This is a guest blog written by Surfer SEO’s Michal Suski. He’ll be running through three tips to help make creating SEO-optimised content a breeze.
Start your content creation without a process and you will end up pouring water into a leaky bucket. Planning the perfect SEO-optimised content creation process can be frustrating, time-consuming, and sometimes left down to guesswork. Luckily, I’ve done the hard work for you.
I want to teach you how to put together an effective process to help you build an SEO-optimised content strategy. Do this, and you could see a huge improvement in your site’s search engine rankings – and fast, too.
Save time with keyword clustering
Forget about traditional keyword research – it’s inefficient, inaccurate and doesn’t take keyword clustering into account.
Building a keyword strategy is time-consuming, too. Picture analysing your competitors, adding hundreds if not thousands of keywords to a spreadsheet and trying to group them in the best way. A lot of the time, decisions you make during this stage will be based on your gut feeling rather than fact.
With this in mind, we built a tool that automatically fetches competitors, examines their visibility URL after URL and compares groups using machine learning algorithms. It sounds like magic but it’s actually super simple and fast.
The tool allows you to perform keyword research and clustering at once, saving yourself SO much time. I personally believe that there is no better way to do this than ask Google which keywords should be ranked together, and by using Surfer we make this process way more efficient compared to Googling manually.
Using the tool means you can get your research and grouping done in just two minutes. No guesswork, no gut feeling – only pure data, analysed and presented so that you can build the most relevant content hub.
Sounds too good to be true? Watch this 3:10 video.
Data-driven content writing
“Write ten pieces of content by the end of this quarter, each 1000 words on these keywords, please.”
Sounds familiar?
This is not only a massively common approach but also incredibly shortsighted. It’s quite frankly a waste of money. There’s simply no way to apply the same guidelines to different keywords and expect strong results. Again, we can use reverse engineering to overcome this.
How does this work?
Basically, you’ll need to examine the pages that are already ranking for your target keywords and look for the patterns. This can be done manually with ease – if you have the time. All you need to do is open search results and check whether your competitors are using long or short form copy. Count their words. Search for topics that are common amongst the top ranking pages and try to use them in your article.
This sounds like a lot of work but it’s worth it. Imagine writing content that is never meant to rank because you are doing it free hand without the assistance of data. It’s Sisyphean work – writing for sake of writing, rather than to grow your domain in the right direction.
Another nightmare, I know. Don’t worry, I have a solution.
Each of those keyword clusters you created after point one can be turned into guidelines based on the pages who currently rank for these keywords. You can have all this in just 60 seconds. Nope, this is not the happy ending of a content writer’s fairy tale. It’s a real-life description of a SaaS product that makes Content Intelligence a real thing.
Here’s the proof.
So, we’ve brainstormed keyword clusters in a data-driven way and performed some SEO-optimised content creation. Now it’s time to give our shiny new content a boost for free.
Boost fresh content with internal links
Internal links are a great source of power when trying to get a new piece of content indexed faster, whilst helping that content to be considered as a valuable resource. Each fresh article should be linked internally from relevant content – ideally from established URLs within your domain.
This way you can show Google that you care about your new piece of content and you want it to care about it too. Wholesome AF.
To do this, use keywords as anchors. Make sure to create internal links pointing to the page using anchors that are this page’s target keywords. This way, you will add extra context and inform Google what’s on the other side of the link. Be consistent – never link to two different pages using the same anchor.
Again this sounds great, but time-consuming.
What if I told you that you can use Surfer to find internal link opportunities for your new article? Simply provide your target keyword and the URL, run the analysis and that’s it. It will find the relevant pages on your site and crawl them to see if you have a link in place already or not. If there isn’t an existing link, Surfer will not only tell you it’s missing, but also suggest the best fragment to link from.
Oh, you were expecting a video? Nope, here’s a real life audit.
Surfer SEO provides Content Intelligence for everyone
By implementing the three step process above you can revolutionise your seo-optimised content creation. Don’t miss the opportunity to improve – you could see some huge results from this.
This blog was guest-written by Michal Suski, CEO of Surfer SEO. Interested in improving the SEO of your eCommerce website? We can help with that.
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