Achieve better rankings through relevance – Get to the point!

During the course of the year, it has become increasingly difficult to deliberately improve a site’s ranking using specific keywords. The good old "text + link building = ranking" has not been working as it did when originally released by the largest search engine in the world for some time now.

So, how can we write a website text that appeals to readers and bots alike?

Sometimes less is more – How long should the text be?

There is no "ideal" text length or "ideal" word count. Before beginning writing, you have to do a little homework to later have as clear an outline as possible. This is what I do when writing rankings-oriented text:

1. Google:

If the text is supposed to focus on a specific search term, it often helps to do a Google search. Google’s favorites will appear first and you can find inspiration for your own text.

And, at first, you don’t even need a tool for a manual analysis of important, frequently occurring search terms. Thanks to Google, similar search inputs can be read under the SERPs in "used search queries". When you use this together with Google Suggest, multiple important keywords and combinations come together quickly. Of course, this needs to be done with an empty cache and in your browsers’ incognito mode so that the results are not manipulated by your own searches.

2. W-questions:

With a W-question tool, you can then check which questions are most often queried and searched on any given topic. The questions are often similar and yield the same results, just using a different sentence construction. Nevertheless, this can also provide more ideas for text structuring and subheadings.

3. Research:

Next, you should consider you expect from your article on a given keyword. What would you want to know if you had searched for keyword XY? What information would you expect from a top-ranked site? With this catalog of questions, you can research the answers and then seek to answer these in your text as precisely and completely as possible.

4. Tools:

To fine-tune your text, you can run it through the TF*IDF tool. This tool shows you the terms belonging to the keyword set that Google expects from a text on this topic. Additionally, you can check the term weighting of your manually researched keywords and adjust them as necessary.

Figure 1: TF*IDF analysis with OnPage.org

Figure 2: Using this text assistant from OnPage.org, you can comprehensively optimize your texts.

So, you can see that text length cannot really be determined beforehand. The common practice of text length limits is rather a question of budget.

Text length depends on the following factors:

• Topic

• Competition

• SEO requirements

Why is the relevance of a text to several search inquiries particularly important?

Google’s search engine bots crawl and index many millions of websites every day. This requires a lot of resources. So, it’s understandable that Google wants to be able to handle many search inquiries with one URL. This means that a site’s contents must be able to qualitatively answer as many search inquiries as possible using only one keyword. This has many advantages:

• The user immediately finds information to search queries they would have subsequently searched.

• According to indexing, a URL is first ranked using only the less important “side keys”; rankings based on the main keyword happen later. Ostensibly, Google is testing the site’s relevance in Longtail and is analyzing user behavior before Moneykey rankings kick in.

• When visitors find a lot of information on a site the retention time increases.

What other qualities should a good website text have?

Of course, planning the content of a text is only the first step. The best content is no good if it is not written and prepared with your target group in mind. You should bear the following factors in mind:

• Target group (who is reading the text?)

• Intention (what should the text achieve?)

• Publisher (who will be publishing the text?)

• Style (advice or product description?)

For internal linking, you should also incorporate short paragraphs or individual sentences into the text to enable cross-linking by topic.

How else can you improve relevance?

A website with only text is naturally less interesting for visitors, even if it’s chock-full of information. The visual layout and introduction of additional content formats are very important to be able to later give positive signals with regard to the user experience. So you should enhance your text with the following elements:

• Images (named after important keywords, with alternative image information and image signature)

• Videos (YouTube videos, for example, are very easy to incorporate and keep the user on the website longer)

• Tables (clearly structured and prepared)

• Lists (summarizing important points at the end of the text, for example)

• Input forms (depending on the goals of the text)

Conclusion

It is not always necessary to publish a text that is as comprehensive as possible. It can also be short and to the point, as long as it has everything it needs to make it stand out. It is important that each text be written with a "header". I have described here how this can be approached. The reader will notice this immediately, and search engine bots will be happy to get such high-quality input - and we all know what this means!