Creating great content that speaks to your audience and showcases your expertise is but one part of the content conundrum. It is equally important to ensure your content works hard for you by optimising its online performance.

We're not all looking for detailed articles where you have to sift through the quantity to get to the quality. So, like a great host we have prepared a short and snappy collection of eight simple tips that you can follow to keep your content on track.

 

  • One size doesn't fit all - The top search results for a particular topic or search term might be full of articles that have an average of 1200 words. You can fairly confidently use this as a barometer for the level of detail people are looking for from that search. However, be aware that very closely related topics might have an average of 500 words and a much simpler Q&A format. Pay attention to what length and format is performing well, and take inspiration from that.

 

  • Don't duplicate content - Don't simply create a whole new article on a subject if you already have one on it. Enhance it, refresh it, update it, redesign it. When you have two pages that Google considers to be the same, it will - most likely - pick one page as the authority and only show that page in search results.

 

  • Turn one piece into many pieces - If you have a large piece of content - perhaps a white paper or a report - much of your audience may be put off when they see how long it will take them to consume it. You will probably get much better engagement by leading your readers to the interesting sub-topics or take-aways by extracting these into shorter pieces that link to the more detail-heavy version.

 

  • Let Google do the heavy lifting - Type your topic into Google, decide what the article should contain by using the features available to you. These include the 'featured snippet' content, the 'people also ask' features and more.

 

  • Write for all knowledge levels - When producing content, it is crucial to create content for all levels of knowledge. Instead of creating one mammoth article with the most detailed aspects of a topic, turn it into three shorter articles for beginners, intermediates and experts in that subject. Creating a flow like this can encourage a user to explore more of your site, rather than just that single article.

 

  • Break up text with imagery - Purely from a readership point of view, the last thing you want to do is have your reader feel like they aren't making any progress through your article. Choose a relatable image or representation of your topic and data, not one just for the sake of it.

  • Meta tags - Create a template for meta tags that needs to be completed on every article before it is posted. The SEO benefits are clear and by using a template, this often frustrating task becomes simple and easy to complete as you go along.

 

  • Don't duplicate content - Did I say that already?

 

Just like the advice in this article, we'll soon be adding a more detailed post on this topic with some specifics that will help push your knowledge even further. Keep a look out for more on this from the White Marble team in the coming weeks.