Content optimization today should combine a user-first approach with a good grounding in SEO. Here’s how to get the right balance.
Google’s helpful content update has finished rolling out, and while it didn’t create the impact many anticipated, it’s certainly turned our attention to reviewing and improving content.
What we have determined is that Google is making more steps toward serving content written for people, by people. With this in mind, optimizing content for both people and search engines should be possible.
Here are my top tips for enhancing your content for better search results and happy readers.
1. Review the readability
Assessing readability is one of my biggest tips for optimizing online content.
Online, we read and take in information differently than in print. Short, simple sentences are easier for us to digest.
In the U.K., guidelines encourage us to pitch our writing to something a 9-year-old could understand. The U.K.’s Office for National Statistics recommends writing in a way that’s easy to understand for all users.
Putting this into practice is harder than it sounds and is often overlooked.
Search engines love “readable” content too. They use natural language processing (NLP) to process language based on linguistic rules to understand the relationships between words.
The intended meaning can easily be lost if these relationships are too complex.
For example, this sentence has a readability score of 11 (OK) on the Hemingway Editor: