How to Create SEO Content (That Actually Ranks in 2024!)

hey in this video i'm going to show you how to create seo content that actually ranks on the first page of google and watch until the end because i'm going to show you something that 99.9 of people ignore but it produces massive seo results let's dive right in hey my name is nathan gotcha i'm the founder of gotch seo and i've led hundreds of successful seo campaigns in the toughest verticals like legal health and b2b and i've also trained thousands of seo professionals in my program gotcha seo academy so if you're new here this is part six in this seo mastery training series and all of the previous lessons will be below the video so make sure you subscribe right now and hit the bell button because you'll get first access to the next video in this series so if you're excited about this video like it right now and let's dive in so the first question is what is seo content well i break seo content into two categories number one keyword driven content which is content that is targeting a qualified keyword i'll explain what it means for a keyword to be qualified in a second number two is link bait which is content designed to attract backlinks but isn't necessarily keyword driven now it certainly can target a keyword but it's not a requirement i'll give some examples later on in this training now ideally you'll want to use an 80 20 split when creating these two different types of seo content 80 of your seo content should be keyword driven while the other 20 should be designed with the intent of acquiring backlinks but with that said let's start with keyword driven content so here's how to create a piece of seo content that actually ranks number one identify a qualified keyword so i tackled keyword research in a previous video in the series so make sure you watch that however let me show you how to quickly find and qualify keyword so go into scm rush enter your domain and then click on the keyword gaap tool and enter your organic competitors domains and if you aren't sure who your organic search competitors are go to the organic research tab and click on competitors enter these domains into the keyword gap tool then scroll down to the results and click on the missing tab these are the keywords that your competitors are ranking for but your website is not and now you're gonna need to filter through these keywords so go to the keyword difficulty filter and select very easy now add any keywords that are relevant to the website what you offer to your list and i recommend starting with keywords with clear bottom of the funnel transactional intent for example i'd try to rank for keyword like santa monica car accident lawyer because it's towards the bottom of the sales funnel and has a greater chance of converting into a qualified lead now if you're not able to find anything worth targeting then you'll need to loosen the keyword difficulty filter or you'll need to analyze a different set of competitors so once you've decided upon a keyword it's time to analyze the search results for this example i'm going to use santa monica car accident lawyer so if you click on your target keyword inside scm rush it will take you to the keyword overview section now you'll see that this keyword phrase only gets 90 searches per month but remember that intent is what matters more than search volume the truth is that you can find high volume keywords all day and drive tons of vanity traffic to your website but it likely won't convert the goal of doing seo is to make more money and that's why you must prioritize keywords with transactional intent first and then work your way up the sales funnel so with that said a santa monica car accident lawyer doesn't need a ton of leads because one big case could be worth a hundred thousand dollars or more so copy the keyword open up an incognito window open google and enter the keyword now you need to take note of what you find in the search results in this case there are ads a local pack and people also ask and it's important to take note of these search features because there are opportunities for you to capture more serp real estate and yes the goal is to rank on organic results but what if you could show up multiple times for the same keyword that greatly increases your odds of capturing more potential leads so based on these search results you can expect a lower ctr even if you were to rank well because the traditional organic results are being pushed down below the fold now the next step in this process is to analyze the competitors on a quantitative basis and don't worry this isn't super difficult you're just going to use data to get a better idea of what you're up against so first how many backlinks will you need to rank go to the keyword overview section enter your keyword and scroll to the serp analysis get the average number of referring domains for the top ten and in this case it's roughly three referring domains and then next you need to identify what the appropriate word count is for your target keyword so go to the seo content template tool enter the target keyword and then go down to the text length to see the ideal word count target now the next part of this process is to analyze the top competitors on a qualitative basis meaning you're going to analyze their content and see their strengths and weaknesses and commonalities among the top performing pages so open up the top three competitors and some type of note-taking device like a google doc in this case i'll ignore big authority websites like expertise.com okay so i'm going to analyze the competitors on a qualitative basis so we're just going to look at the top three competitors for santa monica car accident really what we're trying to do here is we're just trying to see what are they doing really well and we can emulate a lot of things they're doing because ultimately google is telling us that these pages are structured the correct way because ultimately they're ranking so you know a they're doing stuff well on site or on page and b they probably have a nice link profile but in this case we're just going to analyze their actual seo driven pages so and keep in mind just because a page is ranking doesn't mean that there's no room to improve this page but of course if it isn't if it isn't broken you know don't try to fix it so in this case you know having an interstitial pop-up like this can be problematic so