The complete guide to good SEO content

Based on various content elements, such as texts, images, graphics or videos, search engines can deduce for which search query a website is relevant and place it high up in the rankings. Good content is therefore also part of successful search engine optimization. But not all (SEO) content is the same.

We’ll show you what types of SEO content there are and give you step-by-step instructions on how to get your
SEO content
can optimize.

Google used to depend on the content of a website. Only through the text could Google and other search engines understand the content of a web page and thus display it in search results for relevant queries.

Brand sites, blogs and other information portals have therefore always attached great importance to good content. This did not used to be the case with transaction-oriented websites, primarily online stores. Many store operators were afraid that detailed content would lead to potential customers being distracted from the transaction. Therefore, “SEO texts” were often hidden from users, for example, with very small font or gray font on a white background.

Thus, the necessary text was available for the search engine. However, there were hardly any differences in content between the texts. Moreover, they were richly filled with relevant keywords: Because the so-called keyword density was one of the most important key figures for the (supposed) quality of SEO content. In addition, in many cases there were separate pages for synonyms or even misspellings. This made the texts, if they were seen at all, very difficult to read. So users do not benefit from this content.

How does SEO content work today?

Today, search engines work much more intelligently and are able to capture semantic relationships of a website. At the same time, good content has become increasingly important for users and contributes significantly to the success of a company and its website.

SEO content is no longer exclusively for better rankings in search queries. It is written for the user, intended to inform, advise or even entertain and, in the best case, lead to a transaction.

Since the beginnings of Google and Co., the importance of content for SEO has thus changed considerably:

Whereas content used to be primarily intended for search engines, today it must be written primarily for users. Google now rates how helpful and user-friendly texts are.

To reinforce good content, Google updated its search quality rating guidelines at the end of July 2018 to include a stronger focus on the “E-A-T” principles of expertise, authority, and trust. In December 2022, Google will expand the “E-A-T” principle with another E for Experience. However, the basic principle remains: E-E-A-T states that good content must be relevant and helpful.

E = Experience – is measured by the author’s experience with a product or through an expert interview

E = Expertise – measured by the expertise of the author

A = Authority – is measured by the reputation of an author or a website

T = Trust – is composed of factors such as accuracy of content, transparency of information, contact information.

To evaluate the E-E-A-T factors, Google is increasingly drawing on user signals such as bounce rate or dwell time on a page. Thus, the search engine tries to understand whether the user has found what he was looking for or expected and how well the user likes this content.

So, with the updates to the Google search algorithm, the requirements for the content of a website have changed fundamentally. To meet today’s
Google quality guidelines
you need to consider the following points:

Before you can start optimizing your content, you need to think about the different types of content you need and what content you want to provide for your users. In SEO we distinguish between five different types:

1. Transactional content
2. Informational content
3. Branding content
4. Social Content
5. User Generated Content

With transactional content, the name already reveals: The transaction is in the foreground. It should generate conversions and leads. That is, users are supposed to buy a product on your website, register for a seminar, fill out a form, sign up for a subscription, or something similar.

The task of transactional content is therefore to inform the user in such a way that he:

1. can decide on the right product or service.
2. is convinced that you are the best provider for him.

Transactional content is therefore mainly found on product pages, category pages, brand pages, purchase advice pages, registration pages, etc. But blogs are also popular for transporting transactional content.

Transactional content is essential for
SEO
the most important content type. This is mainly due to the fact that there is often a high, steady search volume for terms with a transactional character and that these terms have a high commercial relevance. So with this content you can generate organic traffic and thus sales on a permanent basis.

What optimization measures do you need to take with transactional content?

Because transactional content is particularly important, you should start your optimization here and be especially systematic:

Use keywords

Because the valuable transactional keywords often have a high search volume, the market is practically always highly competitive. That’s why the use of keywords is most important in this type of content.

