Creating content for SEO purposes is often associated with keyword-stuffed articles that lack quality and voice. But, as Google continues to push search marketers towards optimizing for humans instead of algorithms, that kind of content is rapidly losing visibility in the search results.
High-quality content, that’s designed to address the user’s needs as efficiently and effectively as possible, is now the standard.
Even the most comprehensive content will fail audiences if it’s not presented in a digestible format. And, the narrow aspect ratio of mobile devices adds another factor to consider as it influences how much content a user can view at one time. This is why it is so important to organize your content so that users can find the exact information they’re looking for.
The inverted pyramid is a way to organize content by leading with the most relevant, impactful information — in other words, the information the user is presumably seeking — at the very beginning.
The most important information typically includes answering the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where and why). After that, content creators should address the other important details and supplement them with background information.
It’s important to consider the structure of your content as well. Walls of text can obstruct scanability. Engaging visuals serve two purposes here as well: improving scanability by breaking up walls of text while facilitating written content (with additional context or by visualizing data, for example).
Over the last few years, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (known collectively as E-A-T) have become a well-known concept in the search industry, but for audiences, these concepts have always existed.
“E-A-T is super important to incorporate into your content, because . . . from the user perspective, showing off your expertise and your authoritativeness in your space is hugely important, adding that creating trust signals, for both users and search engines, is also critical.
Expertise:
- Having credibility in your space.
- Using experts in your content.
Authoritativeness:
- Showcasing your expertise, awards, external recognition, etc.
- Author bio pages.
- Strong pages about “who” your organization is and what it is about.
Trust:
- External reviews.
- High-quality external links.
- Use credible sources.
- Secure your site.
- Ensure your site copy and content are error-free.
Users come to your site for a reason and addressing that reason can help you increase your search visibility and facilitate conversions. The first step to answering the questions your audience may have been by identifying those questions.
Keyword tools can help figure out what those questions are as well as the opportunity, represented by search volume, that goes with answering each question. In the example above, Berry used Answer the Public in tandem with a keyword tool, which is a common feature among tool providers like Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz, to identify content and keyword ideas and search volume.
Conducting primary or secondary research can help your content amplification efforts as it takes data and turns it into something digestible for journalists as well as your audience. For those in the position to publish primary research, there may be an advantage in that your business owns that data, making it unique to your brand.
With data visualizations and infographics and images, you need to utilize alt text and captions and make them very descriptive, emphasizing that members of your audience may be using assistive technologies to navigate your content. Using the appropriate punctuations within your alt text and captions, and summarizing data that is in your images within the text as well can also greatly improve the user experience.
Make sure that you’re utilizing the formats that you can really do well, and that is going to give you a competitive edge and make sure that, no matter what format you’re using, you’re really following that inverted pyramid and you’re answering your audience’s questions well. Make the content really easy for people to access and understand and scan and you’ll go far.