SEO Content: This Guide Will Help You Create Convincing Website Content

The internet presence is a company's stage - here, it is important to select, deploy, and present content skillfully. The aim is always to answer the questions of the users and provide them added value - but the search engines also have some demands. Successful SEO content meets the requirements of visitors and search engines alike.

But what actually makes up SEO content and what should be kept in mind when optimizing it? Our guest author Lisa Karasch goes into the formats and provides you with tips and tools to assist you.

What is SEO content?

The term SEO content (German for search engine optimized content) is defined by the content such as texts and images that are made available on a website. The aim is to appear in the search results for certain keywords. Depending on the search query, various result formats can be displayed to best answer the searcher's questions.

How is good SEO content defined?

Good SEO content puts the searchers and their search intention in the spotlight. When creating content, you should always be aware that you are creating it for your users and not for the search engine. Behind every search query are people who are trying to answer a question or solve a problem. Your content should help with this. The search engine aims to provide a suitable solution for the questions. The better your website can be read, interpreted, and processed, and the better the content fits the question, the more likely it is that the content will be displayed for a suitable search query. An important point of reference for this, for example, are keywords that can be placed in texts, image descriptions, meta-elements, and other areas.

A simple search for the term "baking bread" shows how important SEO content can be for your topics. It is worth researching which answers the search delivers and which competitors are represented here. You should also check how detailed the pages are built. You can use this initial assessment as a reference for which answers your pages should provide.

Well-prepared SEO content can be read by the search engine and displayed appropriately for the search query.

So that Google can better index the pages, for example, there is the possibility of storing certain page types - such as for recipe, job, event, and product pages. Then Google often presents the results differently, so your answers can appear before the actual organic "blue links" and stand out. With the guidelines from Schema.org and Structured-Data, your developers can define the page types in the used content management system and afterwards check with a test tool from Google. Afterwards, the content team and your SEO content writers ensure that the content is researched, created, and published. After a website has been online for a while, you should regularly audit the content to see what improvements can be made. Because continuous content optimization is just as important as creating helpful content to ensure quality.

What types of SEO content are there?

There are four major content areas:

• Website texts
• Images and graphics
• Videos
• Audio, e.g. podcasts

It's important to know: There isn't just Google, but also other search engines whose requirements you need to keep in mind. YouTube is also a search engine - in this case, however, for videos. Therefore, it is important, for example, to choose description texts and titles specifically so that searchers on this platform are shown the right videos. The various content formats can be integrated specifically on your website to offer the user added value.

Why should you optimize websites for search engines?

There is no question that is not asked - at least in the search engine. Every day, we use Google privately and professionally. A single website can rank for many different keywords and generate organic traffic. This traffic is free compared to Google Ads - i.e. paid traffic. So the search engine plays cost-effective leads on your website. However, your content must be optimized for search engines and fit the search query to be displayed high up in the rankings. This is associated with long-term work, a thought-out SEO strategy and continuous optimization.

Onpage Optimization

Search engine optimization refers to two major areas: on-page and off-page optimization. With On-Page Optimization you work on all points related to the website to improve the ranking. The goal is to provide an excellent User Experience - i.e. a website that loads quickly, has a catchy user guidance, and delivers appropriate SEO content to answer the search intention. These are tailor-made contents that stick to the pulse of the target group and e.g. assets like whitepapers and webinars that offer added value to your users. The combination of user experience and contents ensures that both the technical performance of the website and the contents convince.

Offpage Optimization

The Off-Page Optimization affects all measures that you can carry out outside of your website. This is about promoting and spreading your SEO content. Present yourselves as experts in your field: With link building you ensure that external websites refer to your content. Search engines consider backlinks particularly important and prefer websites with a good backlink profile. With a regular backlink audit you check which websites already link to your SEO content and what quality they have. Links from social networks - so-called social signals - can also have a positive impact on the off-page potential.

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Use text as SEO content

Humans are lazy and no one wants to read boring texts. Still: Texts are among the most important SEO contents of the website. Here it is worth writing in a convincing, understandable, and goal-oriented way. Highlight the benefits of your product or service and research the questions the users have to answer them specifically. The optimization of your content extends over several points.

• Keyword Research: The Keyword Research provides a starting point for writing. What are your users looking for? What questions do they have? What is the goal of the search query? You can determine and categorize this in advance using various Keyword Research Tools, like. Afterwards, you integrate these keywords and search phrases into your website and SEO content. It is best to define a focus keyword and save it for each individual page, so you don't compete with yourself later. Secondary keywords or synonyms that semantically match your focus keyword will support you in writing.

• Headlines: Place keywords and search phrases prominently in your headlines. The search engine recognizes the headline structure (H1, H2, H3 etc.) and reads it specifically to better classify and structure the website contents. The headline structure gives you a kind of grid to follow.

