really dig deep and create a lot of valuable niche content about those topics. Think of it like a hub and spoke model – what are all the different kinds of questions your customers and prospects are asking about those topics? As long as you link them back to the major topic pillar and vice versa, Google will understand that you’re creating content so valuable that you deem it worthy of being linked to. It will more completely associate you with these topics thanks to all the content you’ve written about them.

In conclusion, with today’s advancements in machine learning and the evolution of the digital landscape, writing helpful, informative content that answers the questions your customers and prospects are asking in the language they’re asking them in is the best way to rank higher, boost web traffic and grow a loyal audience.