Clear structure

In order for the user to quickly grasp what is most important to him, a good structure of the content is the be-all and end-all:Structure your texts into meaningful headings and subheadings.Use bullet points, lists and tables to make your content easier to grasp. Use images and videos that help the user decide in favor of your offer.

Use of conversion elements

If you want the user to make a transaction at the end, you absolutely have to include conversion elements ,also called call-to-action, such as a booking button or a booking form. Here is an example from our own website:

Informational content is often covered by online magazines, guidebooks or blog articles. This is primarily about the provision of information. That is, you want to answer users’ questions and thus influence their decisions. Informational content can be divided into evergreen content and time-related content.

Evergreen content is always relevant. They are suitable for answering questions that come up again and again with customers and for covering the information needs of one’s own target group. Time-related content, on the other hand, only plays a role for a short period of time. They are especially important for seasonal themes or special events.

How important is informational content for SEO?

Evergreen content and time-related content have different meanings for a website’s SEO. For example, over 5000 users per month search for “retirement”. If you create good content for this keyword, you can achieve good rankings and traffic in the long term. Since users regularly search for “retirement”, they will also regularly visit your website.

It’s a different story for time-based content. Thus, “World Cup game plan” is intensively searched every four years. As soon as the tournament is over, however, that ebbs away again. Even though time-based content doesn’t drive long-term traffic, it’s not entirely unimportant. If it is good time-related content that conveys your experience, expertise, authority and trust (E-E-A-T principle), users may come back to your website for similar topics.

That said, let’s focus on evergreen content creation here.

Optimize evergreen content correctly

If you want to produce evergreen content and achieve good rankings with it, you should be aware that it is not enough to create this content once. The constant demand for this topic does not represent a sole ranking factor. Google re-evaluates how relevant a target page is for each search query and also considers criteria such as the publication date or the timestamp of an update. This is to present the user with an optimal search result.

Therefore, it is necessary to regularly optimize even supposedly timeless content. This applies not only to technical topics, where a high level of dynamism ensures regular updates, but also to content that appears timeless at first glance.

Also note that the higher the competition of websites for a particular evergreen content, the more criteria need to be optimized.

Branded content is any content you create to introduce your company and explain what your company does. This content can span many different pages and is found across all business models:

• Homepage
• About us
• Career
• Service pages
• FAQs
• Press releases

How important is branding content for SEO?

At first glance, branding content is not relevant for SEO. Normally, you will automatically get good rankings for your brand keywords.

However, before you start optimizing your site for generic terms with high search volume, make sure you rank well for your brand terms (brand, slogan, but also word combinations of brand and career, etc.).

If this is not the case, it is usually due to technical problems, which you should then definitely get to the bottom of. A bad or missing ranking for brand terms is mostly due to faulty
Crawling
.

What optimization measures should you take for your brand content?

Apart from full crawling, you don’t need to optimize your branded content. Usually it is enough to use your brand keywords in the most important places (e.g. title and headline). However, since your branding content will also be about your offer, you should link well to your transactional pages in appropriate places.

Social content refers to all content that is suitable for sharing on social networks. You will find it mainly in magazines, guidebooks or on separate landing pages. It is characterized above all by a high entertainment value. Social content doesn’t necessarily have to be published on your website; social media posts, such as a Facebook post and a YouTube video, can also be social content.

However, this is primarily about the content on your website. Social content is very diverse, the main thing is that the user is well entertained. This works best with infographics, images and videos.

How important is social content for SEO?

Normally, users don’t search for social content, but use it when they find it. But that also means there is virtually no search volume for social content.

So you can’t generate traffic via organic search with social content. However, content is important for SEO because it helps you market your content and your website or business.

Marketing your content, in turn, is important for getting links and mentions on other websites, which in turn are important off-page signals.

What optimization measures do I need to take?

Since you don’t want to rank primarily with social content, keyword targeting is incidental. Instead, make sure that you link your most important SEO pages like transactional pages well here.