• Write SEO text: With the headlines, you structure your text into meaningful sections that make it easier for you to write SEO texts. Research how long well-ranking content for your search phrases are on average and what content they cover. So you have to write as much as possible and as little as necessary to be able to compete on page one. Useful external links to trustworthy sources help to support your claims in the text with expert knowledge. Lists and tables help you to present the textual content clearly and to present your visitors with the SEO content differentiated.

• Fill Page Information: In the background, you can make some settings so that search engines can better classify your pages and texts. This starts with the URL of your page: Use, if possible, the focus keyword and keep it short. In the meta-title and meta-description, you ideally include important keywords, as these are bolded in the description and draw attention. However, Google and other search engines can also display their own versions for meta-title and meta-description.

The search query is displayed by the search engine in bold in the results.

Use images as SEO content

No text without images - the eye is known to eat with. Graphics, illustrations, and images offer you the opportunity to visually enhance your website and loosen up the content. Furthermore, the images can appear in the image search and thus guide users to your website. Infographics also offer a high backlink potential as they clearly present complex facts. In creating visual SEO content, you should again adhere to some guidelines.

• File names: Instead of leaving it at IMG1234.jpg, you should rather choose the file name appropriately and incorporate your focus keyword or a synonym. For this, use only lowercase letters, no spaces (rather hyphens), no special characters, and no umlauts. The file name plays an important role in image search and ranking of images and therefore directly affects the placement of your SEO content. An example could look like this: beautiful-file-name.jpg

• File sizes: Although the internet is largely expanded and fast, the search engines pay attention to a low loading time of the website. Therefore, you should compress file sizes for graphics. Make sure not to lose any quality. Try new file formats like JPEG 2000 or HEIF to keep the file size smaller. Talk to your web developers if the WebP format is used.

• Image caption: It is important not to simply describe the image, but rather to provide explanatory information. Here you can also go into the topic of the page and cleverly place keywords and search phrases.

• Background text of the image: The text around the graphic is carefully examined by the search engines so that the graphic can be better classified semantically. So you should make sure that the text and headings near the graphic are semantically relevant.

• Alt-Tag: Also known as an alternative text - this is not necessarily visible to the users. It was developed for visitors with a visual impairment who cannot see the actual image. Therefore, you should formulate a short description and include important keywords here. If the image cannot be loaded, the alternative text is displayed.

• Image Title: If you hover over a graphic with the mouse pointer, you often see an inserted image title. This should be kept short and ideally not exceed 40 characters. The attribute is used to describe the image in the source code. Here, too, you can insert important search phrases or keywords.

Use videos as SEO content

Videos are a way to explain complex content simply and keep users on your site longer. They can be processed by the brain easier than text. It is important that the video content convinces already after a few seconds so that the users do not scroll on. Videos can also be used on social media and YouTube. YouTube is the most important platform for SEO measures around your video content as it is the most common video platform and also a subsidiary of Google. Here, it's about getting a better ranking on the platform. But the YouTube videos also appear in the Google video search, as this example for the search phrase "make noodle dough yourself" shows.

Video contents can be directly selected in the search.

In addition, you save storage space when you upload the videos to YouTube and then embed them on your website. This way you can ensure that the speed of your website is not negatively affected. To get your videos ranked better by the search engines, there are also tips here that you can consider for SEO content regarding video.

• Video title: The title shows your visitors what the video is about. Choose it concisely and appropriately, so everything important is said.

• Video description: In the description, you can further textually elaborate on the content of the video. On YouTube, the description box is important for this. The descriptive texts are read by search engines and offer a good opportunity to incorporate important keywords into your SEO content. Hashtags can also be used here to generate more reach. This will suggest matching and similar videos to the users on the platform directly. In addition, you can add links to your website to provide the viewers with further information.

• Resolution: Of course, the video should not be pixellated - quality convinces. However, it is not necessary to upload a very high-resolution format with a high file size. A conventional HD resolution is perfectly sufficient. If you host the video on YouTube, the platform provides the video in various versions - depending on what the bandwidth of your users is currently. This is supposed to ensure a loading time that is as fast as possible.

• Tags: Video tags help you and YouTube assign the video to appropriate categories. Only use as many as necessary - they should match your video content as best as possible, so here up to ten tags are enough.

By the way: For YouTube SEO there are special YouTube SEO tools, which support you in optimizing your video content for the search engine.

Use audio as SEO content

Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular - Google has also recognized this and therefore offers the possibility to present audio content clearly in the search. This gives you more chances to upgrade your SEO content with audio formats.

Google gives a podcast view if relevant information is available.

