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Creating Engaging Content That Ranks: Tips and Techniques
26 Plays8 months ago
Join us as we dive into the fundamentals of creating engaging content that not only captures the attention of your audience but also ranks well on Google. From crafting compelling titles to understanding your audience's intent, your host Andrew Laws shares invaluable tips that can help anyone—from beginners to seasoned marketers—improve their content strategy.
Key Points Discussed:
- The Importance of Engaging Content:Why creating compelling content is crucial for online visibility.
The role of content in attracting and retaining audience engagement. - Starting with the Basics:Tips for crafting effective titles and introductions.
The importance of aligning your content with reader intent. - Content Creation for Humans and Search Engines:Balancing SEO needs with genuine user value.
Strategies to keep content relevant and focused. - Research and Relevance:Techniques for keyword research and using tools like SEMRush.
Ensuring your content stays on topic to maintain SEO integrity. - Engagement and Metrics:How to measure the success of your content through analytics.
The significance of user engagement metrics in content evaluation. - Content Updates and Maintenance:The benefits of regularly updating content.
How continual improvements can lead to better search engine rankings. - Practical Tips for Content Creators:Real-life examples of effective content strategies.
Recommendations for resources and further reading on content marketing.
Episode Conclusion:
Andrew emphasises that good content serves the reader first, providing value that in turn leads to better SEO outcomes. He encourages creators to be generous with their knowledge, as transparency and helpfulness are key to building trust and authority in any field.
Call to Action:
Listeners are encouraged to apply these strategies to their content creation efforts and share their experiences. Engage with the podcast through comments, likes, and by subscribing for more useful insights.
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Transcript
Introduction to Engaging Content
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, my name's Andrew Laws and I'm the founder of Yesio. I'm going to talk to you today about how to create engaging content that ranks. I'm going to explain how we go about it in the industry and how really, if you have enthusiasm and knowledge about your own business or your own niche, you can do this all by yourselves.
00:00:20
Speaker
So first of all, let's look at why it's important to create engaging content. I mean, hopefully you can kind of guess this one for yourselves. You want to create content that people want to read, that they want to share, that they want to run to the top of mountains, and you shout about, ring their mums. You want to create the content that makes them go, yes, why haven't I found this person before? Because that type of content naturally floats to the top.
00:00:47
Speaker
of Google search engine results pages or SERPs. Now, just to let you know, we do try and avoid using acronyms, so I will try not to do that again. So it's important to create content that engages the reader, pulls them in.
Creating Content for Humans
00:01:06
Speaker
I'm going to start with real basics here.
00:01:10
Speaker
a good title. The purpose of your title is to get the reader to want to read the article.
00:01:19
Speaker
the subtitle or the intro paragraph to anyone what you're writing, the only purpose that serves is to make people want to read on further. So if you think of your article as something that's like pulling the reader through, you're guiding them along a journey with a rope tied round something. I don't know, I should have thought that analogy out really. So why do we do this?
00:01:46
Speaker
Are we doing it for Google or are we doing it for human beings? A good mindset for creating content is to remember you are creating it for human beings, but that good practice, this natural good practice is also very well understood by Google. So for the purpose of this, I'm going to ignore backlinks how
00:02:07
Speaker
faster your website is, all those other SEO things. I'm just going to talk about how you can write something that engages. Because the truth is, if you can engage your reader, all those other SEO things don't really matter so much.
Focus on Reader Intentions
00:02:21
Speaker
Let's get on with it. First of all, you need to make sure you are thinking about your reader's intent.
00:02:31
Speaker
The article that you're writing, is it designed to just hand over information? Here's a load of information. Is it designed to solve a problem? Is it designed to encourage the reader to take an action like maybe joining a mailing list or buying something or signing a petition? It can be anything. Give yourself a moment to think, what's the intent? What does my reader want from this? What, by the end of this article, will satisfy them?
00:03:01
Speaker
What will make them look at your brand kindly and think, I came to the right website today. Intent is really important. Next, relevance. If you're writing an article for, let's say, classic car website, wandering off into the realms of fantasy about the last holiday you had in Greece or something not connected to the article,
00:03:28
Speaker
isn't going to help make it more relevant. You might want to get across your personality and sometimes that's okay but on the whole it's worth remembering the Dale Carnegie thesis or theory and that's that other people don't care about you. I'm afraid unless you're writing a very personal blog then your reader doesn't care what the background
00:03:53
Speaker
the article is, what your personal feelings are in it. They don't, they just want the information. So keep it relevant.