This is the only way that the backlinks you may receive from marketing your website via social content will have the best possible impact on your transactional pages. If these pages are out of date, you should still make sure that the content remains accessible or 301 redirects to the new content.

In addition to the content types already described, there is another content type that is difficult to categorize due to its diversity:

User-generated content, that is, content provided by your users. This can take place, for example, in the form of comments or within a forum on your site where users can exchange ideas. You may even offer users the ability to upload photos.

Advantages of user-generated content

• Probably the biggest advantage is that you don’t have to worry about creating this content yourself. Your users do it for you.
• Users create content in “their language,” potentially adding terms and topics to your keyword portfolio that you missed in your keyword research.
• Interaction and dwell time are comparatively high.

Apart from the legal aspect, it is also important for the search engine to continuously monitor these pages. User-generated content thus offers high SEO potential. However, it is necessary that you moderate and control user-generated content. Accordingly, user-generated content will also produce a significant amount of work.

Before moving on to creating high-quality content, let’s dispel a myth: there is no Google penalty for duplicate content.

This means that if, for example, you take a company’s press release unchanged from their website and publish it on your website, you will not be penalized with a manual action from Google. However, Google filters duplicate versions of content from search results.

So if two or more pieces of content on your website are substantially similar, Google chooses a canonical (source) URL to display in search results and hides the duplicate versions. This is not a punishment. This is a Google filter that displays only one version of a piece of content to improve the searcher’s experience.

Now that we know what types of content there are, the question is:

So how do you actually write good content?

Before you actively start creating your SEO content, you should be aware of three points:

• The problem: Every user has a problem with a search query or is looking for help. Do you determine with which problem a potential customer comes to you?
• The solution: You have identified the problem of your potential customers. Now you need to provide the solution. Determine what kind of content will provide users with high-quality, in-depth help.
• Your Brand: Become brand aware and establish your brand and products as the problem solver in your industry.

Once you have raised awareness of these points, you can start creating your SEO content step by step:

Step 1: Detailed topics and keyword research

The E-E-A-T principle gives a good picture of what makes good content. So it’s important to use your content to show your experience and expertise, convey authority, and build trust.

So before you just start writing, you need to get comprehensive information on the subject. The following questions may help you:

• Who is my target group?
• How do I want to address this target group?
• Do I want to address my readers as “duzen”, “siezen” or not at all?
• What could be the intention of the user reading my text? Is he looking for a solution to a problem or is his goal a transaction?
• What questions might a user have about the topic I’m writing about?
• What images or videos can I use or create to better explain a subject?
• What further information can I offer the user?
• How do I organize the topic of my text into meaningful sections and subtopics?

Your first starting point when researching the topic will certainly be the search engine itself. Wikipedia should be a good start in many cases to get familiar with a topic. And Google Search Console, social media and competitor analytics can also provide insights. Particularly helpful in answering the above questions, however, is the “primary source”: your customers. Through interviews and customer surveys, you will thus receive high-quality answers and get helpful suggestions for improvement and insights.

However, you should also look at the first results in search engines for relevant search queries of your topic when doing your research. Here you will logically find the content that currently ranks well.

Use these websites for inspiration. Your thought on this should be:

How can I prepare and present the topics of the top results even better?

It should go without saying that you do not copy content.

Especially on extensive websites, there is often a risk that a topic has already been covered once. So before you start researching for a new text, you should check if there is already content on your site that deals with the topic. Your goal must be to have only one piece of content per search intent on your page.

So, if there is already a post on this topic, it is more advisable to revise it and improve it if necessary, instead of writing a new similar post. It doesn’t make sense to provide the user with two similar pieces of content.

The same applies to Google: In principle, Google prefers current texts to outdated ones. This is also understandable:

Who wants to read a text about 2000s laptops today when googling for “laptop buying guide”?

But how important timeliness actually is depends a lot on the topic. There should be much less need for updating in a text about the history of antiquity than in a text about machine learning.

