Make These 3 Easy Changes to Your Content to Crush Your SEO

With the big recent Google update that happened at the beginning of August, Google made a dramatic shift toward what they had been claiming for years. SEO the way it has been done in the past, focusing on key phrases, is mostly dead.

Adam White

Founder of SEOJet

 
Based on the research that we have done at SEOJet, No. 1 ranked pages after the big update had 60-90 percent of their backlinks with no reference to any key phrase in their anchor text.

In other words the backlinks don’t focus on keywords.

So, how does Google really determine what a page is about?

With the page content.

What this means for you coincides with what Google has been telling SEOs around the globe for many years: Focus on really in-depth, good content.

Because we work with so many SEOs at SEOJet, I get to see first hand the mistakes that others make with their content.

There are three common mistakes that are easy to fix and can make all the difference in your SEO efforts.

1. Your Content Isn’t Good Enough To Rank In Google

 
One thing you have probably noticed is that as you do Google searches, more and more pieces of long-form content rank. In a recent study done, page one results on Google have on average about 1800 words of content. In other words, Google loves good, long, content.

This principle goes to the extreme in the SEO industry where there are guys that have upwards of 10k words of content in a single post. It really is ridiculous but the fact of the matter is they rank really well.

If you want to beat your competitors in the SEO game then you need to create long-form, educational content, and you need a lot more of it than your competitors have.

But the content on your own site needs to be four or five-star, meaning you want your target audience to read the content and love it so much they feel compelled to thank you for it or comment on the post or share it.

It needs to be that good.

1a. Pick 1-3 Keywords

 
When you create your long form content, pick one to three related key phrases that you want to target in the article and write the content around those keywords.

For example, I recently wrote a piece of content like this on my blog at SEOJet called SEO Backlink Strategy That Works Like Magic With SEOJet. I am targeting the key phrases “backlink strategy”, “backlink strategy that works”, and “SEO backlink strategy”. You can see from the title of my blog post that I have all three of those key phrases in the title.

I wrote over 3,000 words in that article, trying to make it as detailed as possible so anyone who was looking for a proven SEO backlink strategy would benefit from the content.

I don’t get too concerned about using those exact key phrases a bunch of times in the article itself; I just write the article and use the phrases when it is natural to do so.

My main focus for the content is the benefit of the readers, but I do write around key phrase topics.

2. Your Guest Posts Don’t Have Enough Meat

 
Being the founder of SEO backlink software, I get to see very closely what people in the industry are doing when they do their SEO.

One of the biggest commonalities between almost all SEOs is that when they create content for a guest post, they almost always write 400-600 words. There are hundreds of thousands of guest posts out on the internet with 400-600 words of content.

Why is this a problem?

The first reason this is a problem is because this leaves an easy footprint for Google. If I were Google I would simply go look for articles that have 400-600 words of content and have at least one external link. Then, I would discount the SEO value of that page.

Second, it is very difficult to create content that has any type of substance to it in 500 words. It will never be the type of content Google counts as quality content. So, how much SEO juice is a 500 words article passing to you?

This is why any time I write a guest post I start at 750 words but typically will write 1,000+ words in the end. I want the content to be awesome so that as I build some links to that guest post it will pass great SEO juice to my site.

You can look at this article you are reading now as a good example of how to do a guest post that has SEO value. The content I am presenting has depth, is informative, and is well over 1,000 words.

3. Your Guest Post Content Is Unrelated to Your Link

 
When you are writing content for a guest post you need to get into the mind of Google. What would the big G think about the link to your website that you placed in the article if someone from their quality team actually read the article?

Does your link have justification being there?

Does it make sense to link that certain page?

If you can honestly answer yes to both of those questions, then you have created the right content for that link.

For example, let’s say you have an SEO client that is a plumber in Phoenix, Arizona, and you have written the most amazing step-by-step guide to unclogging a toilet for them.

In order to promote this amazing new article, you want to write a guest post and link back to that page. The best way to write the article for the guest post is to go back to the original amazing unclog the toilet guide and use information from that guide in your guest post.

Then, linking out to it makes perfect sense because you have written your guest post article using that guide as a source.

If instead you write a guest post about something totally unrelated to unclogging a toilet, it won’t look natural to have a link to your unclog a toilet article in the guest post.

4. (Bonus) Product Pages Have Thin or Duplicate Content

 
I know I said you only had to do three things to your content to crush your SEO, but who doesn’t like bonus content?

One other common problem I see (especially with e-commerce sites) is very thin or even duplicate content on the product pages.

Many e-commerce sites are drop-shipping sites, meaning they sell the same products as a thousand other stores. And the majority of those stores just take the manufacturer’s product description and copy and paste it onto their page.

How do you differentiate yourself from all of those other stores selling the same blue widget?

You create some original, clever, unique product descriptions and add way more helpful content to the product pages than your competitors have.

That way Google will look at the thousand blue widget pages as being the same and then yours as having more and better content. Who do you think is going to have the advantage?

Conclusion

 
If you make these four simple content changes I have outlined in this article you will be ahead of most “professional” SEO agencies and consultants giving your clients the edge they need to beat out their competition in Google.

Author Bio

 
Adam White is the founder of SEOJet, backlink management software that helps marketers build amazing backlink profiles. He has been an SEO professional since 2002. In his spare time he wrote and directed a feature film. He lives in Arizona with his wife and 6 children.

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