It's 2023 and content marketing is still one of the best ways of digital marketing. But with that said, it is important to know what has changed and what has remained the same. Search engines, and Google in particular, are always rolling out updates to their search algorithms in an attempt to rank web pages fairly. With Google’s August and December updates, a lot changed for content marketing. Now in 2023, the updates have fully rolled out, and SEO experts have a better idea of how to create content in line with these updates.
In this article, we will go over some best practices for creating content that conforms to the new updates. Applying these best practices will help your content to rank high in the SERPs. So, now let’s get into the nitty-gritty and see what some of these practices are.
Create Content Targeting Proper Keywords
One thing that has not changed is keyword research. You still need to do keyword research and find out which ones are best suited for your brand. A good strategy you can apply here is the “hub and spoke” method.
In the Hub and Spoke method, you create content centered around a very high-volume keyword. This keyword is related to the topic which you want to create exposure around. Then you create content related to the long-tailed and LSI versions of this word. This is called supporting content.
The supporting content provides authority to the main content, which ultimately improves its ranking. This is just one method of creating content that requires extensive keyword research. The point is that no matter what kind of content you create, you do need to conduct keyword research. Proper keyword targeting is still very important in 2023.
Analyze Your Audience and Cater to Their Demand
Apart from keyword research, you also need to spend some time doing audience research. This is necessary because search engines prefer to rank content higher if more people interact with it. That is only possible if the content is helpful to the audience, and provides a solution to their problems. To create such content, it is a must to know what problems are plaguing your audience and how can your brand solve them.
Audience research is done to create buyer personas. These are profiles that help you to segment your audience according to their likes, dislikes, demographics, and even geographical location. This information is used to create content that caters to specific personas, which leads to more conversions. Leverage an essay writer to streamline the creation of targeted content for your buyer personas, ensuring that your messaging resonates effectively with each segmented audience, ultimately driving higher conversion rates.
The most common way of conducting audience research is to check your own platforms and observe user behavior. Reading their comments, and feedback also provides a lot of insight into their needs and requirements.
Ensure That Your Content is Easy to Digest
Some things are still the same old and have not changed at all. You still need to create content that is easy to understand. You can't write anything too complex if you want your content to get the best possible reception. Thus, when creating and editing your content, you should take as much care as possible to ensure that the content is readable and easy to understand.
To achieve that, you can:
- Keep your sentences short;
- Use simple, everyday vocabulary;
- Write short paragraphs.
Alternatively, you can also utilize an online paraphrasing tool. An online paraphrase can automatically improve the readability of the given text by using a variety of techniques. Some of them include synonym exchange, rephrasing, and structural changes as well.
You can check out the following links for some good paraphrasing tools:
- paraphraser.io
- editpad.org/tool/paraphrasing-tool
- app.wordtune.com/editor
These are some of the most useful paraphrasing tools available that can help you improve the readability of your content.
Keep Things Concise to Avoid Wasting the Audience’s Time
One thing that has always been an issue with respect to content marketing is the reader’s lack of time. People are busy, and they have too many things vying for their attention. To expect them to sit down and read long-form content without getting distracted is impractical.
So, content writers have to keep this in mind when they are creating their content. They have to keep things concise so that the reader does not get bored. Of course, there is a delicate balance to strike here, as too much conciseness leads to incomplete knowledge. Such content is ultimately useless and bad for ranking.
The easy way of creating concise content is to create your content as you normally would. And then simply run the draft through an online summarizing tool. Most summarizing tools available today are pretty good at creating really good summaries. Many of them also let you control the length of the created summary. So, you can easily make sure that the content is not too short or too long.
Some great summarizing tools you can use are linked below:
- summarizer.org
- anyword.com/text-summarizer
- chat.openai.com
With these AI summarizers, you can easily create concise articles without sacrificing information.
Ensure that Your Content Fulfills E.E.A.T Guidelines
One new thing that has been added is an extra “E” in Google E.A.T guidelines. E.A.T stands for:
- Expertise;
- Authority;
- Trustworthiness.
The extra “E” stands for “Experience.” The experience guideline has been added to combat the influx of AI-generated content made for ranking only. As we already know that search engines aim to provide useful and helpful content for humans.
AI-generated content is not necessarily bad. But the thing is that most people use it with bad intentions. They try to create a ton of content quickly and get it to rank high. However, AI-generated content is unable to provide any “experience” the way a human writer can. Human writers can provide credentials, and even narrate their experiences to show that they have used a product or service. Google can detect this and raises the rank of content if it checks all the other marks too. So, keep this in mind when creating content and use your “experience” to your advantage.
Conclusion
These are some of the best practices that content writers need to apply to content creation in 2023. Of course, these are not all the best practices, and there are plenty more things to learn in content writing. The field of marketing is always changing and expanding, so there are always more things to learn. To stay up to date on the latest marketing trends in 2023, read our blog to learn more.
As far as content writing goes, as long as you keep the advice of this article in mind, you will surely find success. You should also remember that content marketing takes a few months to show results, so do not be discouraged by the apparent lack of improvement in ranking.
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