Quality content – the Holy Grail for content marketers and SEOs around the world. But how does Google define ‘quality content’ and how do you capitalise on something that is seemingly quite subjective?
Ever since Hummingbird dropped in 2013, the quest for content marketers everywhere has been to find that balance between writing content for SEO and writing content for the end user.
Hummingbird was a big shift for content writers. No longer would we be optimising for specific keywords. Instead, we would be relying on Google’s algorithm to understand the meaning behind the words we were writing.
Ever since then, content marketers everywhere have been striving for that perfect recipe:
- Content Length
- Content Depth
- Topical Keywords
These three pillars are what ‘quality content’ is built on. The content you write needs to be well researched, identifying topical keywords that allow you to write a piece of content that answers a multitude of search queries.
Your content piece needs to have depth. The addition of topical keywords will certainly help with this and allow you to create a piece of content that covers the searcher’s intent in the most detail. That’s a sure fire way of ranking well.
Finally, content length. This is the one content marketers and SEOs still don’t seem to agree upon. We’ve seen recommendations for anywhere between 300 words to 2,500 words as the ideal length for a piece of content. Whilst it certainly appeared that the Hummingbird Algorithm wanted us to focus on longer pieces, the bottom line was they actually wanted more depth which doesn’t always equate to more words.
Researching keyword topics
Like all good SEO work, writing quality content starts with keyword research. The key is, finding topics worth talking about.
A recent blog post from Moz provided a great example of how to identify relevant topics to cover. First things first, identify a keyword that you are interested in ranking for. Plug this into Google as a search query and take a look at the top ten sites that are ranking for that term.
In our hypothetical situation, we want to rank for the term ‘things to do in auckland’. Here is what the current SERP (Search Engine Results Page) in our location looks like:
Nothing out of the ordinary here. The key part is the next stage. Manually go into each of the search results and identify the major topics that are covered in each of the pages.
Here are the topics covered by each of the sites:
#1 – ‘free things to do in auckland’, ‘things to do at night’, ‘things to do on a rainy day in auckland’
#2 – ‘getting around auckland’, ‘beaches’, ‘parks’, ‘islands’, ‘cruise’
#3 – ‘things to do in Auckland central’, ‘day trips’, islands’, ‘day cruises’, ‘beaches’, ‘museum’
#4 – ‘museum’, ‘cruise’, ‘parks’, ‘islands’, ‘auckland on the cheap’
#5 – ‘day trips’, ‘wine tasting’, ‘wildlife’, ‘top things to do’, ‘shopping’
#6 – ‘best free things to do in auckland’, ‘art gallery’, ‘library’, ‘parks’, ‘museum’, ‘waterfalls’, ‘beaches’, ‘comedy’
#7 – ‘cornwall park’, ‘ferry’, ‘restaurants’, ‘comedy’, ‘waterfalls’
#8 – ‘beaches’, ‘swimming’, ‘eating out’, ‘cruise’
#9 – ‘restaurants’, ‘bars’, ‘shopping’, ‘parks’, ‘art gallery’, ‘britomart’
#10 – ‘top things to do’, ‘museum’, ‘one tree hill’, ‘art gallery’, ‘bars’, ‘vineyards’, ‘parks’
This now gives you a comprehensive list of all the topics covered by the top ranking sites. We can see that the cornerstone content topics to cover for this content piece would include:
- Beaches – x3
- Parks – x5
- Museum – x3
- Islands – x3
- Cruise – x 4
- Free things to so in Auckland – x2
By producing a piece of content that covers all of these topics in depth, we should, theoretically, have the most comprehensive piece of content available that covers the widest range or related topics, satisfying the searcher’s intent.
Read more about this tactic in this excellent post by Jeff Baker.
This is a great way of identifying topics for your content pieces, however, it is time-consuming. If you are looking for a quicker way to research topics for a content piece, SEMrush has a very handy tool on their site that allows you to quickly research-related topics.
