You cannot overemphasize the importance of SEO for businesses especially while operating in a digital marketplace. More and more businesses are now trying to leverage the power of optimization to gain benefits that other marketing options cannot provide. The use of the right keywords that are in line with your target audience can drive your business to new heights and increase your revenue.

What benefits does SEO optimization deliver?

Some of the numerous benefits that optimization can gain you are

• Improve your ranking in the search results
• Increase in traffic to your website
• Improve your website’s visibility
• Drive-up your click-through rates (CTR)
• Rise conversion rates
• Increase sales and, as a result, sales revenue.

The above-mentioned benefits are incentive enough for a business to consider and get on board with SEO techniques.

Why is SEO important in content creation?

The content you carry on your website is the driving force that leads to the improvement of traffic inflow to your site. However, before you optimize your site, you will have to conduct comprehensive keyword research and identify the keywords relevant to your audience. Thereafter, to gain inbound traction, you will have to include these identified keywords strategically in your content to drive relevant traffic to your site. Once the inflow of traffic begins, you can work relentlessly to identify leads and pursue them to gain the desired conversion rates.

What does SEO friendly content mean?

SEO friendly content means creating content that search engines understand. In other words, writing content to carry the keywords you identified in addition to other SEO practices will make you visible to search engine algorithms. The SE robots that are involved in crawling, indexing, and ranking your site will pick up these signals and move your site up in the SERP. Hence, creating content, and thereafter optimizing it with both on-page and off-page SEO techniques will help your business excel.

How to write content that is SEO friendly?

There are a series of steps you need to follow in order to make the content you create SEO friendly. They are

1) Research: Conduct comprehensive research on your target audience. This will help you understand their pain points and so you can translate the points collected into search queries that they may use. This exercise will help you identify the keywords that you can use to optimize your site content. Another way to find keywords involves getting in touch with your existing customers and find the search queries that they might enter. Identifying keywords lays the foundation for the rest of the optimization process and hence, needs careful completion.

2) Keywords list: From the keywords thus identified from the research you conducted, screen-out and record only the words that are relevant to your business and campaign. This will serve as a repository that can prove to be helpful in future campaigns as well. Yet another important exercise in this step is to identify seed keywords and also create keyword variants by adding modifiers to them.

3) Content length: Search engines identify and index websites that carry long content. It is advisable to carry articles that are at least 800-1000 words long to get the crawlers attention. Hence, writing articles with the appropriate length with the right keywords plugged-in the content body will help your website gain the traction it needs.

You can also find free tools on the world wide web that allow you to enter your focus keywords to find out the ideal length of the article. Ensuring that you get the word count and the keyword inclusion right is critical to ranking high in the SERP.

4) Content structure: The content you carry on your website pages need to have a good structure. Including numerous headings, sub-headings, bullet points, and sub-bullets points will help you send good signals to the search engine algorithm that is tracking websites.

5) Content freshness: Posting fresh content consistently will also help you gain the attention of the search engine algorithms. It is important to plan and schedule your content at regular intervals to rank higher in the search results and gain the visibility you need.

6) On-page SEO: Optimizing the content your website carries comes under the purview of on-page SEO. The four main areas that on-page SEO deals with are

• Title tags – Incorporating the focus keyword is critical in this step.
• Content – The keywords identified need to be plugged-into the content body.
• Internal links – This involves carries links to sites that are relevant to your audience.
• URL – Optimizing URLs are also critical to rank higher in the search results.

It is important for you to pay attention to the fact that the keyword you want to trend must be plugged-in the

• Main title 
• Sub-title
• Headings 
• Sub-headings, and 
• Meta-description.

7) Optimize images: Search engines cannot read images as their algorithms look for and assess text. Hence, it is important for you to upload only optimized images on your website. Optimizing images refers to change the name of the image and include your focus keyword in renaming it. This will help the search engines to crawl through and assess the ranking capability of your site.

8) Include interlinks: To rank higher in the SERPs, you will also have to carry interlinks on your pages that direct your visitor to the previous or next posts. Link the interlinks to an anchor text that carries your keywords, compelling your audience to click through and spend more dwell time on your site.

9) Use hashtags: Use appropriate hashtags in your content and ensure the inclusion of keywords in the tags to gain better visibility.

Following the above-listed steps in addition to rightly following the off-page SEO and technical SEO techniques will ensure your site success. You can measure the success that optimizing your content has gained you by checking your site’s performance on numerous analytics tools. Based on the results you see; you can modify your content so you can gain a higher ranking, which will pave the way to business success.