Keyword Research and Strategy
00:04:01
Speaker
This is also important from an SEO perspective because if you've written 2000 words and the first 1000 words don't appear to have a connection to the main thread of the article, then it's not going to rank as well. Google's going to say, well, this article isn't the best answer to this problem that
00:04:18
Speaker
that searches are having because it wanders around all over the place. So keep it relevant. Research your keywords. If you're writing an article to rank for something specific, for a specific term, do your research. At the very least, go out and look at the other articles that already rank really highly. What sort of tone do they use? What sort of angle are they taking on it?
00:04:45
Speaker
We go and look at the articles already ranking for the keywords we're targeting because it kind of proves what Google is looking for. Google looks for something slightly different. Oh God, there's hundreds of different things that Google looks for. And they might treat your industry or niche, or niche if you're American, they might treat it differently to how they treat other industries. They might look for different things.
00:05:08
Speaker
ideal thing to do here is just to use SEMrush's content researcher, because then they just do it for you. In fact, the SEMrush way of doing it gives you a list of semantically linked keywords.
Balancing SEO and Human Appeal
00:05:21
Speaker
Now, all that means is they've looked at the top 10 ranking articles and they've said, look, all of these articles all use these words repeatedly in them. That's all semantically linked. Semantically linked just means it's connected to the main topic, basically.
00:05:38
Speaker
Other things that we're... Let's have a look at the goals. What are we aiming for with good content? What makes it good content from an SEO perspective? Well, first of all, good content from an SEO perspective is something that runs in parallel with good content from a human perspective. Remember, you're writing for humans, not an algorithm. But let's talk about the mechanical things. How can we look at a bit of content we've got
00:06:04
Speaker
and know how well it's performing. Well, first of all, look to see where it's ranked. That's an easy one. But you can also look at things like, how long are your viewers spending on the page? If you've written a 2000 word article and you go to Google Analytics, other analytics systems are available, believe it or not, they are like Yandex.
00:06:24
Speaker
If you go and look in Google Analytics and your readers are only staying on your page for 30 seconds and you've got a huge article, you're not capturing them. It's not engaging them. If they're staying on there for 10 or 15 minutes, that's quite amazing. Well done. It's worth looking at the metrics for your articles and go back over your old articles and do this as well, just to figure out how much time people are spending interacting or how they're interacting.
00:06:53
Speaker
With Google Analytics GA4, you can now judge how much people are scrolling through articles. So if you've written really nice articles that don't appear to be ranking as well as you think they ought to, go back through Google Analytics and figure out how much time people are spending. Long story short, if you've written long articles and people are spending an average of almost no time on the page, go back and look at your article.
00:07:19
Speaker
In fact, one thing that's not a bad idea, drop it into chat GPT or BARD or another AI and just say, why aren't people reading this article? What's wrong with it? And you might get some useful information. In fact, you almost definitely will. So why is engagement so important? First of all, we want people to love your brand. We want them to come to your website, go, I love the way these guys write. Again, want to tell
Successful Content Examples
00:07:46
Speaker
everybody. Want to tell the world.
00:07:48
Speaker
But also Google, because they've got their little Google Analytics code everywhere, they know how well people engage with your content. And they want to rank things at the top of their search results that people will engage with. Think of the Google algorithm as a child that really wants to please its parents.
00:08:11
Speaker
or a dog, that's better. It's like a dog. So your search term is like when you throw a ball for the dog. And Google is that dog running off and going, hey, I want to find the best ball. I want to bring back that ball and comes back and expecting a pat on the head. Google wants a little pat on the head for bringing you the best search results. The reality is they're doing that for money. But let's not focus on that too much for now. So I want to talk about a few different
00:08:38
Speaker
examples of really engaging content that I've seen and that I've been involved in creating. There is a really good website called madhr or mad-hr.co.uk. It's a client of us here at Yesseo and we guided them through writing many many articles but there's one article in particular that's really popular on their website
00:09:02
Speaker
And it's an article that answers a question. And that question is, what happens at the end of probation in a new job if my employer doesn't give me, oh, dear me, I can't remember off the top of my head. But it's around probation. It's a topic that the reader is going to be really engaged in. It's something really important to them on a human level. And we've been going back and revising and improving that article again and again and again. There's another top tip for you.
00:09:31
Speaker
Always go back to articles and update them. Google loves an update.
