In the world of search engine optimisation (SEO), experienced practitioners will often say that “content is king”. Now, more than ever, creating high quality content that engages online audiences has become one of the top priorities of digital marketers.

However, having a plan to create high quality content and actually doing it are two different things and many small businesses often don’t have the expertise or capital to carry out effective copywriting. This is why so many businesses choose to hire an expert digital marketing firm to perform SEO strategies like copywriting on their behalf.

As search engine indexing algorithms get smarter and more human-like in how they evaluate web content, the importance of sincere quality has risen. Nowadays, search engines like Google will devalue websites that publish low quality, redundant or outright plagiarised content or with unrelated quality comments.

On the other hand, search engines like Google will actively reward websites they perceive as having high quality content with improved rankings. This is because search engines naturally want to serve the best possible results to their users, so they incentivise websites to provide genuinely useful information in return for a rankings boost.

Without a doubt, the creation of high quality content in the form of in-depth articles is an essential part of the SEO mix for any business. Let’s take a look at 4 steps for creating effective SEO content.

1: Choose a topic your audience cares about

As part of your marketing research, you should have some detailed information about the type of audience you’re a primarily targeting. With this information you can then brainstorm topics that the audience is likely to click on, read and share voluntarily.

Depending on your industry, the kinds of topics you can write about vary greatly. The most effective content will provide users with useful information that they see enough value in to want to share themselves.

2: Go ‘in-depth’ into the topic

Search engines want to provide their users with the best possible information in as few clicks as possible. This means that a 2000 word article that explores the entirety of a subject will perform better for SEO than a 500 word article that barley scratches the surface.

The ideal length for articles rests between around 600 to 1300 words as this is considered meaty enough to be ‘in-depth’ while not being so long that it discourages people from reading it. While article length is a good signal to search engines, the content still needs to be high quality throughout.

3: Write with sophistication

While you’re not expected to write with the linguistic talent of a poet, you need to make sure that your writing has a certain level of sophistication in order to be considered ‘high quality’. This means that you need to write in an engaging rhythm that uses an advanced vocabulary and minimises redundancies.

Your writing needs to be concise and authoritative. Avoid using words like “may” and “could” and instead opt for “will” and “can” as they sound more authoritative. People are reading the article because they want a strong answer to their query, not speculation.

4: Optimal formatting

The way in which the writing is presented is just as important as its actual content in terms of engaging readers. It doesn’t matter how well written something is; nobody will read it if it’s just a block of text with no formatting.

Try and limit your paragraphs to 2 – 3 sentences each and use bulleted lists or tables to communicate technical information more easily. When the content is broken up with subheadings, lists and paragraphs, someone is far more likely to read it.