Creating A Perfectly Optimised Web Page
Content is one of the most important ranking factors in the eyes of Google. I have lots of experience in creating content to help businesses outrank their competition, and I recently presented my methods at the TurnDigi Marketing Conference 2020.
In my talk, I discussed the various factors that should be considered when creating a perfectly optimised page. My techniques have had huge results for business finance brand SME Loans, where the site’s organic visibility has boosted by over 10% in just thirty days.
Play Video about Turn Digi - Fourth Session of the Day
Content optimisation strategy for SME Loans
A content optimisation strategy should focus on creating content, or making your current content as relevant as possible so as to increase visibility in Google’s search engine results page and improve SEO rankings. Quickly after joining the company in the role of Head of SEO, I provided SME Loans with a template to achieve maximum optimisation success, the main factors of that template included:
-Content length
-Anchor links
-People also Ask
-Answers optimised for Featured Snippets
-Schema (including FAQs and How Tos)
What were the challenges?
Competitive Industry
SME Loans falls in the highly competitive financial services sector, which is one of the most difficult verticals to rank for. The main competitors for SME Loans’ target keywords include high authority banks, UK government websites and established business finance providers.
In order to compete against these platforms, boost rankings within the SERP and increase organic search visibility, the site’s current content needed to be optimised.
Scrutinised Industry by Google
Besides being a competitive Industry, Google is very particular about how it regulates and assesses the financial industry on SERPs. It meant that when we generated content it had to follow best SEO practices of Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) and have Expertise Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). Therefore, we had to be very detail oriented when creating new content.
Unhelpful CMS
One of the key challenges was that we had to work with a customised CMS, this limited the type and amount of changes that we had to make. Often it required us to liaise with the tech team if we wanted to implement a structural page to the website. This often slowed down any progress that we wished to make.
What were the solutions?
I used the 5 factors of the content page template to guide the SEO team to achieve maximum success. The following elements were considered both when revisiting pages and creating new pages to be published on the SME Loans site:
Optimal content length
Content length has an impact on rankings because in the eyes of Google, content length equates to content depth. We ensured that the pages on SME Loans had a length between 1,500 and 2,000 words. Whilst the recommended word count is industry dependent, and largely determined by how competitive the keyword is, Google no longer values short-form content between 400 – 500 words in length.
As well as appealing to Google’s bots, longer pages can increase dwell time, which is the metric used to analyse how long a visitor spends on a page before returning to the SERP. However, it is important that your page content is highly readable and answers the user’s search queries.
Anchor links or Jumplinks
The next factor taken into consideration were anchor links. Anchor links are good for both UX (user experience) and SEO (search engine optimisation). Also known as jump links, they work like an index for pages with extensive text, using the anchor text to take the user to a specific part of the piece of content that interests them.
Anchor links can help your website appear on Google’s SERP, they work to send signals for featured snippets, and get added as breadcrumb search results so it is important that these links get placed at the top of the page.
Featured snippet optimisation
Utilising proven tactics which I used for my previous employer ConsenSys, a large part of my content optimisation strategy focused on featured snippets. Featured snippet optimisation forms an important part of on-page SEO. It describes the process of optimising your website’s content in order to earn featured snippets for given search queries.
For SME Loans, this was particularly important as the site was competing against major banks such as Barclays and HSBC for highly competitive keywords such as ‘business loans’ and ‘start up loans’.
SME Loans appeared on page 2 of Google’s SERP for most of these competitive keywords, so an important tactic was targeting featured snippets to secure prime real estate on page 1 of Google’s search engine.
In order to help Google’s bots identify your site’s information more quickly, I recommend generating most of your headings (H2 – H5) from the ‘People also Ask’ section. This is important because this section reveals the most popular questions Google receives that relate to your original search query, giving a better understanding or user intent.
Under Victoria’s strategy, each of the SME Loans pages’ headings were turned into questions and optimised with the main target keywords. When conducting keyword research, the content writers focused on ‘People also Ask’ to guide their content structure.
It’s important to note that for some queries, ‘People also Ask’ doesn’t appear in the SERP. In this instance Victoria proposed to her team some basic questions that they should focus on answering in each page, these include:
- What is [target keyword]?
- What are the advantages / benefits of [target keyword]?
- How can I get [target keyword]?
- Why choose us for [target keyword] vs. competitors?
