Content Creation: 22 Ways to Help you Make your Content Great * Serious Bloggers
By: Anthony Miller
Tags: Search Engine Optimizati, Content Marketing, Content Creation, Content Writing

If you’re not good at content creation, you’re in trouble.

Why?

Because content helps you attract, educate, engage, and satisfy your visitors, bring new ones, and make you money.

Here’s the truth.

If you want to boost your blog’s rankings and get traffic you need great content.

No matter if you’re creating content for yourself or your business it’s important to do it right.

In this post, I’ll show you my 10 tips for creating great content, plus a bonus on how to optimize that content for search engines.

So, keep reading.

Why Content Creation Plays Important Role in Your Blog’s Success

You probably heard the phrase content is a king for about a million times. Content helps you to connect with your audience, build trust, and it’s the core of everything you are planning to do with your blog.

It also helps to educate your audience, to have more online visibility, and to drive traffic to your blog. Be sure that without great content, it’s impossible to attract any attention to your blog.

The First Step of Successful Content Creation

The first step of every successful content creation is creating a content plan. With a content plan, you are deciding what’ll you do and when you’ll do it.

Should I say that you also have to stick to that plan?

You might be wondering what are the benefits of content planning.

Well, you won’t get stuck staring at the blank screen and wondering what to write about.

There are two steps of content planning:

You can get lots of content ideas by researching on Google, Quora, YouTube, Amazon, Answer the Public, and BuzzSumo.

One important thing that I suggest is to create content both for your audience as well as the content for other bloggers. I’ve explained this in my Start a Blog Guide so make sure to read it.

When you have enough ideas (around 30 or more) it’s time to add them to your editorial calendar. Inside the calendar, you should add titles, keywords, publishing dates, and link to the published post so you have everything organized in one place.

Structure of Your Content

When you have a topic and title for your blog post, you should create and structure content.

If you want to do it right you should start with a structure for your post that readers understand, like the List Formula. Begin with an intro, then list the primary facts of the article, and sum it all up with a conclusion.

The How-To Formula is another easy format for structuring your posts. It starts with an introduction, then a section on why this is important to the reader and then you provide elements on how to do something in a list format.

It’s easier to start with the main points and leave the introduction and conclusion for the end.

The intro has to be attractive because if you lose the reader in the first few paragraphs they’ll stop reading and leave your site.

The best is to define the objective of the post and explain how it will deal with a problem that the reader has. This will give them a reason to keep reading.

Now when we are done with the introduction to content creation it’s time to roll up our sleeves and start with tips that will help you to create awesome content every time.

10 Ways to Boost Your Content so You Can Stand Out From the Crowd

Creating content is easy. But creating great content is something that takes time and lots of effort.

If you are publishing posts just to fill your blog then stop. That will get you nowhere.

What you should do instead?

Create only quality content for your blog and follow these tips to make it even better.

Make Your Content Easy to Read By Using Right Size of the Font

You can have the best content on the web but if it’s hard to read you’ll lose readers. That’s why your font should be at least 15pX.

Boost CTR By Using Parentheses and Numbers in Your Title

Numbers aren’t just for list posts like “The 25 Best Diet Tips to Lose Weight and Improve Health”.

You can use numbers to show a specific result your readers can get from reading your content and implementing that newfound knowledge.

Here’s the example: “How to Make $1000 a Month Online From Scratch”.

Some researchers also found out that titles with numbers get a better CTR than ones without them.

HubSpot found out that titles with parentheses improve clicks by 36%

Using parentheses might not seem doable for every title, but you can always add them at the end of your title like in this example:

“ How to Make Money Blogging (Free Guide for 2020)”.

Hook Your Readers With Short Introduction

Your introduction has only one purpose. To get people to read the rest of your content.

But how to write a good introduction?

By keeping it up to 8 lines or less and using very short sentences in the first couple of lines.

Get Readers Attention By Using Beneficial Subheaders Every 200 Words

Subheaders are a great way to soften the content and to show people what is your content about.

Researchers found out that most of your visitors won’t read your content from word to word. They’ll be scanning through your content looking for something that will stop them and make them read.

And that is the job of your subheaders, to make them stop scanning and to pay attention.

Improve the Users Experience By Using Short Paragraphs

Research on how users read on the web found out that 79% of readers always scan the page and only 16% read word to word.

Short paragraphs make your content easier to scan, read, and digest.

Improve Your Content By Using Lots of Visuals

Do I have to say that content with visuals kicks ass of content with just text?

Anything works. You can use screenshots, charts, visualizations, or diagrams.

