Creating Content that Search Engines Love

Online marketing is an essential part of a business strategy and part of that strategy includes creating content. For your content to be seen online, you need to properly optimize it for search engines.

When users go to search engines like Google, they’re looking for a specific answer to a question. They type in that question and browse through the results pages until they hopefully find the answer they’re looking for. When creating content

, you can be able to be there in the users’ time of need by supplying them with valuable, useful content that can be the answer to their questions.

Google can then crawl the page and determine whether the content is valuable to searchers.

In this article, we will go over some of the types of content that search engines and searchers love.

Evergreen content

If you’ve ever searched for a topic online and noticed it was published over a year ago but still shows up in one of the top positions on the search engine results page, that piece of content is considered evergreen.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, evergreen content refers to a piece that continues to remain relevant long after it’s published. Like evergreen trees who retain their leaves all year round, this type of content is one that can stand the test of time.

Evergreen pieces give readers valuable information and can continue to drive traffic to your site as time goes on, because of its relevancy.

In the example below, you can see how Forbes post on The 10 Dos and Don’ts of Conducting Employee Background Checks and Shareable for Hires post on How to Do An Employee Background Check still show up in the top positions on the search engine results pages simply for their relevancy to the given search term.

One post is from 2012 and one from 2018. Surely there have been many other posts relevant to the topic, but these high-quality useful articles can withstand the test of time, because of their evergreen status.

Videos

While a lot of us prefer reading articles, there’s a chunk of us who prefer visual learning, which is why videos are such valuable pieces of content to put out. When you upload your video content to YouTube, you have a higher chance of it appearing in the video tab in the SERPs.

Though optimizing videos is a whole different process, this type of content is still extremely valuable and one that searchers and search engines love.

Keyword rich blogs

Of course, for your content to make its way up to the top of the search engine results pages, you need to make sure it is optimized and includes target keywords. When you write any form of content, whether it be a blog post or FAQ page of your website, you need to strategically place different keywords you want to rank for within the content.

This doesn’t mean pick one keyword and place it throughout the body of the content. Google can analyze the content of your page and detect what your business is about. This means you don’t need to use the same target keyword over and over.

Use synonyms of the same phrase so you’re not stuffing the same keyword multiple times throughout your content. Pick 1-2 target keywords, 1-2 long-tail keywords and place them naturally throughout the body of you content.

Lists

Lists are another great option for a piece of content as they are easy to craft and can act as a go-to source for searchers. Lists are typically broken up into small sections and are easy for searchers to scan through.

Guides

Guides are typically longer-form content and are super valuable to readers, and great content for search engines. This type of content must be high-quality, include visuals, and be in a simple language.

Guides can come in many different forms, such as a downloadable PDF, a long-structured blog post, or an infographic. Think of a guide as a mini class. It supplies you with all the information you need to know about a given topic and is broken down in a way that is easily digestible to readers.

Summary

Search engine optimization is always evolving. Diversifying the content you produce and creating high-quality informative pieces can help you establish yourself as a brand while keeping search engines, and humans, happy.