The Benefits of SEO for Articles

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To learn in this and any other field, two exercises are required: absorb information (read, listen, watch) and practice a lot. While the practical part occurs within the platform, in this blog, we offer those theoretical bases that we will later test. But not all theories are good; that’s why we need to learn from the best. Today, writing with us is David Ayala, the well-known brain behind davidayala.com, where you can continue learning much more. We leave you with him!

Often, we do not stop to optimize the articles on our websites and we jump directly to optimizing only the landing pages that we want to rank for the main keywords.

This is a mistake because many benefits can be obtained from optimizing the articles on our websites, not only gaining in long tail because the articles rank but also improving the overall SEO of our website indirectly.

In this article, we will see the benefits of SEO in articles both from our own websites and from reviews and posts on other websites, and also how to improve that SEO in the articles themselves.

The Article URL

The first thing we need to consider is that the article's URL is well optimized, and I am not only referring to having a URL that is friendly for search engines but also that even if the URL is friendly, it must also be well optimized.

We cannot work with a URL like mywebsite.com/food/dog-food/food-for-small-dogs/

That URL can be much better optimized as follows: mywebsite.com/food/dogs/small/ or mywebsite.com/food/small-dogs/

The Length of the Article

The length of articles has generated great debate over the years. Many people said that to rank better, much longer content is needed, while others said that the length of the content does not matter.

Who was right? The truth is that both opinions had some truth, as in some cases longer texts rank better, and in other cases, the length of the content does not matter as much.

• When to use a short article

Using a short article will largely depend on the topic and our competitors. For example, in the YouTube video niche, it would not make sense to make a long article since practically all competitors have short texts.

Why? Because what the user is looking for are videos and not text, so if you put too much text and do not include a good video, the user experience will be disastrous, and they will end up leaving your website and accessing your competitors' sites through Google, which will worsen your CTR and improve theirs, thus leading to worse positioning for you.

• When to use a long article

This is the totally opposite case; if we are facing a niche where texts are very long because a lot of information needs to be provided, and we provide very short texts, the user experience will be very poor.

Therefore, as we have said before, we should leave short texts for niches whose websites are focused on other things such as videos or even image websites that have very little text.

However, in other topics such as health advice, diets, etc., longer text content is prioritized since in this case, what users are looking for is a lot of information, and obviously, of high quality. Thus, the user experience in those niches tends to be proportional to the length and quality of the texts available.

Keyword Density

– What is it?

The keyword density is the percentage of occurrences of the keyword we want to rank for within the text. It is something that has been used a lot in the past, adjusting the keyword density to a specific percentage, to try to force Google to see that we are more relevant for that keyword.

– Does it still work?

Currently, focusing too much on this is foolish since forcing occurrences of that keyword and increasing keyword density will only lead us to fall into over-optimization and, therefore, Google will rank us worse for that keyword, meaning we will achieve the opposite result than we expected.

Nowadays, we have to be more semantic to give more emphasis to our keywords without reaching over-optimizations.

The Semantics

– Synonyms

Instead of using meaningless repetitions of keywords in our texts, it is much better to use synonyms of the keywords, as Google is becoming increasingly semantic and knows the synonyms of the keywords, and if we use them, it will relate them and know that we are referring to our main keyword.

– Related language

Just as it is very interesting to use synonyms, it is also interesting to use language related to the topic we are addressing. That is, if we are trying to rank an article for a medical keyword, it will be very important to use specific keywords within the medical jargon as Google knows how to identify and relate them to our article.

The H Tags

The H tags are also very important when it comes to emphasizing the keywords we want to rank. Generally, we will use H1 and H2, as the following tags have very little relevance in terms of emphasis for the keywords that interest us.

– The H1 tag

This tag is the one that Google gives the most importance to, and therefore it will be the tag in which we introduce the exact keyword for which we want to rank our article. Likewise, we will also try to ensure that the H1 tag does not match the meta title so that it does not appear too over-optimized in Google's eyes.

– The H2 tag

In this tag, the best thing is not to repeat the main keyword again but to use synonyms of it. This way, we will achieve, on one hand, to gain in semantics in front of Google and, on the other, also try to rank a bit for the synonyms of our main keyword in Google. That is, using H2 tags in this way will have a double benefit.

Bold and Italics

– Do they still work?

Something that has been widely used in SEO is marking with bold and italics the keywords we wanted to rank to try to give them more emphasis and for Google to consider these keywords more relevant.

Currently, they practically have no direct relation to SEO, and that is why it is not worth focusing on making bold and italics exclusively for ranking.

It is true that it is very interesting to use them to help users visually see the most important parts of the article.

Why? Because you will facilitate reading for the user and therefore make a very large article much easier and more pleasant to read, which will improve the user experience and reduce the number of abandonments from our page, as well as the number of people who go to Google to look for the competition because they are not entirely satisfied with our content. Knowing how to use bold correctly will mean an improvement in our positioning in the long run.

External Links

External links from our articles to other websites have always been avoided at all costs because we are sending link juice to other websites that are usually our direct competitors.

