How to Effectively Create Great Content and Rank in 2018

July 18, 2023 | Content Marketing

How to Effectively Create Great Content and Rank in 2018

If you were to look at every brand and business on the internet today, they all have one thing in common. They all rely on content to get new visitors and customers to their site. It doesn’t matter if it’s for SEO or social, it all comes down to the quality of content and how they get it out to the masses.

With such a common theme among all websites, you can only imagine how hard it is to create content that will be good enough for your audience, but also enough to rank at the top of Google at the same time. With more than a billion active sites on the internet today pushing out new content on a daily basis, there is only so much room Google has with organic search results.

In addition to nearly all sites focusing on their creating content, something many of them also fall into is the idea that content creation should be their main focus. While this may be true, content creation will only get you so far. Today we are going to look at some of the best ways to not only pre-plan and create content for your site, but also how to effectively promote it and rank higher in the search results.

Let’s get started.

Write for Both Google and Your Audience

You’ve probably heard the saying ‘write for your audience and not for Google’. While this is true, you should be writing your content in reference to the guidelines the Google is looking for and how to make sure your content is the best index at the same time. However, the obvious thing is to also not try and stuff keywords and search phrases throughout your content. Instead, put in the time and effort to make sure it’s all laid out best for both your audience and Google.

Something we already know is that longer-form content now ranks higher than regular and shorter content. By this, we mean a high-quality article must now consist of at least 2,000-words of content. The days of creating 500-word articles and seeing them rank in Google are over.

How to Effectively Create Great Content and Rank in 2018

If you want to create the best content possible while also making it easy for you to promote it, you should find your focus keywords and then create an in-depth article or resource that also covers all angles relating to that keyword as well. For example, if you wanted to write about “Guest Blogging”, then you can also cover “how to approach sites”, “best types of written content”, “guest blogging template emails” and much more all within the same article.

It’s not just about writing the content, it’s also about structuring it correctly and knowing what subheaders and categories to focus your content around as well. This can be done by simply doing a little keyword research before getting started with your article.

Know What Keywords You Want to Rank For

With the concept of keyword research in mind, we can use a tool like Ubersuggest to not only find a target keyword or focus for our resource article, we can also see how many people are searching for the keyword and other relevant search phrases as well. I personally like this tool because it’s quick and easy to access and pulls all of its information right from Google Keyword Planner and Google Suggest without the need to log in. Best of all, it’s also free and the data (which is a final number and not a range) can instantly be downloaded and imported into any other SEO or content creation tools you might be using.

To see how this tool could help with your content creation process, we can type something as simple as ‘how to improve your credit score’ into the Search tool and look at its results below.

How to Effectively Create Great Content and Rank in 2018

As you can see, there are many different things people are searching for when it comes to their credit score. This is something you should keep in mind when trying to create content for your site. Not only should the focus of increasing a credit score come to mind, you can also highlight the different aspects of where to get a free credit report, best working methods to improve credit reports and also the different levels of a credit score and why an individual might fall into theirs. For each new sub-keyword you come up with, you can run the search again to get even more specific recommendations and stats.

The takeaway here is to use a tool like Ubersuggest, to not only find a focus keyword and niche topic but also all relating search phrases as well. By combining all of this information within one article, it will provide not only more value to your audience, but also show Google that it’s a high-quality piece of content.

Analyze the Competition and Create Better Content

As mentioned earlier, there are only so many free organic listings on the main page of Google. If you aren’t ranking on the first page, you might as well not rank at all. With this in mind, you need to know what it takes to rank on the first page of the search results for your keyword or phrase, and the best way to do this is the simple look at the content already ranking.

The first step in this process is the simply go to Google and type in whatever it is you want to rank for. You can then manually look at each of the articles and see what type of content is currently ranking. Some sites might have text focused content, while others might have list or resource style articles, using custom images, creating original videos or even an bringing it all together with their own infographic. No matter what your competitors are using, be sure to create a collection of the best content methods out there and make sure your final resource is the best.

Another resource to consider is a tool like RankWatch, which will allow you to look at the backlinks for each of these sites. The features built into the platform allow for organic and paid competition analysis, the viewing of ad copies and also keyword by keyword comparison. These are all key elements to consider when doing any type of SEO or competitor analysis. It’s not just about content and keywords, but also knowing which sites are ranking for the individual search phrases and why.

How to Effectively Create Great Content and Rank in 2018

No matter what the keyword or niche focus you are going after, there are plenty of tools to help you during the research process. Even with the best content and research in the world, it’s still likely not enough. In the end, it’s killer content and building high-quality backlinks and references to the page that help sites rank against the competition.

Focus on Content Promotion versus Just Content Creation

With all of this now laid out for you, it shouldn’t be a problem to create a really high-quality content article or resource with more than 2,000-words. Be sure to have your title focus on the keyword or phrase you want to rank for, and then cover as many different angles possible throughout the article and using subtitles, headers, images and videos to break apart your content. Don’t worry if you go over 2,000 words. In most cases, the more content, the better.

Once all of this is in place and your content is live, you can then focus on the content outreach process. Of course, you will want to share your content on social media and link to it through internal linking on any other websites or blogs that you might have. However, the best way to rank your site higher in the search results is to get high-quality backlinks and references from other websites.

How to Effectively Create Great Content and Rank in 2018

Some of the best working methods for this can be seen below.

  1. Guest Blogging on Relevant Blogs
  2. 404 Broken Link Building
  3. Using Hashtags and Tagging References
  4. Contact Editors on Media Sites
  5. Hiring a Reputable Outreach Team

As you can imagine, each of these methods is going to take some time and effort — as they are focused on ‘manual’ outreach, which many other bloggers, sites, and brands aren’t willing to do.

Conclusion

You should now have everything in place for you to effectively create content and then market it to the masses. Remember, spend the required amount of time to make sure your content provides value not only to your audience but it’s laid out in the perfect way for Google as well. This will make the content promotion process much easier in the days and weeks ahead. The better your content is, the more likely other bloggers and authority sites will link back to it as a reliable resource or reference.

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