3 Steps to Creating Winning SEO Content in 2019
Having just completed writing a book about SEO for Penguin Random House, I spent much of the last six months doing a deep dive into how to create a winning digital strategy for businesses in New Zealand and Australia.
Through this research, I discovered one thing that companies spend a lot of time on – but generally execute really poorly – is their content strategy. In this article, I have picked out the top three elements for producing content that Google (and your customers!) will love.
Go Deep
In 2018, Pure SEO undertook a deep dive into Australasian search results, with our findings matching studies undertaken by similar agencies in the US and UK. Google (and searchers) love to engage with highly informative, interesting, and comprehensive content.
My advice is to create content that is at least 2,000 words long (how-to guides, independent research, long-form blog posts, or interviews). Make sure the content you produce is interspersed with images, video, graphs and other interesting page elements.
Try to avoid long blocks of text without visual breaks, as this can be exhausting for a reader and there’s a higher possibility of crucial information being lost in a sea of text.
Video
According to Cisco, 80 per cent of all online traffic by 2021 will be video. From a personal perspective, I intend to invest a lot of my company’s time and money in creating video in 2019. With Google now owning YouTube – now the second most-used search engine in the world – it would be remis not to look at a YouTube strategy for your business.
A Searchmetrics whitepaper indicates creating good video on YouTube is also likely to help your Google search results. Their data revealed that 55 per cent of all Google search results contain at least one video, 82 per cent of which originate from YouTube.
Mobile
I also discovered 2018 was the year that people undertook more Google searches on mobile devices than desktops – in 2019 this upward trend will continue to increase. Google has already been talking about this for a couple of years, and recently moved to a mobile-first index (meaning they look at a website’s mobile pages as the primary page for their search index).
Ensuring any web content you produce is optimised for mobile devices should be a given in 2019. If you have a mobile-specific site, it is worth considering moving to a responsive design; your website reformats automatically depending on the device used to access it.
For my main company, I will be bringing on a dedicated content creator. Historically, I have relied on the spare time of our in-house content team who produce content for our clients. Whilst this has been great – and the results have been excellent – I no longer believe it will be enough to deliver the necessary quantity and quality required for a successful SEO campaign in 2019.
