No matter what your business is, it is likely operating in a crowded market, and the online marketplace is no different. That is why websites are a must for providing a digital shop front to reach customers anywhere in the world. But what is often misunderstood is how important the content on a website is to make sure the site is visible to potential customers in the world wide web.

The key to standing out from your competition is through ensuring your website is ranked well on different search engines. This means appearing in the top 10 results from a search query performed by a potential customer. The way to make this is happen is by optimising website content for search engines, also known as SEO (search engine optimisation).

 Here are five tips to optimise content for search engines and reach target customers:

#1: Keyword research and selection

This is the first step of SEO. It is important to understand online user behaviour and which keywords and combination of keywords are most often searched for by the target audience. There are many keyword research tools available that provide information on how competitive a keyword is, how many monthly searches there are for the keyword, and how you currently rank for that keyword. But a key aspect of this step is to research the context of your keyword in search engines. This step involves creating a search query of that keyword in a search engine (e.g. Google) and looking at the search query results. It helps to gauge whether the web pages that come up from that search query relate to your line of business and would be applicable to your target customer. Keyword research and selection are the building blocks to creating SEO-optimised content.

#2: Headings

Headings are a great way to provide structure to a web page, article or blog post. For search engines, headings provide information on the hierarchical structure of a page, and improves user experience when navigating a website.User experience is a vital key for SEO ranking, and headings enable search engines bots to understand the content on a page, what is most important, and how pieces of content relate to one another. Heading structures are defined in the back end of your website using the standard language for most websites, HTML, and coded as H1, H2, H3 and so on. As headings are a vital part of SEO, it is important to include relevant keywords in those headings.

#3: Avoid keyword stuffing

You may think that you have 15 brilliant keyword combinations that you want to use to optimise a webpage, all of which are highly searched and low competition – you’ve found the holy grail! Wrong. Now more than ever, search engines like Google have taken steps to redefine their algorithms to recognise such instances of spam and penalise the websites that do so by dropping them in the search engine rankings, or even removing websites from search results altogether. This may seem drastic, but it comes down to creating readable, quality content that enhances user experience on your website. No one wants to read a paragraph like this:

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#4: Quality content

As mentioned in tip #3, the quality of content cannot be overstated. At the end of 2022, Google updated its ‘E-A-T’ concept (a measure of how Google’s algorithm evaluates website content) to ‘E-E-A-T’.

E: Expertise – is the content written by someone who has the knowledge in this area?

E: Experience (the latest addition) – does the content demonstrate that it is produced by someone who has experience in this area?

A: Authoritativeness – is the website or author known as ago-to source for the topic?

T: Trustworthiness – is the website safe, accurate and reliable?

When developing content for a webpage, article or blog, make sure what is being written relates to your business and you have expertise in that area.

Next, select a primary keyword. This is the keyword that you want to focus on improving your search engine ranking for. Include the primary keyword in the heading, as well as in the URL, and aim to mention it at least once in the opening paragraph, but avoid keyword stuffing. You can also select one or two secondary keywords to be used sporadically throughout the content, that relate closely to the primary keyword.

When writing content, focus on incorporating the keyword where it feels most natural. Variations of the keyword (secondary keywords) can also be used. For example, if you select the keyword ‘financial advice’, you don’t need to use it each time you reference that information exactly in this sequence. Instead use the secondary keywords like ‘financial help and advice’, ‘advice on finances’, ‘financial investment advice’. There is no need to force the exact keyword each time, as search engine algorithms will recognise these keyword variations. Above all, if it doesn’t make sense to have a keyword in that sentence, don’t include it.

What matters most is that the content is simple and readable. Website visitors need to feel they are getting the information in a concise manner, and that the content is interesting, relevant and written by expert authors.

#5: Get it out!

Once you have published new content on your website, let your network, such as clients and employees, know. This can be done by including a link to your new page, article or blog post in a client newsletter, on your intranet, or simply posting it up on your company’s social media pages.

The more engagements and visits to the page, the higher the authority of the website becomes. This helps to convince those bots that the website is indeed a trustworthy source of expert information, and you may then start generating more quality leads from it.