- The advantages question is particularly important to consider, as this section points to what makes your topic useful for the user, which is important to Google. This is especially true for Google’s ‘Your Money or Your Life’ (YMYL) pages, which impact the happiness, health, financial stability or safety of users.
Answers optimised for Featured Snippets
Once we had covered how to search for featured snippets to target, we moved onto the second part of the process, which involves developing answers using the optimised format for featured snippets, writing:
-Paragraphs
-Bulleted lists
-Numbered lists
-Tables
The SEO team then ensured that their content was optimised to secure the featured snippets, writing one crisp, concise paragraph of 40 – 58 words followed by a list or table:
I addressed an often overlooked area of featured snippet optimisation, and reminded the SEO team that as well as optimising content, they should also focus on optimising any images being uploaded using the target keyword. This is important because if the pictures aren’t optimised properly, Google will choose to show an image in the SERP from a different page source.
All of the pictures on SME Loans were revisited, and both the image file name and alt tags were updated using the target keyword. As an example:
It didn’t take long for SME Loans images to appear alongside the featured snippet:
Structured Data
When in the planning stage of content optimisation, I suggest mapping out the schema that your main competitors are using, and incorporating their schema to your own results. Make use of Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper for this and get ahead of the competition by optimising FAQs and How Tos.
Schema FAQs
In SEO, schema markup is code that is implemented to websites to help search engines return information and results for users. FAQ schema is one type of this markup that can be used if you have a page list of Frequently Asked Questions and answers for a specific topic in your field of knowledge.
Schema tagging provides so much value to your website, but it is generally underutilised in the financial services. Properly marked up FAQs can appear at the top of Google’s SERP, taking up double the amount of prime real estate.
Schema HowTos
You can also optimise for How Tos, which are step by step instructions explaining to the user how to do something. This is easy to implement when building a WordPress site, using the Yoast SEO plugin. Without this development help, you can alternatively optimise your content to secure a numbered step by step ‘How To’ featured snippet.
How to ensure your content is optimised:
On Page SEO Checker
When producing copy decks in the optimisation planning stage, the SEMRush On Page SEO Checker tool provided insightful reports that revealed how SME Loans compared to its competitors in terms of:
-Keyword usage
-H1 tags & title tags
-Meta descriptions
-Semantic keywords
-Readability
-Backlinks
-Video usage
-Readability
This can be helpful in ensuring your content outranks your competitors for all types of web pages – from blog posts through to product pages.
SEO Writing Assistant
The SEO team created their content making use of SEMRush’s SEO Writing Assistant. This feature of SEMRush has a Chrome plugin which enables writers to receive valuable insights directly from their Google doc. The writing assistant scores content on four areas:
-Readability
-SEO
-Originality
-Tony of voice
What were the results?
When optimising your content for SEO purposes, the main advantage is influencing your website’s chances to rank higher in Google’s search results. For SME Loans, in just thirty days went from just one Featured Snippets to 18.
This had a massive impact on Visibility which doubled from 3.3% to 6.6%, and we went from 81 to 108 keywords on positions 1-3 (making the Average Position increase +50% from 9.83 to 6.05).
Optimising your page can also help to secure featured snippets, FAQs and How Tos for given keywords, enabling your website to emerge in the highest position of the SERP despite not sitting on page 1.
This technique quickly resulted in SME Loans appearing in the top SERP position for competitive keywords like ‘unsecured business loans’ and ‘start up loans’, overtaking major financial institutions without having to pay per click:
FAQs:
What is content optimisation?
Content optimisation describes the process of writing content in a way that it will reach a given target audience by ranking highly in Google’s search engine page results. When optimising content, it is important to conduct keyword and competitor research and ensure that the relevant keywords are included, alongside images, meta, title tags, calls to action and appropriate links.
Why is content optimisation important?
Content optimisation describes the process of writing content in a way that it will reach a given target audience by ranking highly in Google’s search engine page results. When optimising content, it is important to conduct keyword and competitor research and ensure that the relevant keywords are included, alongside images, meta, title tags, calls to action and appropriate links.
What are the benefits of content optimisation?
As demonstrated in this case study, optimising your site’s content can have several benefits to business. As well as appealing to Google’s bots, content optimisation can help you to:
– Appear in Google’s featured snippet section
– Boost your web page’s organic search visibility
– Increase organic traffic
– Increase dwell time, decrease bounce rate
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