Why Content Needs SEO to Win Traffic
Creating content is a critical component of having a successful website. Without content, your target audience won’t have a solid reason to visit you online. More importantly, the absence of content prevents Google’s search bots from crawling your site. As a result, your audience won’t be able to see you on search result pages. If you’re not on search result pages, your online visibility and traffic generation will suffer.
For this reason, it’s important to put extra effort into your content creation process. By posting good content regularly, your audience will be more inclined to visit you and come back for more. Also, Google will be able to crawl your site and rank you on search result pages accordingly.
Top Reasons Why Content Needs SEO
Keep in mind, however, that creating good content is not enough to attract traffic for your site. You’ll need to optimise your blogs, articles, videos, infographics, and other pieces of content for search engines. Otherwise, it would be difficult for your target audience to find them on the Internet, where hundreds of new content and webpages are created every day.
A recent Ahrefs.com study on the amount of traffic received by new webpages perfectly explains why content needs SEO. It revealed that a total of 94.3% of about two million pages received zero organic traffic from Google. Of these pages, only 5.29% of them got a maximum of ten visits per month.
How to Drive Organic Traffic to Your Content
As mentioned earlier, creating good content is just one part of the equation. You need to perform the following SEO tasks to ensure that members of your target audience would visit your site.
1. Include backlinks in your content
You probably have heard it already, but it bears repeating. Backlinks are essential to the success of not only your content but also your entire website. They help you achieve better search rankings and they are one of Google’s top three ranking factors.
The same research showed that it is almost impossible to get on the first page of Google without backlinks. Also, to attract organic search traffic, you’ll need backlinks to your content or webpages. Always remember that the more backlinks you have, the more organic traffic you’ll receive from Google.
Meanwhile, when obtaining links for your site, make sure they are from trusted or authority websites. It is because having links from bad and spammy websites could hurt your search ranking. It could even earn you a penalty from Google. As such, make sure to obtain only quality backlinks to maximise your potential to generate traffic.
2. Ensure that your content topics have long-term traffic potential
While having a lot of backlinks can help with SEO, it is still possible to receive zero traffic from Google. There are two common reasons why it can occur:
Reason No 1: You got a penalty from Google for having bad backlinks
Reason No 2: You’re not targeting a topic your audience is searching for online.
We have already discussed Reason No 1 above, so we’ll proceed with Reason No 2. You’re less likely to receive organic search traffic if no one is searching for the topic you’re discussing in your content or webpage. The main reason people are not searching for your topic is that it’s either they are unaware of it, or they simply don’t care.
Fortunately, there are two SEO tasks you can do to remedy this problem. First, you can identify the pages or content on your site that has the most number of referring domains. Then, conduct keyword research and re-optimise your content for relevant topics or keywords with good search traffic potential.
3. Ensure that your content matches search intent
Your content already has lots of quality backlinks and targets keywords with good traffic potential. However, you’re still not receiving organic traffic. What gives?
Even if your content meets the conditions discussed above, it can still receive zero traffic if it doesn’t match a user’s search intent. Search intent refers to the reason why a user conducts a particular search online. A user may use Google because he wants to buy something, he needs to answer a question, or he is looking for a specific website.
For your content to receive traffic, you should optimise it for user intent. Create content pieces that answer your target audience’s questions or allow for their intended transaction. For instance, if your audience needs specific information, don’t direct them to one of your product pages and sell them goods. Instead, show them an article that can provide them with the data they need.
4. Index your content
Here’s another reason why content needs SEO. If your content is not indexed, Google won’t be able to rank it. As such, one of the most important SEO tasks you should do is make sure that all of your webpages are correctly indexed.
There are many reasons why your webpages aren’t indexed. The most common one is a wayward noindex meta tag, which is a small code that stops search engines from indexing URLs. Other reasons include unwanted redirects, robots.txt, and canonicals. To see if your webpages are indexed properly, you should search site:[url] on Google.
Final Thoughts
Always keep in mind that creating good content is just half of the equation. It would help if you optimised it for search engines, as well. By making your content search-engine friendly, not only can you receive the right amount of organic search traffic, but you’re also making it easier for your audience to find you online.
At Springhill Marketing, we have highly experienced SEO specialists who can help you optimise your content for search engines such as Google. Contact us today and let’s take your online marketing campaigns to the next level.
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