10 Content Optimization Tips for Generating Organic Search Results

Despite all the Google algorithm updates, evolutions in user preferences, and shifts in the competitive landscape, there’s one enduring truth about digital marketing: Content is King.

If you want to maximize your brand’s online visibility and achieve your traffic and conversion goals, you need to publish world-class, people-first content.

But what exactly does “world-class content” look like?

Use these dos and don’ts to help you better understand how to write SEO content.

The primary aim of Search is to provide the most relevant, useful results for each query. Typically, the top Organic Search results are sites recognized as experts in their respective fields.

Building topical authority is a vital part of gaining recognition as an expert in your industry. For this reason, it’s important to focus on your niche as you create content.

There’s nothing wrong with branching out and covering related topics as you produce more content over time. But if you’re just getting started, or revamping your content strategy, you’ll want to firmly establish a robust foundation in the topic(s) at the very core of your business.

Google intends to fill page one with accurate, verifiable, insightful information. Don’t expect outdated, superficial content to show up in the top organic positions.

High-quality content should come straight from the source, which is why your team's most knowledgeable and experienced members should play a central role in producing it.

While tasking a product designer with writing isn’t always feasible, connecting your writers with your product/service experts will add the precision, authenticity, and fidelity essential to world-class content.

Ideally, you’d set up regular workshops to give your content creators the greatest exposure possible to your brand’s experts, so they can leverage that expertise in your brand’s content.

Google processes some 8.5 billion searches daily, which are performed by people of virtually every profession, income level, and geographic region. But you don’t want to speak to all of them.

Rather, you want to speak to your target audience: the people who might actually become customers.

Google’s most prominent content optimization guidance is to write for people, not search engines. Google wants to reward content designed to deliver genuine value to users rather than rank content written to satisfy or manipulate search engine algorithms.

When producing content, keep your customer personas in mind and make sure you speak to that audience, answering their questions, addressing their concerns, and highlighting how your brand aligns with their interests.

While surface-level information isn’t enough to build meaningful topical authority for your brand, that isn’t the only reason each piece of content should be comprehensive.

Search has come a long way from the “10 blue links” of yesteryear. There are more avenues to appear high on page one, including features such as the “people also ask” box and the recently introduced AI Overviews (AIOs).

Regarding AIOs, Google says, “No action is needed from publishers to benefit from AI Overviews.” However, consider this piece of guidance that follows (emphasis added):

“AI Overviews show links to resources that support the information in the snapshot and explore the topic further. This allows people to dig deeper and discover a diverse range of content from publishers, creators, retailers, businesses, and more, and use the information they find to advance their tasks.”

So while the AI snapshot will include quick takeaways, each item included in the AIO links to a page that can help the user dig deeper.

Ideally, that’s where your brand comes in.

To maximize your chances of an AIO linking back to your site, you need to ensure your content is useful and practical enough to help users “advance their tasks,” as Google puts it.

This SERP feature is a collection of questions related to the initial query, so comprehensiveness is key to appearing here.

There are a few other things you can do to optimize your content for the People Also Ask section. The best place to start is by using questions in your subheadings (typically H2 and H3 tags) and immediately following each with a clear, short answer.

Most often, that will look like a subheading followed by a short paragraph of one to two sentences, with additional paragraphs that support the answer.

You’ll have better odds of appearing in both AIO links and the People Also Ask box by targeting long-tail keywords, as this type of keyword is most likely to generate both of these SERP features.

This isn’t just solid advice for Organic Search content optimization but also guidance that will help you build a better page, website, and brand.

Consider this: Right now, many of your competitors are using AI writing tools like ChatGPT to create AI-generated content. Since these tools all pull from practically indistinguishable data sets, the content they spit out will look more or less the same.

Google doesn’t want to fill its SERPs with homogenous pages that are of little value to searchers. Instead, Google aims to provide a set of high-quality, diverse results on page one.

Therefore, adding unique value to your content is key. Your team’s industry experts are invaluable in this area.

Developing original content isn’t just solid Organic Search optimization but also the perfect opportunity to discuss your brand’s USPs and highlight what sets you apart from your competition.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness: These are the core attributes that a piece of content must exhibit to earn a top spot on any SERP.

As a brand, you need to sound like you know what you’re talking about by demonstrating topical authority.

You want to present information in a way that encourages users to seek you out as a source of knowledge, return as they continue to learn more about your niche, and recommend you to others.

Now, here’s where some digital marketers get hung up on the value of E-E-A-T.

No, it’s not technically a ranking factor. It’s officially a Quality Rater Guideline, which means E-E-A-T, as an entity, doesn’t directly impact rankings.

However, E-E-A-T is something Google’s quality raters (real humans) are looking for, which means these are the same traits any user would want to see in a piece of content.

