Everyone involved with digital marketing wants to know the winning formula for attracting organic traffic to their website. Many considerations affect success, such as being original, relevant and focusing on your audience, but what are the key details?
Recently, Semrush compiled an extensive report analysing the effectiveness of different strategies to improve content performance. This article will focus on their four core findings to help you understand what elements of your content can be improved to increase your organic traffic.
1. Headlines
Your headline is the first chance you have to grab a visitor’s attention. It should give them an accurate indication of what they can expect. Remember that it also can represent your brand and tone.
Types of Headlines
Readers are often looking for instant relevant answers. Some headlines have proven to get more organic traffic. So, a title starting with “guide to…” may attract up to three times more traffic. Choose “guide to” or “how to” headlines to grab more shares and backlinks.
Length of Headline
Your Headline (H1) should be your hook, but what is the ideal length? It appears that SERPS favours shorter titles (fewer than seven words).
However, blog post headlines may perform better if made longer as people are drawn toward explanations and detail. You can optimise your blog headline by creating a shorter meta title for search and a longer one on the page itself.
Give Your Readers Information
Your headline should describe what a reader can expect from the content. Equally, your content must match up to the headline.
Matching your heading, keywords, and content will increase relevancy and improve your search engine performance, helping to drive organic traffic to your content.
Look at Me
As well as getting your reader’s attention, your headline needs to inspire them to want to learn more about the topic.
It’s all about your headline being tempting enough to encourage a reader to click through to your page to read more.
User Intent
Never forget your target audience. Are they looking to make a purchase, find out information or compare products?
Audience intent is an essential aspect of creating a headline that will focus on answering their query.
2. Content Structure
Heading tags are the correct way to structure your content and make it look good.
Using H1, H2, H3, and H4 tags allows your visitors to digest the content easily. It also encourages you to provide more detail on your chosen topic, which appeals to readers who want their search question answered in full.
Heading Depth
Heading depth measures the number of H tags in your content. A more complex structure (the presence of H1, H2, H3 and H4 tags) performs better.
It is a combination of SEO and content marketing that connects the technical use of tags. Using appropriately tagged subtitles will undoubtedly ensure the topic is explored in greater depth.
Make Use of Lists
Lists help break up your content and make it easier to read. Large bodies of text can be offputting.
Google seems to approve of lists, too, with text that includes one list per 500 words performing better. However, as a warning, you should not use too many lists as it can reduce the depth of information provided.
3. Include Images and Video
Visual content is valuable as it breaks up the text and looks appealing. It can also convey information quickly and help with engagement.
How much visual content you include will depend on your industry and audience, but it should not be neglected.
- Images – Using more than seven images in your content can attract 116% more organic traffic.
- Videos – Videos, especially short-form videos, can help to generate clicks. They also attract more backlinks.
4. Magic Word Count
Deciding what length your content should be to attract the most organic traffic is not an easy task. Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all approach that can be used.
Quality is undoubtedly critical, but presenting your content in a digestible way for your audience will be different for every business.
Instead, to learn how long your content should be, you need to focus on your audience and ask yourself the following questions:
- What do they want to know?
- How can I make my content top quality?
- How much information do they need to get their answer?
In general, longer articles rank higher, but you must consider what works for your industry and how you can present your answers in depth while always concentrating on producing quality content.
Are you looking to boost organic traffic with excellent content? Consider enlisting the help of Essex-based SEO & Web for your content writing requirements.
