Member Article

Chris Buckley - MD of Pixel Kicks - talks content strategy and site maps

It’s blatantly obvious that you’re never going to have a high ranking website without having anything worthwhile for users to read or watch and for Google to index.

Carrying on from my previous article, we now need to consider how we approach our own content. The type of content you decide to use on your website can and should include all of the following:

• Pages and posts
• Video
• Images & infographics
• Photography
• Tools & calculators
• Guest posts
• Surveys

Static Page Sitemap

Using the information gained from successfully analysing & reviewing your competition, you can now start to formulate your own content.

Firstly, focus on establishing a sitemap that covers all your services, products and general information. Create the sitemap in Google Sheets or look at apps such as GlooMaps or SlickPlan, then ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you have a nice even spread of your services, products and information?
• Does the content represent what your website is about?
• Is there enough variety to keep users on your site, and coming back for more?
• Do all of your targeted keywords have a related page?
• Have you considered pages such as FAQ’s, glossaries and other types of help-based content?
• Is your blog or news section correctly categorised?

Page Formatting

Consider how users in 2019 interact with modern web pages, together with their short attention span. Here’s our key tips for producing killer pages that keep the user interested and on your site for longer:

• Write at least 300 words for each page.
• Don’t write large paragraphs. Instead break your text up into short sentences.
• Regularly split sections with headings
• Carefully consider imagery, particularly the main featured image on each page – would it grab your attention?
• Add further images throughout each page
• Add videos within pages – if they add to the quality and relevance of your pages
• Consider embedding social media posts – again if they add to the quality and relevance of your pages
• Regularly include links to other pages on your site

Thin Content & Duplicate Content

Thin content is what Google considers to be of little or no value. Generally pages that don’t help or inform the reader. If users bounce quickly from your pages, the likelihood is that it doesn’t provide what they were looking for. To help you identify thin content, consider whether the pages on your site comprise of the following:

1. Duplicate content or not unique enough
2. Too many ads on the page, resulting in less unique content
3. Low word count on the page
4. Mostly comprised from external sources
5. The topic is only covered in a shallow manner
6. Contains many spelling or grammatical mistakes
7. Not very informative to the user, and doesn’t read well
8. Stuffed with keywords

A couple of tools that might help you identify or fix thin content include Grammarly & Copyscape. As a simple rule of thumb, write your own unique copy, and don’t copy from other pages.

Content Calendar

Creating a content calendar is a great way to approach writing new copy for pages, creating videos, or producing imagery on a regular basis. One common problem is that people can easily get overawed by the amount of work they have to do, so by spreading jobs out on a weekly or monthly basis you make it easier to plan everything in, ensuring you stick to targets.

Our preferred method is to create a Google Sheet (split by weeks or months), decide what you’re going to write, when, and also who will be writing it. Share the sheet between all contributors.

Another tool you may want to consider is AirTable which essentially combines spreadsheets with database functionality. For larger sites with bigger content plans, we’ve found this to be really helpful. If you love being organised, understand databases, and have typically been a stickler for spreadsheets then give it a try. Spending time on a well-structured content calendar causes less stress further down the line, can give you posting consistency and help to introduce a proper editorial process. Who doesn’t want a nice “at a glance” list of what you need to do?

Blog Posts

We love writing really in-depth, long & engaging blog posts here at Pixel Kicks. As a digital marketing agency we’re constantly writing for our clients and ourselves, so we make it competitive between all our staff by seeing who’s blog post gets the most traffic. There’s prizes for the best blog of the month, quarter and year. Gamify the process and it makes it a whole lot more fun!

When deciding on subjects to write about, obviously it makes sense to stick to what your core services, products and areas of specialisation are. Posts based on your location can also help your local SEO. Once the subject has been decided upon, we try and stick to the following SEO factors that search engines just love.

• Minimum 1500 words long
• A great title – catchy, descriptive, inviting
• Short paragraphs
• Regular subheadings consisting of mainly H2 and H3 tags
• Bulleted lists
• 3/4 images
• 1/2 videos
• 1/2 embedded social posts
• 2/3 internal links
• 1/2 outbound links

Ideally try and base your subject around content that targets user search queries, and that satisfies user intent. It goes without saying that regardless of the above, you should always try and aim for the following criteria too:

• Interestingly written & engaging
• Uniqueness & freshness of content
• Aesthetically pleasing
• Fast to load
• Mobile optimised

Got that? Let’s move on and look at some other important content assets that can influence rankings: images & video.

Images: Alt tags, Title tags & Filenames

Without images, the web would be a much blander place, and adding them to your pages encourages people to read them by making them more attractive and appealing. This not only helps the ranking of the web page, but also the rankings of the images themselves in image search results.

As such we’re always amazed at how website fail to take advantage of correctly optimised image filenames. Are your images called “DCS0235522.jpg” or “blue-tshirt-labrador-dog.jpg”. The latter is most definitely better, as search engines can easily index the words present. Name your images as well as you can, thinking equally from a user perspective as well as SEO, but be careful about trying to cram unrelated keywords in.

Look at the Alt tags & Title tags too – do they have descriptive wording? Again, don’t go keyword stuffing, but describe them as best you can.

Google places a high value on alt text to determine how it relates to the surrounding text copy as well as the image itself. Alt text describes what is on the image as well as the function of the image on the page, and is a positive ranking factor. This is the main tag to describe the image textually so that search engines can understand what it is. The title attribute is shown as a tooltip when you hover over the image, but they have little or zero impact on your SEO unlike alt tags. Wondering what to write in both? Try not to overthink things, essentially just write a simple title for the image that complements the alt text.

With your images correctly named and tagged, make sure to consider the following:

• Do you have a nice mix of images that complement your keywords?

• Are your images compressed and sized correctly?

• Do they add to the quality and relevance of your pages? *

• “But pictures of dogs don’t seem relevant to the topic of this post that I’m reading right now.” *

True. But aren’t they more interesting than endless bar charts & magnifying glasses? Making an impact and standing out from the crowd is important too. The idea is that you might stand a better chance of remembering “that really in-depth blog post about SEO with the pictures of the dogs”.

Videos

Do you have video content for any or all of the pages? If so make sure to include them. The internet in becoming more and more dominated by video content, and this will help enrich your pages.

Users typically stay on your site for longer, in fact Wistia found that visitors spend 2.6x more time on pages with video. This in turn will increase your dwell time, which is a known positive ranking factor.

Now ask yourself the following:

• Are the videos related to the page in question and do they complement the body copy?
• If so, is the user likely to watch it?
• Does it load & play fast? – this is a no-brainer if you use any of the major video hosting networks such as YouTube, Vimeo, BrightCove etc.
• If self-hosting, check there are no lags or delays. This is not so much of a problem these days as it was 10/15 years ago.

Ideally you’ll want to use your own video content, but it’s perfectly fine to complement your pages with videos from other publishers. Why not send them a message telling them that you think their content is great, and you’ve used it on a page along with a link to it. They might love how you’ve used their video and possibly share your awesome content themselves.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Pixel Kicks .