Should you write SEO Content for the search engine or your audience?

As a business owner, one of the biggest challenges is creating content that will rank well in search engines and be helpful, engaging, and interesting for your ideal customer. Have you ever found yourself wondering which is more important – writing for your customer or the search engine to get the best results? If so, you’re not alone. I get this question from followers and prospective students all the time. It’s a great question, so let’s dive in.

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Your content should be designed to help your ideal customer; it needs to provide value and insights and help them. Content should build your like and trust factors with your audience. It should help nurture your prospective customers and help them ultimately move from visitor to buyer.

The missing piece for many content creators is SEO and working with the search engine so that your content gets more traffic. This leads people to wonder if they’re supposed to create content for the search engine first and their ideal customer second. That’s a big no.

I want you to focus on creating content for your audience first and optimizing the content for the search engine rather than creating content for the search engine.

How do you do this and get the best results?

Focus on your audience's needs and interests when creating SEO Content.

When creating SEO content, it's important to keep your target audience in mind. What questions are they asking? What challenges are they facing? What topics are they interested in? By focusing on these needs and interests, you can create engaging and relevant content for your audience.

Always start with your customer’s needs and create content that helps them, and you’ll be on the right track.

Choose the right keyword.

 It’s important that you choose a keyword with the following criteria in mind:

1.     Can your website rank for this keyword?

2.     Does your ideal customer use this keyword?

3.     Is this keyword closely related to the content piece you want to create?

If you’re not sure how to choose the right keyword, request a copy of my SEO Content Quick Start Guide right now and sign up for my free SEO class so you can learn more. When you’re ready, join me in SimpleSEO Content, and I’ll teach you how to do this and more.

Determine your content topic using your keyword.

Rather than starting with the content idea generation and immediately starting to write, I want you to do keyword research to identify a keyword you want to use for your content piece before you start writing.

Following this process allows you to ensure the content topic you write about has an audience looking for information. Then doing your keyword research ahead of time helps you to refine your title and make adjustments you might need to find the perfect combination of a keyword your audience is interested in and how you can rank so you know there’s traffic out there for your content piece.

Write high-quality content.

Google wants to provide the best possible content to its searchers. When you spend time creating high-quality, helpful content, you’re helping Google feel more comfortable sending their customers to your website or blog. Provide value, anticipate your ideal customer's questions, and answer them completely. You can’t simply copy/paste content from an AI tool or use a content company that provides cookie-cutter content to everyone in your industry because you won’t get results with either of those options.

Optimize your content the right way.

Follow Google’s SEO best practices, optimize the content you create for your ideal customer, and make it easier for Google to understand your content.

Choose one keyword that your website can rank at the top of Google for and use that keyword in the places where Google will look for information on what your page is about.

You need to use your keyword in the following places:

1. Page or blog post title
2. URL
3. Header Tags (H1-H3)
4. Copy
5. Image File Name
6. Title Tag
7. Meta Description

Always write for your ideal customer, focus on them, and provide value first and foremost. Optimize your content for the search engines second, and you’ll have the best results.