My Best SEO Tip – An Ode to Content

Over the years, webmasters of all experience levels and backgrounds have asked me from time to time for my best SEO tip.

While it’s impossible to reduce all of SEO to one practice or idea, I do find that one tip takes precedent: creating quality content is the single best thing you can do to rank well.

With that in mind, I thought I’d expound on my best SEO tip in this ode to content.

My Best SEO Tip

What is Quality Content?

First, let’s define quality content.

A lot of marketers and SEOers stress the importance of quality content but don’t explain what it actually is.

Quality content does two things:

It Answers Its Keyword Well

Every page on your site should be aiming to rank for a unique keyword. That’s something you already know.

In my tutorial on how to know what keywords to use for SEO, one of the three components I consider when finding keywords is intent.

Identifying the intent behind a search is invaluable, not only for finding more profitable keywords but for creating better content for that keyword.

There’s an intent behind every single search someone does on Google. Everyone is looking for the resolution to some kind of problem they’re having, large or small.

If you can infer what they’re looking for, you can create your content accordingly on that page to answer that precisely intent.

And when you give your audience what they want, your user engagement reflects this in the form of more time spent on your site, more pages visited, less bounces, etc.

It’s The Authority On Its Topic

Secondly, quality content is the authority on its topic. Whenever you sit down to write on a new topic, odds are someone has already written on it.

Heck, odds are, many people have already written on it.

This means that you need to outdo everyone else to create the quintessential piece of writing on your topic.

This is something I covered in my SEO checklist for blog posts, but the idea is that your article on the topic should be more complete and engaging than those of your competitors.

You can do this by:

• Include a video, infographic, and other images to better convey your message. Offering your content in different forms like this keeps your visitors engaged (and Google knows it).
• Longer posts outperform their shorter peers in rankings. Aim for at least 2000 words (assuming the topic lends itself to it).
• Exhaust the topic by covering every point associated with it. Answer every question someone searching for that keyword phrase might have. Check the other pages currently ranking for that keyword to see details you might be missing on the topic. With all this combined, you should have the most complete reference on your topic.

The SEO Benefits of Quality Content

Now let’s talk about why quality content is my best SEO tip in the many ways it helps you rank.

Earned Links

Links from other websites are one of the most powerful signals to Google that your page has good content; content worth ranking well.

When you have the authority post on your keyword like I just described, you earn links from other webmasters.

Quality content is link bait. Full stop.

Sometimes you’ll earn a link because a webmaster is writing about something peripheral to your topic and they feel your page would help their audience.

Sometimes your post is so complete that it will discourage another webmaster from attempting to write about that topic themselves altogether, encouraging them to simply link to your page in its stead.

This is why you want to create that authority page on your topic and keyword.

You want to include that complete and thorough page on that topic, complete with a video or infographic so that anyone referencing your topic can’t help but link to your take on it.

User Metrics

User metrics are statistics which reflect how people interact with your site. It’s yet another powerful indicator of the quality of the content on your page which Google uses to determine where to rank it.

Google gets this information from the millions of people who use its own web browser, Google Chrome. Some of the more relevant metrics to reflect quality content include:

Time on Page

Quite literally how much time someone spends on the page. Retaining visitors for longer time spent on a page is a sign of quality content.

Bounce Rate

A bounce is recorded when someone visits a page on your website and leaves without visiting any other pages. Including relevant internal links and having a visible, navigable menu are the best ways to curb bounce rate.

Pages Visited

In the same vein, pages visited is just that. The more pages visited per a visitor’s session, the better it looks for that initial page they came to and the site in general.

Repeat Visits

If someone returns to that page after their initial visit, it’s a sign that there’s quality content worth returning to on that page (content worth ranking).

Traffic

Let’s not forget that traffic itself is a ranking factor (see my breakdown of how does Google rank pages). The more people who come to your page, the more perceived quality to Google.

The great thing about quality content is that it’s so easily shareable, making it a traffic magnet. The content itself does all of the heavy lifting for you here as you don’t need to sell anything.

Share your quality content with a handful of my 51 website traffic sources and watch the traffic (and links) flow.

And don’t discount the effect which churning out quality content on a regular basis has in creating an audience.

A first time visitor is more likely to return if they like what they read on your site. When they see that you regularly put out new content of that caliber, you’ll quickly gain a loyal and passionate audience.

The same can be said for any webmasters who link to your content. You’ll quickly gain a reputation as an authority in your niche and the frequent beneficiary of links when you keep up a regular schedule of creating quality.

The bottom line is that creating quality content pays so many dividends, making it my best SEO tip.

Take the time to make sure every new post you write meets the criteria of being quality content and enjoy the benefits every time you hit “publish”.