Their SEO Content Template allows you to plug in your target keywords and your target country. From there, it will then take those keywords, analyse the SERPs and make suggestions about the topics that are covered by the current pages ranking for those terms.
Pretty cool right?
Not only does it give you a list of related topics, it also makes suggestions about where to try and acquire backlinks, the optimal text length and a target readability score.
But there’s more!
A recent addition to the SEO Content Template is the ability to plug this in with Google Docs. The SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant is a nifty add-on for Google Docs which brings in those relevant topics, keyword length and other SEO suggestions as well as rating your readability score. You are given an overall score for your piece of content and you can see where improvements can be made, helping you to write more focused content pieces that cover all the topics that are most relevant to the target keywords.
Whilst you may be confident about the quality of the copy you are writing, this provides you with a really subjective sense check of whether your content is covering all the bases when it comes to the topics you want to rank for.
Writing new content or refreshing your old content
So, we’ve talked about ways of identifying topics to discuss in your content but one thing to really think about is whether to write a new piece of content or whether you would get more value out of updating a current piece of content, focussing on including a wider range of topics based on the research you have carried out.
We have found a lot of success with the recycling of older pieces of content that already rank for a target keyword(s) but could be performing much better so that’s where we are going to focus.
Again, we have found the best way to identify existing blog pieces that are ranking for a specific keyword or group of keywords is to use SEMrush. Moz’s Keyword tool also does a really good job with this, however here at Digital Hothouse, we like to have everything under one roof inside of SEMrush.
Simply type in your domain and head to the Domain Analytics Tab and the Positions report. From here you can use the filters to identify all the keywords you currently rank for that sit on page two (this is where we want to focus our efforts). You can also filter your URLs so you can see blog content only. We also included a minimum search volume of 200 as a filter but you can adjust this depending on the client and sector you are working in.
The results look a bit like this:
We ordered our results by search volume and we can immediately see there are some fantastic opportunities for us to ‘upgrade’ some of our existing blog posts and take advantage of some high search volume queries.
So what now? Follow this step by step guide:
1. Evaluate your existing content piece
Once you have identified these target keywords and content pieces, take the time to review the content pieces subjectively. Do they really cover this particular topic comprehensively? You can even plug an existing piece into Google Docs and run SEMrush’s SEO Writing Assistant over it to get a second opinion.
2. Identify the wider topics relevant to the target keyword
Once you have decided which pieces you want to ‘upgrade’ it’s time to plug your target keyword back into the SEO Content Template and see which related topics are uncovered. You can, of course, take a manual look at this if you have the time and go through the top ten results in the SERPs to identify the consistently recurring topics.
3. Re-write your content piece
We would recommend using Google Docs to re-write that original piece, focussing on those topics that appeared the most consistently in the top ten results. Once you are happy with the piece (and you have seen an increase in your overall content score), update the publish date and republish the piece. At this stage, we recommend fetching the page as Google. This means that you can request Google to immediately re-index the content piece and you should be able to see the rewards of your hard work reflected in the SERPs.
4. Outreach the content piece
Whether you outreached the piece first time around or not, make sure you do some relevant outreach second time around. Your content piece will now be much more comprehensive and you may even have introduced more up-to-date information into the piece that no one else has covered. SEMrush’s SEO Content Template will also give you some great suggestions on the sites that are most relevant to your piece so be sure to add them to your outreach list.
Make sure you keep a track of your start ranking and measure the impact of the changes you are making. Some of the changes will deliver immediate results whereas others may take a little longer, especially if you are relying on links to add authority to your piece.
Summary
Whilst this is not a sure-fire way of achieving better rankings, it is the most comprehensive approach to influencing one of Google’s ranking factors. Creating a new piece of content or updating an existing piece to add more topical depth is something that Google wants to see and something Google rewards. With the right research and good writing, you can start to see some big improvements to your rankings and drive more traffic to your site.
Content first published as a guest blog on Trusted Shops – 20 April 2018