How to Optimise Your Content for Search Engines

If you follow Embryo online or read any of our website content and blog, you’ll know that we’re a search engine marketing agency that loves content.

We don’t just love it for the sake of it or shout about the importance of content dozens of times a week because we’re a bunch of bookworms…

We love content because Google does. Therefore, it’s not only at the forefront of all of our minds, but it’s at the core of our strategies, too.

By now, you should understand that having good content on a website is a good thing. But, what makes content ‘good’?

In this blog, I’ll tell you how you can optimise your content writing based on the latest Google algorithmic changes (as of the time of writing in July 2020 – if you’re reading this in the future, hello from the past) – through utilising natural keywords from an understanding of search intent.

Natural keyword use…

There is a very common misconception inside and outside of the industry that keywords on websites and content have to be ‘shoehorned’ in for SEO purposes and that, in doing so, it makes the content – for want of a better word – trash.

This is completely incorrect.

If you are writing naturally towards the aim of answering a users search intent (which you should absolutely be doing), then the keywords will come naturally.

When writing this way- you’ll tend to do fairly well organically.

Google agrees.

When Google’s BERT algorithm update started rolling out in October of 2019 , Google doubled down on the content-first approach. Put simply, BERT is an update that allows Google’s algorithms to better understand user’s search intent and rank websites and content based on the context.

So, if you’re writing the way I mentioned before – you’ll be hitting the nail on the head in terms of the latest Google algorithm.

Understand your audience, and what they are wanting

In all areas of marketing, it is crucial (if you want to do well) to utilise empathy to not only understand the users you are marketing to but to understand what it is they are wanting.

This is particularly important for search engine marketing and content marketing.

So, how do you do that?

• Discover which keywords your audience is using when searching.
• Discover how to write content that naturally includes these keywords.

Audience research is essential. And, if you cannot get this straight from somebody in conversation, you may need to resort to a more data-led approach.

You can even create something as simple as a Google Form to ask your audience directly.

Fortunately, there are a variety of online tools that you can use to do this kind of research for you, which I recommend if you want to speed up the process and/or are not a fan of the manual research approach.

However, whichever approach you take to research and understanding your audience, it is an essential step before putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) in order to include keywords naturally to optimise your content for SEO without feeling like you are forcing it and shoehorning keywords in.