SEO isn’t rocket science. Google has made it clear what drives top rankings:
- Superior answers to search queries
- Fantastic user experiences
Sustainable SEO begins and ends with content, and amazing content begins and ends with your users.
Straight from the horse’s mouth:
“Google’s automated ranking systems are designed to present helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings.” – Google
Good SEO, then, means crafting content that caters to your audience’s needs, not necessarily your own. The two are certainly intertwined – if you create amazing content, you’ll attract your audience – but sometimes, it’s easy to lose sight of that fact when you’re concerned with optimization.
Here’s a common scenario:
Let’s say you want to rank well for the term “how to reset an Apple Watch.”
The process entails about four simple steps – certainly not enough to justify long-form content on its own, but since it’s often a good idea to chase related terms on the same page, you decide to cover related topics such as “why you should reset your Apple Watch,” “when to reset an Apple Watch,” “why won’t my Apple Watch reset,” “what does an Apple Watch reset do,” etc. – you get the picture.
There’s nothing wrong with that strategy. In fact, it can be a great way to establish your expertise on the topic of resetting an Apple Watch.
However, we often see people make the mistake of burying the actual step-by-step instructions below all that other content.
Their logic makes sense, as time-on-page and scroll depth appear to be SEO factors – but this strategy is antithetical to Google’s stated ranking priority.
Think about it: if you wanted to know how to reset your Apple Watch, would you want to scroll through blocks of paragraph text just to find the step-by-step instructions?
Of course not.
A better strategy is to put those instructions at the top of the page, so your visitors can immediately view them. That’s part of creating people-first content: catering to their needs, rather than yours.
You can always add the additional content below the instructions, thereby offering visitors an opportunity to expand their knowledge or instantly get answers to related questions they might have – but always answer their primary question right away.
Try it out yourself. Write with people in mind, and we think you’ll begin to see positive results from your SEO content efforts.
Amazing content isn’t buried under a bunch of SEO hocus pocus. It’s easily accessible. It delights users, earns natural backlinks and drives remarkable results.
It’s your most valuable SEO tool, just like Google intended.