While user friendly content helps persuade and engage customers, it also has the added benefit of letting search engines know what your business is about. Although the days of writing and producing content for the likes of Google has long gone, if you focus purely on keywords and forget about the user it’s just not going to work today.
It’s all about quality content that your visitors and customers will want to read and is of value to them, here’s a few ideas on how to create engaging user friendly content
1. Use Variations of Your Keywords
Forget keyword stuffing and using the exact same words 10 times, but you do need to keep in mind relevant words that will make the content relevant to the users search and SEO friendly. Search engines now have the ability to understand variations of words which benefits you and users, for example – ‘social media course’, ‘social media training course’ and ‘training course for social media’.
2. Create Evergreen Content
When producing content, it’s good to keep in mind how Google works, which is to return relevant results. When they deliver the right answer to a query they are doing their job right, that’s where evergreen content comes in.
Evergreen content focuses on longevity, so will be just as relevant in two or more years as it is now. Google will continue to deliver evergreen content and it can rank well if users are finding it useful by clicking and engaging on that page.
3. User Experience
Creating content for ‘search results’ is usually based on what content is on the page. When you create content for a great user experience you need to focus on the impact the page has on a reader too.
Google’s web crawler measures how quickly a person clicks to your website page, how many people click on a page, how long they spend on that page, how far they scroll on that page, and where they go after viewing that page. All of this information available through Google Analytics, lets you see your website through your visitors’ eyes and whether your content is compelling them to click on more and stay on your site.
4. Use a Readable Style
User friendly content must be easy to digest and in a style that is suitable for your target audience. Make sure you write short paragraphs so not to intimidate readers with long sections of text. Within your paragraphs, keep sentences short and don’t try to impress by using big words.
Breaking content up also helps, use headings (H1 and H2 tags), along with bullet points if you have a lot to get across. Don’t forget to include images, we process an image faster than text but it also breaks up the page.
5. Create Shareable & Link Worthy Content
User experience and SEO should work together, and if you can let your visitors have a positive experience using your website or reading your content they are much more likely to:-
- Visit more pages
- Interact on your social media
- Share your products/service
- Link to your website
6. Video Marketing
Video captures viewers faster than written content but you still need to keep it user friendly. Ensure that as well as grabbing attention, it also educates and entertains at the same time. The growth of video within social and mobile content marketing makes video a great option. Even the smallest of budgets and an inexpensive video camera or smartphone can go a long way.
7. Share, Share, Share
Once you have carefully crafted your content, its time to get marketing through your website, email marketing, blog and social media networks. Whatever form your content is; a blog post, infographic or a video, content marketing is all about getting your message out there to attract and retain customers.
8. Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Organising your content marketing is not only helpful in order to provide focus but lets you see what works well and what you can do better. A simple spreadsheet is often enough and you can link this to events, offers and instore promotions you have and create a co-ordinated marketing plan.
Have you created user friendly content that made you stand out from the crowd? Then we’d love to hear from you either in the comments below or on our Twitter page.