Basically, to ensure that your text stays current and your users can always be up-to-date, you need to revise your texts as soon as the topic has evolved. To do this, look at whether the keywords are still current and you are still targeting the right audience. Also check the structure of your content.

To make it a little easier for yourself to optimize your content later on, you should consider the importance of the topicality of the subject matter right at the beginning of a new text. Technical topics, for example, are particularly dynamic and must therefore be regularly adapted.

To ensure that the optimization of your texts is structured, establish a process in which it is precisely defined at what intervals who is responsible for checking the texts for up-to-dateness and initiating the revision. For example, highly topical issues are reviewed once a month and less topical issues once a year. The responsibility can be based on the topics or on the editor, because the editor has already dealt intensively with the topic.

Once the research for the text is complete, you can start writing. Creating an SEO text is a creative process and there are no universal criteria for the quality of a text. However, there are definitely some guidelines that can make your writing easier.

The right structure for your SEO content

To give your text a clear structure, you should think of a structure before you start writing. This makes the text readable and helps the user to see the information that is important for him.

Set title tag and meta description

In order for users to assess whether your text provides them with the necessary information already in the Google rankings, you need an appealing title and meta description. Both should contain the main keyword.

The title tag tells the user succinctly what to expect in your content. You can also address the users directly in the process.
The meta-description summarizes the content in a few more words. Above all, it should make users curious and show what makes this content so special.

Use appropriate headings

Appropriate headings help your users to grasp the topic and its subtopics more quickly. So he can also specifically read only the sections that are most interesting to him. Therefore should Headings should be concise and describe what follows in the section. You should use creative headlines rather sparingly.

But headlines are not only helpful for users. Google and other search engines also use them to capture content. Moreover, they are among the most important elements for keyword usage.

Headings are marked in HTML as H1, H2, H3, etc. Here, the H1 heading is your main heading that summarizes the content of a page for users and search engines. In it, you should definitely use the main keyword. More on this topic in the Keywords section.

You should structure the remaining headings H2 to H6 so that they appear in a logical hierarchy. An H2 is thus superordinate to the H3, etc.

Short paragraphs for improved readability

Reading behavior is different online than in print. Users tend to skim paragraphs rather than read them in full. Therefore, write in simple, short sentences so that the content can be quickly grasped by the readers and highlight what is important.

The right scope of your SEO content

Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for the length of texts. The simple answer is: write as much as necessary, but as little as possible. The user must receive all the information he needs and expects. This ensures that your content is relevant to a search query.

Complex topics naturally need a longer text, while content on simple topics can also be kept short and concise.

If you want to have at least a rough orientation for the length of your text, it can be helpful to look at the texts of the top 10 organic search results.

The correct use of keywords

It is advisable to integrate the keywords that you have determined for your text through keyword research into the text from the very beginning. This will make the text much more readable than if you add the keywords afterwards.

You should focus on one main keyword and a maximum of three to four secondary keywords. You can also use long-tail keywords. The keywords should be from the same cluster and prominently placed in the text. However, they should be careful not to use the keywords too often. Because that makes the text hard to read for the user. In addition, Google might rank the page lower due to keyword stuffing and below-average user engagement.

The ideal keyword density for a text is still controversial. There is no blanket answer to how often a keyword should appear in the text. As you read, pay attention to whether the frequency of keywords particularly strikes you. If so, reduce the usage. Alternatively, you can use tools to measure keyword density. On the one hand, you can use the WDF*IDF tools for this purpose. In addition, WordPress, for example, has the YOAST SEO plugin that shows you if your keyword appears often enough in the text and paragraphs.

To make the text as readable as possible, you should not only use the keyword itself, but also various synonyms In this way, you can also optimize for synonyms at the same time, in case Google displays slightly modified results for them. Most of the time, however, the algorithm understands exactly which terms are meant.

If your keyword consists of several words, you can also use Stop and filler words use between the terms. These are for example:
for, a, and, the, the, the
etc. Google understands the keyword anyway, because the stop and filler words are ignored.