However, this is a complete mistake, as linking to strong websites in our niche is a very healthy practice for both us and Google. On one hand, we offer users related sites or articles that complement the information, and that always improves the user experience; on the other hand, Google starts to relate us to very strong websites in the sector.

Therefore, there is no need to be afraid to link to other websites, as it can be beneficial, but of course, we should not go crazy and start linking to everyone.

Improving CTR

– What is it and how does improving CTR benefit us?

The CTR that I have mentioned before is the percentage of clicks that users make on your website from search results.

Google estimates that the website that is in position X for a specific search usually receives a certain number of clicks on average.

If your website, even without changing position, manages to increase that average number of clicks and thus increase the CTR, Google will interpret that your content is of great quality for the user and will then help you improve your rankings.

– The meta title tag

The title under which your website appears in search results will be what users will pay the most attention to when deciding to click on your result or not. That is why, in addition to having a meta title optimized for SEO, we also need to make it attractive to the user to encourage more clicks and thus improve our CTR.

We need to have a good call to action, which in some cases can simply be offering something "free", or in other cases offering some type of "exclusive" or "special offer" that catches a lot of attention and increases the number of clicks.

– The meta description tag

Perhaps the meta description is losing more and more strength in SEO matters, but it is still very important when it comes to improving our CTR since we can put much longer calls to action in our meta description.

For example, in an e-commerce site, it is always a good call to action to display the price of the product to potential customers, so if our competition is not displaying prices in search results, it is much more likely that the user will click on the one that already knows the price because it fits directly into the amount of money they intended to spend.

Improving User Metrics

– What are they and how does improving user metrics benefit us?

User metrics are based on the usability and experience you provide to users on your website. If your page is very complex to use or the content is very poor, user metrics will worsen because the people visiting your website will have a bad experience and consequently, will quickly abandon your website.

Moreover, they will return to Google to search for other websites that do meet their needs. This will result in a deterioration of your CTR and an improvement of your competition's CTR.

– Article Content

We have always been talking about quality content in front of Google, quality content to rank better, but in reality, quality content does not have to be for Google since Google cannot interpret whether an article is useful or if it is really useless.

Quality content has to be for the users, as it is they, through their actions, who will tell Google whether the content is good or bad.

If we offer content that does not provide any value to the user and does not resolve all their needs and questions, their immediate action will be to abandon our website and search for another result on Google, which will consequently worsen our user metrics.

– Audiovisual Media

An interesting complement to improve the user experience is to introduce audio and video in our articles.

What do we achieve with this? On one hand, we add value to our content, which will be appreciated by the user, and on the other hand, we also achieve a much longer stay on our website, which greatly improves the user experience of our site.

– Useful Images that Help Understand

Often, we rush to put images that do not provide any utility to our articles, images that are useless and practically just take up space.

These types of images do not help our content at all; however, if we include clarifying images, images that do resolve doubts and concerns, we will gain in user experience.

– Internal Linking

It is very interesting that from our own article we link to others on our own website for two reasons:

• On one hand, we will increase the time users spend on the site.
• On the other hand, we will complement the information of the article with that of others with related content that we have created in the past.

Improving Global SEO with CTR and User Experience

– Can improving the CTR and particular UX improve the global SEO of a website?

When we improve the SEO of our articles by improving their CTR and user experience or even improving their on-page SEO, we manage to increase the keywords ranked in Google and therefore we will also increase the number of visitors to our website.

What happens with this? It makes our global metrics improve, enhances our website's CTR, improves the overall user experience of the website, and therefore indirectly also improves the ranking of other sections of our site.

SEO for Reviews on High Authority Sites

– Why is it important to do SEO on our reviews?

Just as I have talked about the importance of working on-page SEO and improving CTR and user metrics for our articles, it is also essential to improve this in the reviews we make to link to our websites.

Why is it important? Very simple, if we are trying to rank for a specific keyword and we manage to optimize that review well for that keyword, Google will give it relevance for that keyword, and therefore it will transmit much more strength to that link to our website for that specific word.

– How to do SEO for our reviews?

We have to treat reviews as we would treat any other article on our website, so we should apply everything I have explained to optimize the articles on our page.

– What do we consider a high authority site?

It is clear that sometimes we will make reviews on sites of higher or lower authority, but what interests us is, of course, that the vast majority are done on high authority sites.

For this, we can resort to very well-positioned websites with a large number of visits, such as newspapers, for example. Moreover, it is now very easy to access this type of high-quality links through platforms like Unancor.

– Why is it even more important to optimize a review on a high authority site?

On these high authority sites, it is even more important to optimize them for SEO because, being important sites, not only will Google estimate that the article is related to the keyword you are interested in ranking, but it is also possible that some of these reviews will rank on Google and therefore give you extra value for that link on that high authority website.

Conclusions on Doing SEO for Articles

In conclusion, we can say that, although we try to rank the biggest keywords on the homepage or in the categories of our website, we cannot forget that it is also essential to work very well on the positioning of the articles present on our page.

Doing this will not only give us very positive direct benefits, but it will also indirectly achieve an improvement in the overall SEO of our website.