SEO and Content

The most successful content is developed with its audience and their needs in mind. Does your content offer something of value? Is it built to earn more than the first click?

The helpful content update is Google’s latest effort to ensure users see more original, helpful content written by people, for people in the SERPs. This means every site’s content should have a primary purpose or focus.

1. Focus on people-first content: Try not to stray too far away from your main topic.

2. Avoid creating content for search engines first: Provide sufficient answers to user questions. Consider whether your users will leave feeling as if they’ve learned enough about a topic to achieve their goal.

“Don’t get too caught up in the competition to rank,” said Laura King Edwards, Wray Ward’s content marketing director. “Remember, it’s not just about getting traffic to your website. Effective content is uniquely positioned to provide a solution to the user’s challenge. In other words, have you done enough to keep their attention?”

Google is leaning into real expertise more than ever before, rewarding sites for content that reflects insightful analysis and original research, and is written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well. Channeling E.E.A.T. — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — can help earn wins for competitive terms and topics.

In Google’s eyes, the real subject matter experts:

• Make the purpose of their content clear

• Update their content regularly (publishing fresh content, updating old stats, checking for dead links, and more)

• Link to and from high-quality sources

• Consider multiple viewpoints to establish trust

With the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and resources, remember that it isn’t enough to address problems your business is uniquely positioned to solve. Now, it’s more important than ever to do this in your brand’s unique voice. (We’re closely monitoring the evolution of AI at Wray Ward. Stay tuned for additional content on this subject and what it means for marketing.)

Technical SEO and UX

If you keep SEO principles and content best practices in mind during the content strategy and design phases of a new website, you will avoid a lot of rework in the future.

Technical SEO is a subcategory of search engine optimization that involves optimizing your website to help search engines crawl and index your pages correctly. A technically sound site is critical to ensure your website is easy for users to navigate. Focusing on your core web vitals and overall site experience, which includes making sure the site is mobile-friendly, helps search engines crawl your site and rank it in search results to begin with. It’s also beneficial for UX.

“Making your content findable and having a clean look and feel are really important in order to keep users on your site,” said Emily Hastings, digital content strategist at Wray Ward. “Often, we say that we want to ‘spoon feed’ content to users, so they don’t have to search for long to find what they’re looking for.

“Anticipating users’ wants and needs on a website is critical to their overall experience with your brand and will ultimately improve your site’s ranking on Google.”

Site Structure

Site structure plays a big role in UX. When a user lands on any one of your pages, you want to make sure they know where they are on your website and that Google can efficiently crawl your pages.

For example, while offering PDF downloads of important information is convenient, putting the content in PDFs doesn’t give Google the opportunity to crawl that content and boost your search rankings. If you plan to offer PDF downloads for resources, consider also having an on-site version or landing page that allows Google to see all of the valuable content within those downloads, right there on the page.

Investing in UX will help your site perform better as a whole, which affects how search engines will rank your website. Implementing good UX practices will also help people easily find the content they are looking for once they land on your site.

ADA Compliance

A word about ADA compliance: Your website should also be easily accessible for all users, which means it should comply with accessibility standards such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. Following these SEO best practices will help put your website on the right path:

• Compelling title tags/meta descriptions

• Easy readability

• Descriptive alt text for images and captions

• Video captions and transcriptions

• Proper heading and subheading structure

• Linked anchor text

What does it all mean for home and building brands?

Many factors are important to the success of your site. While SEO takes time to bear fruit, home and building brands that give it the love and care it deserves will reap rewards. At the end of the day, creating quality content that meets your target audience’s needs will help propel your brand to success.

Want to learn more about creating content with purpose? Check out my tips to supercharge your SEO game.