A well-thought-out page structure for your podcasts is a sensible starting point. This can, for example, consist of a landing page for your podcast and a respective subpage for an episode. A possible structure could be the following:

• Landing page: www.your-website.com/name-of-the-podcast/
• Episode 1: www.your-website.com/name-of-the-podcast/name-episode-1/
• Episode 2: www.your-website.com/name-of-the-podcast/name-episode-2/

After that, everything follows the described SEO content scheme: You write a suitable text for the podcast description, which among other things contains important keywords and select the title as appropriate as possible. Google Podcasts lists individual episodes in a standardized format. For this, you must follow the instructions of the Google Podcast Manager and provide the necessary information on your page - this includes an RSS feed with the podcast info, a supported audio format, and a podcast image.

Tools that help in creating SEO content

At the beginning, there is the topic finding - because this determines which keywords and search phrases are relevant for you and your target group. Ask colleagues from sales for important topics and first carry out a comprehensive market analysis. Then various tools, such as Quaro

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Tools for keyword research

The standard for keyword research is the solution from Google itself. The Google Keyword Planner provides you with the current data directly from the search engine, which you can use for the creation of SEO content. Search volume, CPCs, and trends can be seen at a glance. Anyone who does not need more than these essential features is well served by this.

The Google Keyword Planner shows all relevant information clearly and suggests further ideas to you.

Google automatically suggests alternatives or other interesting topics. However, those who want to create keyword clusters and conduct competitive analyses will not get around other providers. These offer more functions such as additional keyword suggestions of the category "question".

Another tool, especially for beginners, is simpler to use: UberSuggest. This makes it easy to find keyword ideas, as this tool makes a variety of alternative suggestions. You also have the option to let yourself be inspired by the SEO content of your competitors, as these are directly displayed for the researched search terms.

The content ideas at Ubersuggest help you get started.

In addition, Ubersuggest gives you the chance to take a closer look at your competition and slightly examine the organic traffic. The tool, for example, reveals the top SEO pages of a domain and breaks down which keywords attract particularly many organic calls to the site.

Reviews and information on other Keyword Research Tools can be found on OMR Reviews.

Tools for text creation

Many SEO Analysis Tools offer, among other things, features for text creation. This includes XOVI. The tool is an SEO all-rounder and also helps with the SEO content creation. In addition to keyword research, you can use it to check your texts and pages for quality and various guidelines. The WDF*IDF analysis, for example, helps with this. This determines how often search terms occur in a text in relation to the total number of words. The result is then viewed in relation to the total number of found documents - i.e. websites. So you can find out if a search term is mentioned often enough on your page, or if your competition possibly uses more terms.

With XOVI, you can check SEO texts with the WDF editor or perform a WDF*IDF analysis for pages.

On OMR you can find more tools for writing SEO texts, so you can present your users with successful SEO content.

To optimize the meta titles and meta descriptions on your pages, Seobility offers a practical function. The SERP snippet generator shows you what the pages would look like in the search results and points out to you too long titles and descriptions. 

The SERP snippet generator helps in the precise creation of meta-title & -description.

To ensure that the search engines use your proposed titles and descriptions, it is important to adhere to the correct length. When regularly checking SEO content, you should therefore control the meta-elements and provide the necessary information to the search engine.

In addition, Seobility offers you the option of taking a closer look at individual URLs in the SEO check. Here, the tool provides useful tips with which you can further improve the text content on the site or optimize the headline structure.

The content of your SEO texts is checked by Seobility.

The SEO check also alerts you to technical errors that you can solve with your developer team to improve the page speed, for example. The tool also shows if image titles or alt tags are missing that you can easily write yourself. Therefore, you upgrade your graphic SEO content and provide the search engines with all important information.

Reviews and information on other SEO Content Tools can be found on OMR Reviews.

Tools for SEO content monitoring

Once your content is online, monitoring and regular optimization is essential. For this, too, the different providers of SEO tools have many solutions. As a rule, different projects can be set up - e.g. for a website and a blog - that you can then fill with keywords to track them. With XOVI there is the particularly practical ranking comparison, which allows you to represent the placements of your important keywords in comparison to the competition. The report also directly shows with which URL you appear to the keyword in the search results. This allows you to check whether your focus keywords really unfold their potential.

The XOVI ranking comparison shows you at a glance how your most important keywords are positioned.

With this method, you see if your SEO content performs well compared to the competition. If there is still potential for improvement for important search terms, you can tackle this.

Another monitoring task is the content gap analysis. With this, you can determine whether your competition possibly provides content that is not present on your site. If you also offer these services or products, you can include the gaps in your content plan.

With XOVI, two domains can be compared to compare SEO content. 

You not only have the option to compare yourself with your top competitors: You can also compare two competitors and thus check which content both provide and where there are gaps between them and you. This puts you one step ahead of the competition in creating SEO content.

Now you can get started: You have a first overview of the individual facets around the topic of SEO content. This has set the first step towards high-performance websites. Now it's time to create, monitor, and optimize your website content. In the OMR Academy you can find many more tips on online marketing and content creation.