9 Tips for Creating Your Best SEO Content in 2019

In 2019, SEO content will be all about the audience.

If you’re looking to improve your content marketing and see real ROI, you have to use practices that will really benefit them.

Content that’s highly ranked, that drives traffic and leads is always user-focused, first and foremost.

That’s why today’s tips for SEO content in 2019 all point back to your reader, A.K.A. the V.I.P. and M.V.P. you need to know and understand to get it right.

Because, when you write to the right people in the right way, your writing and content will climb higher.

9 Keys for Creating Your Best SEO Content in 2019

Ready?

Here are my nine top tips for helping you create your best (most-read, most-shared, and most valuable) content this year and beyond.

1. Write to the Right People with Targeted Keywords

Your SEO content won’t reach the right people if you fail to optimize it with targeted keywords.

What do I mean by “targeted keywords”?

These are key terms and phrases for which your audience niche is actively searching.

To find these terms, you must first understand:

Who your audience segments are.
What kind of information they need.
Why they need that information.
Which keywords they’re using to find it.

This may seem like a lot, but it really isn’t if you break it down into a few activities:

Audience research: Identify the type of audience you think wants/needs what you offer. Then, go find where they congregate online. Talk to them. Survey them. Figure out their personal habits, preferences, demographics, and stats. (Marketing Land has a good guide on this process.)
Keyword research: Find relevant, profitable keywords that relate to your expertise, your products/services, and your audience’s search intent.
Topic research: Come up with content topics based on the targeted keywords you discovered and what your audience wants to learn/know.

2. Focus on Readability

SEO content that shoots to the top of SERPs has a few things going for it, including this major feature:

It’s incredibly readable.

When your audience clicks your link, every single element on the page makes them want to stay and read it.

And, when they stay and read, that makes your page look great to Google.

It signals, “Hey, this page is relevant to the search query! The user has found the information they were looking for!”

That signal is called dwell time – or, the amount of time that passes between the point when you click on a search result and the point when you return to the results page.

Readability contributes to longer dwell times with a few qualities that are baked in:

Clarity
Organization
Logic
Simplicity

To be readable, your content needs to convey all types of information in an understandable way.

And, when your content is understandable to more people, more people will stay longer, which will help your Google rankings.

3. Go Deeper in Your Content

A big SEO trend for 2019 is creating content that goes deeper and farther into a topic.

This works for higher rankings because, according to digital marketer Eric Enge, Google is “intensifying its focus” on content quality.

This is what Enge said in a recent trends post from Danny Goodwin on SEJ:

“We tracked the SEO performance of a number of different sites. The sites that provided exceptional depth in quality content coverage literally soared in rankings throughout the year. Sites that were weaker in their content depth suffered in comparison.”

Furthermore, according to Enge, this trend is going to continue.

So, how should you go about creating deeper content?

Write long-form blog posts – think 2,000 words or more.
Explore topics that have many different facets and angles.
Write ultimate guides.
Go further than surface-level research. Instead of a cursory Google search, try Google Scholar, JSTOR, or industry publications to find new data and studies.

4. Improve Your Page Speed

A simple way to improve your SEO content in 2019:

Improve your page speed.

Help your pages and content fully load and display faster.

The slower your page speed, the more frustrated you’ll make your users.

Who wants to sit around waiting for a website to load?

According to a BBC News report, half of shoppers won’t wait more than 3 seconds for a retail page to load.

And research from the Nielsen Norman Group revealed that most users will leave pages within 10-20 seconds.