improve website content

11 Simple Ways to Improve Your Content

Content is one of the most important aspects of SEO. You should be spending a lot of time creating highly engaging content that specifically targets users with the right intent. The content on your website should help users answer a question and actually give them useful information.

Google is constantly making changes in their algorithm in relation to user intent and having high quality content that have expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E.A.T). You can no longer really simply say that “content is king” anymore. Yes, content is still important, but it is now about providing the quality content that users crave.

Now, you may think your content is crash hot, but there are always ways to improve. You should never rest on your laurels! Make sure you are constantly looking to try the next big thing and aim to be a pioneer when it comes to trying the latest and greatest in terms of content.

You might be on to other side of the coin, where you don’t actually spend that much time on content and/ or don’t put that much emphasis on it. This could be one of the major reasons why you website isn’t performing as well as you would have hoped in the rankings.

creating website content

Some of you might be thinking “but I run an e-commerce website, so I don’t really need content”. Well, sorry to bust your bubble, but you would be wrong! Content is needed for EVERY site. If you are struggling for different ways to include content on your website, the easiest place to start is by creating a blog section.

But don’t just create a blog section on your site for the sake of it. Your blog needs to have a purpose and a direction. When it comes to content in SEO you need both quality and quantity. Meaning your content has to be highly engaging as well as the fact that you need to update your blog regularly.

Time consuming? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely!

So, have a read on below at some of the best ways you can improve your content, most of these tips are quick fixes, meaning that you don’t have to worry about this process being too time consuming:

1. Use Images

Your content should have images, it’s pretty much a no-brainer. Think of your own experience when browsing other websites. It can actually be quite confronting to click onto a page and just see paragraph after paragraph of text. So make sure you break up your text with images.

You could also even use a graph or chart to showcase specific data, if that’s what you are talking about in your content. Images can help make your point even clearer and really drive home what you are talking about. When using images, don’t forget to optimise them for SEO as well!

2. Test your Headlines

Your headline is the thing that captures the interest of the user and plays a big part in whether they continue to read on or not. So make sure you take your time when picking what to include in the headline, to ensure you get it right.

Another good idea is to test different headlines on the same piece of content. Once you have enough data from a range of different articles, you can make a more educated guess as to what are the kinds of headings that your audience finds the most appealing.

Your headline may also act as your meta title (which is the thing that users see in Google when searching for something). So a unique headline that draws the user in will help to increase clicks and traffic to that page on your website.

3. Don’t Forget About Internal Linking

It’s usually the simplest of things that people tend to forget, right? Internal linking is something so easy that doesn’t even take up too much of your time and can be quite impactful. So, if you are working towards improving the ranking of a particular post, make sure you include a lot of internal links back to that page.

You should also consider adding internal link retroactively. Sometimes you’ll write a piece of content on a topic that is pretty new to your website, so you can’t really place a lot of internal links in your content. However, after a little while, you might have written more pieces on a certain topic, so you should go back and add those links in.

4. Update Existing Content

Most of the content on your website isn’t really going to fall into the category of “one and done”. So make sure you revisit some of your older pieces of content to give them a little bit of an update. It is important to keep the content on your website as updated and accurate as possible.

Also, over the years the best practice in content and SEO tend to change. So, while you may have written a piece of content that was highly optimised for SEO a few years ago, it might not be to crash hot right now. So give some of your worthwhile pieces of content a little bit of TLC every now and again.

5. Include Videos

Along the lines of including images throughout your content, you should also consider using videos as well. More and more social media platforms are prioritising video over other things, and we all know just how much Google loves videos (they even purchased YouTube all the way back in 2006!).

Video content on website

Creating your own videos may seem difficult, time consuming and expensive, especially if you are a small business with limited resources. But the good news is that it doesn’t have to be difficult, as long as you’ve got the right tools by your side, even websites like Canva can assist you in your video content creation.

6. Think about your Audience

You need to think and write for your audience. If your content isn’t created with your audience in mind, then they probably won’t read it. You shouldn’t create content purely from what you think search engines will like, it needs to be for the actual user.

This is why keyword research is so important when creating content, because if you are writing about something that no one is searching for, then you are pretty much wasting your time. It is a good idea to also review your data and see which pieces of content your users engaged with most, and create more pieces similar to that.

7. Include Information from Experts

On the internet anyone can write about anything, so you want to ensure that your users trust the information you are writing about. One of the great ways to do this is to include information like data or quotes from experts in the given field, ideally someone that people would recognise as an expert.

This also works to help associate your website with theirs and pick up on some of their “authority juice” that comes with being an expert. By including insights it also can help to boost the range of content you write about and ensures that your content is factually correct. It is a good idea to even try to partner with an expert in the field and try to get them to guest blog on your website.

8. Don’t use Jargon

Jargon could be viewed as excluding some of your visitors, as they may not be experts in this area and get confused by what you are writing about. Your aim should never be to confuse your audience! Just because you want your content to be high quality, shouldn’t mean it’s difficult to understand.

The range of your audience’s knowledge base is large, so make sure you aren’t writing content that is too advanced, in order to appeal to the largest pool of users as possible. It could be a good idea to send your content to someone else (who isn’t as advanced as you in the area) to see if they can understand and read it properly.

9. Use an Editing Tool

The good news is that there are a lot of different editing tools available for you to take advantage of, Grammarly probably springs to mind here. It’s not just about making sure you have spelt all the words properly. But also making sure that overall structure of sentences and paragraphs are good (among a few other things).

Make sure that before you publish your content that you properly proofread your work. Try to proofread with fresh eyes (i.e. try not to write the content then proofread it straight away).

You are more likely to pick up on errors or typos with fresh eyes. You could also consider sending the content to another person in your team to look over as well; this is because they may be able to pick up on something that you missed.

10. Always Remember SEO

With so many other things to remember when it comes to creating content, it can be easy to forget the most basic of things, the SEO! So make sure you optimise your content and include your target keywords in the right places (heading, meta data, images, etc.).

You should also ensure that your content is original, the formatting is in an easy to read manner (i.e. mobile responsive), it has a high quality, and includes in-depth research. If your content has all these things then you are well on your way to success.

11. Have Fun

The most important thing! While there is a time and a place for serious content, there is also another time and place for fun content as well. It is a good idea to mix up the type of content you create. That way you don’t become bland, boring and predictable.

Your visitors are always coming back for more to see what you have done or written about this time. Having fun pieces of content can also be highly engaging so make sure you take a look at what others are doing in your area and see if you can put your own individual spin on it.

In Summary

Content is vital for the success of your website. If you want to improve your rankings to get more visitors to your site, then the first place to start is probably content. Every site needs content, no matter what the purpose of your website is.

If you are struggling for ways to include more content on your site, then you should consider introducing a blog section to your website. There are a number of great quick wins included in this article that can be applied to your website within a matter of minutes, others listed above may take a little bit of extra time, but it is certainly worth it in the long run.