Studies have found that visuals increase content credibility by 75%.

Make It Personal By Using Lots of Personal Pronouns

Here’s the truth.

People adore reading about themselves and when you use the word “you” in your content it makes a difference in how they’ll respond to it.

Motivate Your Readers to Keep Reading By Using Bucket Brigades

Bucket brigades are phrases mostly used by copywriters to make people keep on reading. They can also help you to emotionally connect with your readers.

Those are phrases like:

Just add them in your post where it makes sense.

Make Your Content More Credible By Citing Data, Studies, or Facts

When you are including particular data or a result always cite an industry study so your content stands out. This also allows you to add graphs and charts to your content.

The bottom line is:

Always have something to back up what you are saying.

Motivate Readers to Comment and Share Your Content By Including CTA in Your Conclusion

All you have to do is ask.

When a reader comes to the end of your post letting them know what to do next will boost comments on your blog or even shares.

So instead of writing something like “I hope you learned something” get them to comment or share your post.

That’s it.

As an addition, here’s an infographic I made for one of my older blogs about content creation.

Now when you know how to create great content it’s time to optimize it for keyword and user experience.

How to Optimize Your Content for Better Rankings

If you are thinking that this will be only about basic old fashioned optimization like adding the keyword in the title, you are dead wrong.

Sure I’m going to write about that too because it still works. But I’ll also show you how to optimize your content for RankBrain.

I’ll explain what is RankBrain and I’ll show you how to take advantage of it to get higher rankings.

Let’s go.

What is RankBrain

RankBrain is an AI algorithm that Google uses to better understand users’ satisfaction with search results. It analyzes User Experience Signals and uses that data to rank results on the first page.

12 Ways to Optimize Your Content for RankBrain

By following the first 10 tips you’ll already do some optimization and here’s the rest of it.

Have a Short Url That Includes Your Targeted Keyword

Your URL is the most important part of page SEO and if your title doesn’t include your targeted keyword it’s going to be hard to rank for that term.

Did you know that the URL doesn’t have to match the title of the blog exactly?

You can shorten the URL without losing the context of that page. That way, you can update the content over time without updating the URL.

If you go through Google’s webmaster guideline you’ll see that they recommend using words that illustrate your content in your URL, and to keep it short.

Have a keyword in the title as close as possible to the beginning

Google adds more value to keywords found at the beginning of the title.

The bottom line:

When it makes sense, put your keyword at the beginning of the title.

Have at Least One Power Word in Your Title

Power words are words well-known for stimulating action.

These words induce sentiment and having them in your title almost guarantees some clicks to your blog posts.

Great headlines have one power word in them at least.

Have a Strong Emotional Feeling in Your Title

Emotional words or phrases incite emotions and feelings. Emotional words are powerful and make people take action.

When you use emotional words such as easy, simple, and more in your headlines, you can boost clicks on your article.

Have a Keyword in the First 100 Words

This is to ensure that Google will understand what your content is about. By putting your keyword at five strategic spots in your content you are telling Google what is the topic of your content.

I already mentioned the first strategic spot for keywords, which is your title and this is the second spot.

And the last three spots?

Here they are.

Have a Keyword in Your H2 Subheader

Just like with titles, Google gives more value to keywords found in subheadings as well.

Have a Keyword in the First Image’s Alt Text

Google doesn’t just scan your text to determine the topic, they also look at the images. Search engines can’t see images the same way humans can, and the image’s alt text tells them what an image is about.

So make sure to have your keyword in the first image’s alt text at least.

Have a Keyword in the Last 150 Words

This is done for the same reason why you should have your keyword in the first 100 words. To show the topic of your content.

Make Your Content Around 1500 Words Minimum

Studies found that the average word count of content on the first page is 1447 words. Is there anything else to say?

Have at Least 5 Images in Your Content

Images drive more engagement from your visitors. More engagement also means that they will stay on your blog longer. If they stay longer your rankings go up.

Have LSI Keywords in Your Content

LSI keywords are words and phrases closely related to your target keyword. They also help Google to determine the topic of your content.

Use LSIgraph to find them and scatter them in your content.

Have a Keyword in the Meta Description

Your meta description is important because it gives search engines and readers information about your blog post’s content. The maximum length of a meta description should be around 150–160 characters and it should include the keyword for which you’re trying to optimize.

Conclusion

That’s it.

Now you have a blueprint for content creation that will get you higher rankings and more traffic, and you know how to optimize that content.

What do you think about my content creation guide? Is there something important that I missed? Are you going to take action on what you just learned?

Now it’s up to you.

Tell me in the comments below.