One of the most important factors for SEO is unique, relevant content. How often do you do a Google search and find what you’re looking for on the first page? Probably pretty often. This is because Google and other search engines want the user to find exactly what they are looking for as quickly as possible. If you searched “red sandals” and you only found green boots, would you trust Google for all of your searches? Probably not. Many important factors make Google rank your website, but the content is by far one of the most important.

What Is Unique Content?

Unique content means it is original and is unlike other content on the web. If you were to copy content from another source or perhaps use the same content on more than one of your webpages, you might be doing more harm than good. In SEO theory, Google will rank the original page out of the two and not rank your page at all. This is also considered duplicate content and is frowned upon when creating SEO pages. So, creating content from scratch is your best bet.

Keyword Research is King

Okay, so you wrote a great webpage, but your page isn’t getting traffic. Is your page written on a popular topic of interest? Well, maybe, but another critical factor to keep in mind is keywords and highly searched queries. If you want your page to do well for SEO, keyword research should be done to ensure that highly searched words are used in the content. Search engines want to find the most relevant page for the user, so the keywords are indicators that your page is about that topic. Be aware that adding too many keywords can make your readability drop drastically and can be a red flag to the search engine. Balance and readability are both important when adding keywords to your content. The user needs to be able to understand your content. Creating a bad experience for the user can actually do more harm than good. Ideally, if you want to receive more traffic and visibility to your site, adding keywords and relevant content is key.

Update Your Old Content

Updating old content can be very powerful for SEO as well. The content on your site might be good, but over time, your competition is updating its website with great content as well. There is a strong possibly that your page can be outranked. Not only that, Google and other search engines naturally crawl your site on a somewhat regular basis depending on how often you update your site. If you go 2 or 3 years without touching your website and your competition is updating their website monthly, which site do you think is going to rank higher? More than likely, the site that is getting fresh content added monthly. This has been seen by many SEO analysts.

Site Structure Affects SEO

Another important factor to consider is website structure. If you have a page that you want your users to find quickly, but it takes 4 clicks to get to, is it really that important? Search engines crawl the site and see this as well. Though you may have optimized a page well enough to show up in the search results, often times the homepage is the page that takes the cake! If your user does land on the homepage, is that important page easily found? Or do they have to spend a significant amount of time clicking to find it? If this is the case, it might not get as much traffic as you think it should. The navigation is also very important. The navigation is the first thing the user and the search engine will see when ranking the site. For a good user experience, you should have important pages added to the navigation. Also, avoid adding too many sub-menus. Keep in mind, you want the important pages to be found.

Track Your Progress with Google Analytics

Track your progress and your traffic. Setting up Google Analytics is an easy way to track how many users are visiting your site daily. Once the Google Analytics code is installed on your website, you will gain access to see who comes in and what pages they land on. You can also check the average time a user spends on your site and how many pages they visit on average. If you notice the user is leaving the site within a couple of seconds, you might have some visibility issues to work out. In the meantime, you can analyze these basic reports and optimize your SEO pages to increase more traffic.

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Quality Not Quantity

Lastly, keep in mind that adding a ton of new content to your site all at once isn’t ideal either. The content should always be quality-focused, not quantity focused. Adding a high volume of content to the website to get it to rank better can also be a red flag to Google and other search engines. Always keep the user in your best interest and your page should naturally rank better.

Author: Jaclyn Venidis, SEO Account Manager