Google wants to give the top SERP positions to content that delivers genuine value to users, and E-E-A-T comprises the factors that users (whether they’re aware of it or not) contemplate instantaneously as they decide whether they want to read your content.

That’s why Google E-E-A-T needs to be in every brand’s Organic Search playbook.

We’ve briefly discussed AI in SEO, but the tendency for AI-generated content to be little more than a clone isn’t the only reason to be careful when using AI content optimization tools.

Shortly after these tools burst onto the scene in 2022, Google clarified it doesn’t judge content based on whether AI played a role in its creation. So, yes, you can safely use AI, wholly or in part, to generate content for your website.

But it’s worth asking: What’s the value of AI-generated content?

And since we’re asking questions, here are a few more to consider:

To be clear, there are a few significant advantages to AI, especially as a force multiplier. It’s great for writing article summaries and topic ideation, among other tasks.

But relying on AI to choose and execute the themes, voice, and direction of your content is a recipe for disaster, not to mention AI’s propensity to hallucinate or include factual errors.

At a minimum, AI-generated content can be published in a pinch, but only after thorough editing by a human, which can sometimes take more work than writing the content from scratch.

It’s far better to have a team of experts creating content written by humans, for humans.

It may seem obvious, but Google’s guidance has led some to believe that they can simply do their best and hope Google rewards their pages accordingly.

The truth is that no matter what Google would like us to believe, as digital marketers, we must consider the search engine as well as the user. Google has ideas about how Search will function for the betterment of the web, but it’s clear the execution still has a long way to go.

So, as natural and user-oriented as your content should be, it should still have a solid foundation in thorough, thoughtful keyword research.

Not just any keywords will do. Your content should be built around the keywords most closely aligned with your business objectives.

Unless you’re an enterprise with an enormous budget, your best bet is to establish a list of seed keywords: short, one- or two-word keywords that broadly describe a topic. Examples include “fashion,” “skincare,” and “dietary supplements.”

From there, you can turn these into long-tail keywords. Because long-tail keywords are far more specific than seed keywords, they have a lower search volume, but there’s also less competition, making it easier to rank.

Plus, users who query long-tail keywords are more likely to convert overall since they’re searching for something specific. This means these keywords offer the best potential ROI.

Once you have your keywords, you can start creating content targeting them. Avoid targeting too many keywords at once, and instead, choose a few choice keywords to build a single piece of content around.

Some content optimization tools include keyword density or word count thresholds in their content scoring.

These tools are, frankly, behind the times.

It’s been widely known for some time that Google doesn’t look at keyword density or word count as ranking factors. High-quality content can be relatively short, and low-quality content can be 1,000 words or more in length.

You absolutely need to include your targeted keywords in your content. But keyword use is a question of quality, not quantity; it’s not how many times you use a keyword but whether its inclusion is natural and central to the thrust of the content itself.

In the old days of Organic Search optimization, simply including a keyword on a page would be enough to tell search engines like Google, “Hey, this page is about this keyword.”

But in the age of AI, Google is also using a variety of other means to determine relevance, so we can put any discussion of word count and keyword density to bed.

Creating world-class, people-first content as part of your Organic Search strategy has several unique advantages. Notably, the content has the ability to continue driving results for your business in the long term.

But, like an automobile, content is a depreciable asset. Without proper maintenance, your content can lose value, sometimes surprisingly quickly, depending on your industry and the evolving SERP landscape.

Hitting the “publish” button in your CMS doesn’t mean you’re finished with a piece of content. Whether it’s semiannually, annually, or any other frequency, reviewing, refreshing, or removing content is key to getting the utmost value out of your work.

Because content “helpfulness” is a sitewide signal, outdated or neglected content can negatively impact how Google and users perceive your site.

In a practical sense, any low-quality content will act as a counterweight, mitigating the positive effects of your bright, shiny, new content. Think of it as enjoying a fantastic entree in a new restaurant’s spotless dining room, only to enter the restroom and find that it’s on par with some of the lower-end gas stations you stopped at during your last road trip. The dining experience as a whole is negatively impacted.

Regularly optimizing content is a chore, but it’s a chore that will ensure your brand sees maximum dividends from its investment in content optimization.

From digital content creation to landing page design and even fundamentals like keyword research, optimizing your website for Organic Search is a tall order.

That’s why so many brands partner with VELOX. Our organic and paid search experts will execute a complete campaign that conservatively targets 400 to 800% ROI.

Whether you’re looking for a healthier backlink profile, a more effective and efficient PPC strategy, or a cutting-edge business intelligence partner, VELOX is the ROI-focused digital marketing agency that can deliver the exponential growth your business needs to scale.

See what sustained search dominance can do for you. Contact VELOX today for your free marketing plan.