Recommended Reading
00:09:35
Speaker
It's really what they want to see. It shows that you're on the board. It shows you're authoritative. And it shows you know what you're talking about because you've had to keep going back and adding more juicy information. Another article, another article idea. Well, you can look at almost any article on the SEO website. We do research to see what questions people are asking, what challenges they're having. And then we write articles to match those.
00:10:01
Speaker
This is fairly standard practice for what we call inbound marketing. But if you want to dig deeper into this, I recommend a book called They Ask, You Answer. It's written by somebody called Marcus Sheridan. It's probably the best book on inbound marketing I've ever read. And all the advice in the book really perfectly echoes the sort of things you should be writing from an SEO perspective. So the concept of the book is think about the questions that your customers and your clients ask you during your sales process.
00:10:30
Speaker
They write articles to answer them. It's quite simple. It works for any industry. It doesn't matter what type of business you've got. Think about not always just objections, but what other questions do people ask? It could be, how does this work? Once I give you money, how does my car go faster? It could be anything. So write articles to those. They are, by default, good examples of engaging content.
Content Structure Tips
00:10:57
Speaker
Even if you do no keyword research, just create
00:11:01
Speaker
Articles that answer questions. It's really a good start. So how should you structure your content? Well, I'm not going to go into great deal of depth here, but start with an introduction that lays out what the person's going to discover. If you want to, give a little bit of history of the problem or whatever it is you're writing about. And then you need a conclusion at the end. But the middle bit, the really meaty bit, be generous with your knowledge.
00:11:31
Speaker
Trust your knowledge. Remember that you are an expert in what you're writing about. And just give it all away. Give away the farm. In the early days of the internet, there was a real problem with companies writing articles as if they didn't want to reveal their secrets. They didn't want to share their knowledge. Like, no, no, no one's ever going to come and give us money and hire us as clients if we just tell them
00:11:56
Speaker
how to do what it is they want to do, or if we just share all our knowledge, what need will there be for us? Absolute opposite of that is what actually happens. The more you share your knowledge, the more you are generous with your information, the more likely you are to get more clients. There's several really interesting reasons behind this. The first one is you're proving you know what you're talking about. Number two,
00:12:24
Speaker
People will follow your instructions, but they'll quite often get stuck. And when they get stuck, where do you think they're going to go and look for an expert? That person that wrote that brilliant article about just this. So just please, just be generous with your information.
Enhancing Engagement with CTAs and FAQs
00:12:40
Speaker
After your conclusion, add a call to action. After all, if you're watching this video or you're engaged in SEO for any reason, it's probably because you want the visitors to your website to do something. Don't be afraid to ask for it.
00:12:54
Speaker
Click here to sign up for the box, for our email list. Actually, even better, just put the sign up box there. There's another concept for another time, removing clicks. Say, click here to buy. Whatever it is you want them to do. Now, a little bonus bit of fairy dust to sprinkle on your article, add FAQs. There will be really simple three or four questions that you can add to the end of your article.
00:13:23
Speaker
that are frequently asked questions. And if you can't think of what they are, ask around your office, ask your team, or just go to Google and find out what is in that little box that says people also asked. Don't write really long answers. Keep them concise. If you've got WordPress, then use
00:13:45
Speaker
the Yoast FAQ schema thing or the rank math, just use schema so that Google understands it. That's the little sprinkling of magic fairy dust.
Effective Meta Descriptions
00:13:56
Speaker
Another little sprinkling of magic fairy dust, dust on top of dust, is to write a really good meta description. This is really important. It's not specifically a ranking signal, but
00:14:09
Speaker
If what we want to happen happens, and your article appears on the first page of Google, your meta description for the article is your little advertising bit of space. If you write something that pulls the people in to your article, and ultimately if more people click on your result than results above you in Google,
00:14:30
Speaker
Google will lift you up the rankings. Is there a way of going, hang on, I think we might have got it wrong. We put this result with number eight and more people clicked on it. So it should be higher and then they lift you up.
Conclusion and Audience Feedback
00:14:43
Speaker
So there you go. There is how to create engaging content, why engaging content is important, a rough layout for your engaging content, and some ideas for what to write about. I hope this has been useful for you. Please like and subscribe and comment. You can add comments.
00:15:02
Speaker
Let us know your techniques. Let us know your experience for creating content. I want to know more. Thank you ever so much for watching and or listening, depending on what platform you're on. And I just want to say thank you. Thank you for your time. Any questions? Let us know. I am signing off. I have been Andrew Laws from Yesseo. I will remain Andrew Laws from Yesseo. So all it remains for me to say is tutty bye.