Place keywords correctly

You should use the keyword not only in the body text, of course, but also in various other elements of your web page, for example, in the headings and title. There the use of keywords is of particular importance and essential more important than in the ALT attributes, for example.

In addition, the importance of keyword targeting also depends on the type of content. If it is transactional content e.g. on category or product pages, accurate keyword targeting is very important. On informational pages e.g. guides, blogs, service pages it is less important. On the other hand, it is hardly relevant for social sites.

Finding the right words

Besides keywords, there are other important words that need to be found. These are emotional words. Depending on the topic and tone, these can be quite different. For example, if you are writing a text about a very emotionally charged topic, your words should be very gentle and understanding. Show the reader that you understand their problem and that your content offers the most helpful solution.

Images, graphics and videos not only enhance a text visually, but also help the user immensely in understanding the text. In addition, there is great SEO potential in these elements, as such content is found and displayed via image and/or video search in addition to “normal search”. Text content with images is ultimately rated better by Google than content without images. Good images are therefore an important ranking criterion for a website.

Especially when describing complex technical contexts, representations of the content are very helpful for the users. The advantage for the user is obvious:

He can grasp the contents of the page even before he has started reading the associated text. Consider whether there are aspects of your text that are easier to explain with an image or video than with plain text.

Moreover, in many cases (online stores product images, hotel images, etc.) images can be decisive for consumers’ purchase decisions.

Tips for using images:

• Don’t use stock photos if possible, and if you do, use high-quality and carefully selected stock photos.
• Use images with a similar style. If you use images from different sources with different look, it will look unprofessional and unattractive to your users.
• Optimize images for fast loading time. Save images in medium quality and in the appropriate size.

Also, add alt tags to your images. These are alternative texts that describe the image. They serve as additional relevance signals, with which the SEO performance of the content can be improved. In addition, Google understands the content of an image better this way. It is important when formulating the alt tag that the most relevant keywords are used.

Links are known to be one of the important ranking factors in the Google algorithm. While there is a lot of talk about external links, i.e. incoming links from other domains, and a lot of effort is put into obtaining them, relatively little attention is paid to the internal linking of a website.

Thereby an internal link is a powerful SEO tool and should not be limited to the navigation and the use of the keyword in the link text. External links increase Google’s trust in the domain. The higher the trust, the more Google trusts the internal links.

In this respect, both types of links are important and it would be an oversight to focus only on external linking and disregard the possibilities of internal linking.

The practical thing about internal links is that you are completely free to define them yourself. You can implement your own plan in the number, placement and design of the link texts.

Moreover, there is no need to worry about Google filters. While for external links, at the latest since the Penguin update, the excessive use of hard money keywords in the anchor text quickly leads to ranking losses, the opposite is more likely to be the case for internal links.

Google recommends in its PDF Introduction to Search Engine Optimization:

“… the better the anchor text, the easier it is for users to navigate and the better Google understands what the page being linked to is about.”

So if the target page is about “private health insurance”, for example, it is absolutely legitimate to link the page internally with the link text “private health insurance” as often as you want. You do not violate any of Google’s guidelines.

Most websites do not take full advantage of this possibility. However, remember that the linked pages must still be relevant to the user.

How many internal links should I use?

Unfortunately, there is no guideline for this either. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Can you still read the text with the links or are you just distracted? Again, the top premise is, the text must be better because of the internal links.

In addition, you should also make sure that every link you set is easy for the user to reach. Especially on smartphones, clicking on a link can cause problems if too many are too close together.

Therefore, it is recommended to set only one link in a paragraph. This way, there is enough space around the link and the user does not accidentally click on a completely different one.

Good SEO content ensures that users are drawn to your website, answers all their questions, and leads to the hoped-for transaction if necessary. It meets the E-E-A-T factors and makes you the go-to person in your field. So, good SEO content ensures more sales and success for your business.

So what are you waiting for? Learn about SEO content now and start increasing your traffic!