When it comes to owning a small business, what do you think is the hardest part to do? As a part of a team that provides SEO services for business owners, I think the hardest part is that when I know I’m creative but I have to balance my creative works with the optimisation process, especially for search optimisation. Sometimes I would think that I have to limit my creativity in order to make it work well with the SEO progress. It turns out; it is not true at all. In fact, I can be all creative as I want without limiting my creativity, but can still work well with SEO. Want to know how I got rid of my self-doubts and went all out to make my content balanced with SEO while putting my creativity to a full use? Keep reading this article to find out!
In order to make high quality content, the first thing you have to do is know the fact that you have to handle text optimisation, make it a perfect fit for your audience’s needs and of course, stay creative. The balance between these processes may be hard even for some content writers, but when it is done properly; you can get better results both for your SEO and marketing efforts. There are crucial parts in making that happen, pay attention to these steps if you want to learn how to do it right.
Research your audience; what they like and what they avoid like the plague
Even when you come up with ideas, you still have to know whether it is useful or not for your audience. Do they need it? Is it going to be a waste of time? Is the topic out of option? The best way to get the answer is to gather as much as information as you can and a discussion room is something you need to look at. You can gain information straight from your audience through good sources, such as:
- Quora
- Other social media forum discussions
Those channels above are useful for gathering information easily. While you won’t immediately get ideas from those forums, at least you can collect what preference your audience likes, their interests and what they think about it from even a single topic. From this, you can then turn the information you’ve got into new ideas that you can explore further.
Another way to conduct a research on your audience is through monitoring external blogs and other media. Find out what they are talking about your chosen topic. Also, you can adjust the information to the current trending topic and see if there is any potential for new ideas.
Check your competitors’ performance
They say anyone can be a teacher. Yes, you can learn from anyone, including from your competitors. There are things you can compare with your competitors. You can look at their content topic, their marketing strategy, and how well the content result goes. You can also read their articles and find what topics get most of the links and social shares. From that, you can make an outline and adjust it to your company’s style. If it is relevant, then you can re-create ideas based on that.
Make sure your content is adjusted to SEO requirements
This is the most important part. There are things you need to pay attention to in order to make good content in compliance with SEO rules and guidelines:
- Readability: See if the text in your content can be easily understood by your readers or not.
- Number of words: There are certain requirements in calculating the number of words in your text based on the average word count of your competitors’ content.
- Image and video size: If your content contains some images or videos, then make sure the size is adjustable to your website and SEO-friendly.
- Title: This is important for making first impressions.
- The authenticity: Authenticity is very important for a business. When you have a company, you have to be unique. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to stand out, but you have to have your own originality that differentiates your quality from your competitors. Therefore, avoid plagiarism at all cost, as it will also affect your credibility in Google’s “eyes.”
That’s how you balance creativity with SEO. Having a business is often connected with creativity and ideas and not all ideas can be a match to your SEO process. However, if you can maintain this progress by doing these steps, then you are on the right path.