i would personally if this was my website i would load this you know have somewhat of a delay before it shows up because it is kind of intrusive to the user you know i haven't even scrolled and i'm already getting blocked out by this particular interstitial so either load this on a delay maybe 30 seconds to a minute or load it on the second page load so the first thing i want to do is go ahead and look at this page and see if it's optimized the appropriate way and it is optimized well for santa monica car accident lawyer so of course that's something we're going to want to have to emulate as well and they also optimize the meta description for santa monica auto accident lawyers so they're trying to get a slight variation in there but google's pretty good at knowing that these are pretty much the same thing so you don't need to get that granular as far as you know adding swipe variations but overall looking at this page here you know it's pretty clean it mentions the primary keyword in the appropriate spots so a couple key things we want to look for is just to see how many times santa monica is mentioned here and it looks like it's mentioned obviously here in the h1 and we can use this little plug in here to see on the headings it looks like it is mentioned here in the h1 so that's perfect and so we'll want to do the same they mentioned santa monica in the first sentence along with car accident lawyer they've split it up a little bit so that's not necessarily a bad thing but if i was doing this i probably have this a little more focused however maybe you know you may want to test just modeling them because they are doing super well and we'll go down here it's very nicely designed and a couple key points here is whenever you have links in here you know i'm kind of helping this company here a little bit but when we have links there needs to be contrast because these don't actually look like links so there needs to be contrast here just so it's clear that those actually are links and one other thing too which this is kind of a design flaw but having the headlines the same color as the links can cause contrast issues as well so one thing is you know make this usually black just so it's more universal and the links will ultimately have greater contrast and ultimately get clicked on which is the goal of a link and overall you know looking at this page it's pretty you know what you would expect nothing uh super impressive so that's actually a good sign because you know it's not going to be super difficult to emulate this and ultimately we could probably do something much better by just adding more visuals adding more case studies and more bottom of the funnel content because really this this particular keyword phrase santa monica car accident lawyer is very bottom of the funnel so we're going to have bottom of the funnel content to push that user into the action that we're trying to achieve which is for them to become a lead right so a lot of this informational stuff is useful but we would ultimately want to have more bottom of the funnel content like case studies and testimonials stories anything that's going to persuade a prospect to become a qualified lead so one other key point here and one thing they're doing well is that they are prioritizing this page in the site architecture so it means that this is getting a lot of priority across the entire website because they place this particular url into the navigation so that's really important because now it's getting a lot of site-wide coverage so this is definitely something that you'll want to emulate if you're trying to rank for this particular keyword all right so let's move on to the second one here so this one's fascinating because they're actually not even fully optimized for the primary keyword which is santa monica car accident lawyers and they do mention it a little bit on the page like accident attorneys and they do mention you know car as well in here but overall this page isn't specifically optimized so more than likely this page is doing well we're not going to get into linkedin side of things but it's probably doing well because they have a lot of link equity a lot of authority to be able to rank so this is one that i probably wouldn't model because a lot of the time you may find some anomalies in search so this one is probably more than likely just an anomaly and you know you probably wouldn't be able to rank by modeling this particular page okay and the last one here is pretty similar to the first one they've done a nice job with putting the primary keyword phrase in the first h1 here they mentioned santa monica a few times which is great so to be honest to beat these particular pages shouldn't be too difficult because ultimately we can optimize the pages much better than what these competitors are doing and we can produce much better content than what they're producing now this page is actually the best formatted page in my opinion because they actually do have bottom of the funnel content down here which is perfect and they actually they break up the content nicely so you know this topic isn't super fun so we need to do is we need to break up the content a lot to make it a much more readable so they've done a very very good job of this and so this would be a good thing to emulate and also like i mentioned they're doing what they need to do they're showing bottom of the funnel content they're showing what their team looks like they're showing faces so overall this page in my opinion and they have testimonials here is the best one to model or take some key pieces away from as far as the overall experience they also have a contact form above the fold which is important because i want to try to drive leads as fast as possible like we don't it shouldn't be a requirement that they read through all this to become a lead we should try to get them to become a lead as soon as they land here we want to get that goal completion as fast as possible but but it's just important when you're analyzing competitors like these three or really in any vertical just to take the things that are best practices are the things they're doing well and ultimately just try to do better because at the end of the day there's a lot of pages ranking on google that aren't super impressive so try to take the good and the bad from here and try to produce something that's better and different than what's currently