Content SEO: 10 actionable tips that work in 2021

Last Updated:April 28, 2021

1 Grab the right keyword to beat the competition

How do you find the most valuable keyword set for your content development?

Right answer to this question is “Keyword Research”. Then the next question is, how to do the keyword research.

Keywords research is the foundation of content marketing and you should use the good paid keyword research tools to do proper keyword research. We are using following tools to do the keyword research

www.ahref.com

This is the most popular paid keyword research tool you can use to find a good set of keywords. This is the only keyword research tool which gives you the “Click” data. These estimated number of click on sarch results will be useful for your to select the keywords

www.semruch.com

This is the most popular keyword research tool before the ahref comes into the play. This tool allows you to do deep research and you can you keyword gap-tool to generate fresh content ideas. You can analyze a complete list of your competitor’s organic keyword rankings and pages

www.moz.com

Moz has https://moz.com/explorer to do keyword research and you can use this tool to find out the keyword difficulty.

You can find out the relevant long tail keywords, broadly related topics or keywords in question format 

https://kwfinder.com/

KWFinder has a lot more features than other tools. You can get accurate keyword difficulty (KD) . You can target low KD (< 60) keywords to develop

2 Table of contents

Read the content of the following post

This is one of the best posts if you want to learn about English grammar mistakes when do content writing.

The only problem in this post is the lack of the table of the content. So you are unable to browse the document quickly and if you want to find a piece of content you have to scroll the full page.

Now you can read this post about keyword research

https://ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-research/

This post has a table of contents and navigation is easy. Headlines of the table of contents.

Look at the following table of contents for a link building post

So this is a pillar post about the link building and it has got all the information to get started with link building.

By looking at the table of contents you quickly get the idea about the post and user will engage with the content when they read the post.

3 Write compelling title and meta descriptions

Although meta description and title are not a search engine factor they are very useful to get some clicks when the user sees the search result. If you have eye-catching title and meta description they can stand high among other results.

Meta title and description are also important when you share your web page with other social media platforms. They grab the title and description from your post and display them in their system.

Guideline to writing a better meta description

On Page SEO in SERP

When you search on google for the keyword “On Page SEO” you can see the above result on the SERP and it is a perfect written meta description.

If you want to write a meta description which people love to click you call follow the steps below.

  1. Include your keyword in the meta description
  2. When user click results like this on SERP you should display the outline of your guide so that they will stay on your page and go through your amazing contents
  3. Apply Call To Action in your meta description
  4. Try to give a preview of the actual content of your article. Never cheat your audience.
  5. Use SEO plug-in like Yoast, Rankmath or ALL in One SEO to write a better description. They will show you some metrics to optimize.
  6. Use some copy of the meta description and do A/B test then you can select the best. Do not change them quickly give them at least 100 days to appear on the SERP

Learn more about meta description

Guideline to write a compelling title

How much power do you have to control the position of the SERP for a given keyword?

You can control the only a handful of things, 95% will be controlled by Google. Google is going to decide the quality of your post and it will be shown in the results page where your page deserves.

One of the things you can control on On Page SEO is the title tag.

Is Title tag ranking factor?

Some people say it is a ranking factor and others not.

But everyone believes that title is useful to understand the contents of the page. So title will help Google to understand your post as well as audience to get the idea of your post before opening the web page.

  1. Include your keyword in the title
  2. Write a unique title for your post
  3. Pay your attention to the length of the characters of the title
  4. Try to describe the content of your page
  5. Write brief and simple titles
  6. Do a research of the title appearing on the first page of the SERP and write a similar format
  7. Do your A/B Test with different titles and note down the click-through rate to select best performing the title

4 Include visual content

If you are planning to write 1000 words contents you can include at least 3-4 graphics first. Later stage you can add infographic if possible and some video to make your content.

According to Social Media Examiner

  1. 32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business, with blogging in second (27%)
  2. 80% of marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing. Video (63%), alone, has also surpassed blogging (60%) in usage as a social media-marketing asset
  3. 11% more B2C marketers than B2B marketers say visual content is the most important type of content today.

5 Call to Action

You tell your audience to do something ( Buy Now, Subscribe our newsletter, Fill the form now) when you read your article. This type of action is called “Call to Action” 

You need to provide enough information they explain why they should do this

Do not be too pushy when you create CTA.

CTA is the starting point to engage with your audience and in fact, it is better to put your energy to study and craft the clickable call to action inside your content.

Needless to say, the right CTA to fit your content can boost your revenue like sky rocket.

It is not easy to design or write a good call to action without being pushy.
Now let’s see some valuable tips when you add a call to action in your post.

Use strong command verbs

You can write CTA like this with power word like buy,order,subcribe

Subscribe now to get 25% only today

Here when you subscribe you will get a 25% discount and this is applicable only for today.

In facts, action follows with the rewards

You simply start with your CTA with command verbs and try out how it goes with your audience. 

Use the power words

What are power words?

Power words are words that trigger a psychological or emotional response from the reader.

Power words can encourage your audience to take some actions.

Stimulate curiosity and anticipation 

Your CTA should be enthusiastic and then your audience also enthusiastic to experience the next step.

How college student earn $2300 per month by writing SEO contents 

When someone see this kind of statement  he has the curiosity to read more details about it and he wants know how he did it

The effective way to build the CTA with curiosity is to show the action and the result in summary format. If they are interested in studying more they have to take action.

Show social proof to earn the trust

How about showing proof before the CTA. People love to see some proofs. A good review from a previous buyer (Provable)