ranking so like i mentioned if you want to be able to produce the best seo driven content for a query like this like santa monica car accident lawyer which is really towards the bottom of the funnel it's pretty investigative in nature like i mentioned we need to focus on bottom of the funnel content we should not we should not be producing content that's informational in nature because the person looking for this is not looking to learn about car accidents or learn about even how to become an attorney or the the law itself they just want to see if they can find the right attorney for their situation so they can get the best settlement possible and that's all you're trying to do you're trying to prove that you were the best attorney for their unique situation and that's what these pages should be structured like so now that you know what you're up against you need to develop an seo content strategy and there are a couple of key questions to ask number one what is the goal of this content now this one might seem obvious but why are you even targeting this keyword or creating this page at all well in this case the goal is to drive qualified leads from organic search number two what's the intent now there are four categories of intent that will cover most keywords you'll encounter first is informational intent which is at the top of the funnel an example of this would be what is personal injury the next is investigative intent which is in the middle of the funnel and an example is santa monica car accident lawyer the next is transactional which might be the barnes firm reviews and the final category is navigational like the barnes firm it's important to establish the intent of the keywords because it will dictate how you structure your page number three will this content need a subject matter expert and the answer is almost always yes but it's still important to ask number four what's your unique angle for differentiation and this is the most important question to ask how is your page going to be different and better than what already exists you simply can't rehash what everyone else has already done and expect to beat them you need to bring something new to the table and something that can't be easily replicated differentiation isn't always about the content itself either sometimes you can differentiate yourself by having a better user experience using better design or even custom visuals using video or even adding custom tools or filters there are endless possibilities for differentiation and the good news is that most people doing seo never go this deep they just throw together an article jam some keywords into it and pray that it works so if you're even thinking about differentiating then you're already ahead of the game number five what budget do we need so based on the word count level of expertise required and necessary backlinks to rank you can estimate what the budget will be to rank now at this point it's time to create the content and once it's created i recommend running it through semrush's real-time content check in this example i took a random personal injury law firm who is ranking on page five for the target keyword now based on scm russia's analysis it rated it as mediocre which means that there's a lot of room for improvement semrush groups the scoring based on four categories readability seo originality and tone of voice this particular page has decent readability and tone of voice but it isn't original and it isn't optimized well for seo so just by adding santa monica car accident lawyer into the first sentence it increased the score from a 5.3 to a 7.8 now keep in mind in this example i pulled an existing page so the originality score won't be high however when you're running a new piece of content through this tool it should be 100 unique otherwise you need to go back to the drawing board so with that said here are the bare minimum requirements for on-page seo place the primary keyword in the url the title the first h1 tag the first sentence and the last sentence just do this and you'll perform better than most of your competitors now once you've optimized the content and boosted your score as much as possible it's almost ready to publish i also recommend creating 100 unique images and videos if you have the resources because it adds depth to the page so with that said once it's published go to scm rush's on-page seo checker and run the target keyword and url through this tool if you did the initial steps well then there won't be many recommendations here but it's still worth double checking and if you did a nice job the page should rank in the top 100 within a week or two and if not then your website isn't authoritative enough which means you'll need to focus on link building now the good news is that link building will be the focus of the next video in this seo mastery series so make sure you subscribe so now the final type of seo content to create is link bait and link bait is designed for the sole purpose of acquiring backlinks which as you may or may not know are the biggest ranking factor in google in fact according to a ranking factor study conducted by scm rush they found that the more backlinks a domain has the higher its position on the serp so some examples of effective link bait are software and tools for example scm rush has an insane amount of backlinks because a it's a great tool and b it's easy to drive backlinks to software and tools because it's inherently linkable one of my other go-to's for link bait is using data and this can be data that already exists or data that you actually create but people love linking to data because it's easily referenceable and may support whatever argument they're trying to make in their content okay so now you know how to create seo content that actually ranks but there's a missing piece now most seo content won't achieve its full potential without the most important ranking factor which are backlinks so in the next video i'm going to show you my favorite and most reliable ways to acquire high quality backlinks so make sure you subscribe and hit the bell button to get notified when it goes live and if you got value from this video please like it and drop a comment below thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Semrush

Views: 37,589

Keywords: seo content, seo, search engine optimization

Id: gW7w1b2Ds0w

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022