Creating unique content that is valuable to users is a great way to engage readers and gain powerful SEO backlinks at the same time. The best part about creating good content is that you can be creative. From educational articles to useful listicles that visitors can save or read on their own, to local community content with useful information, it all helps to gain more traffic, links, and authority online.
Types of Content & How it is Used
Text vs Image
Images grab and hold attention substantially faster than text, and can also be used to make posts and pages more entertaining. If you are presenting a lot of information, it is best to break up that information with pictures to give readers a reprieve from the text and to keep them engaged.
Educational Content
Educational content uses an assortment of teaching tools and media types to convey a lesson or point. Strong educational content and strong marketing content are shockingly similar – both focus on grabbing your audience’s attention, keeping your audience engaged, and promoting knowledge acquisition and retainment.
Evergreen Content
Content that is “evergreen” is always relevant – i.e., it will always attract readers and will not become dated easily, if at all. Evergreen content is essential for gaining and maintaining a presence on search engines such as Google.
Blog Posts vs Pages
Blog posts are an excellent way to diversify content, cultivate a higher likelihood of appearing on search engines, and convey concise information in a user-friendly manner, but are also often embedded deeper within a site. Pages, in contrast, are easier to navigate towards, have a greater presence on the site, and are more likely to remain relevant.
Listicles
Listicles are short and sweet articles that present information in a fast, easy-to-digest form with bold headings to grab readers’ attention and quick descriptions to make sure they don’t become bored. Listicles also make excellent evergreen content – listicles as far back as several years ago still appear on search engines regularly, depending on the topic.
PRO TIP: Evergreen URLs
As you create your pages and/or posts, it is important to consider URL versatility and craft them for the future, especially when it comes to building “evergreen” content. Creating pages/post and publishing them using a technique we call “Evergreen URL” optimization can improve the future usability of the page. For example, if you have a listicle blog article containing “7 Ways to Eat Healthy” as the title, you may want to consider removing the number 7 from the URL slug, and use “Ways to Eat Healthy” or “Best Ways to Eat Healthy” instead so you can add to your list in the future and change the article title as needed. Before long, your listicle could have 20, 30, or even 100+ items that are all useful, and it gives you the ability to build massive SEO content pages at your own pace. With this technique, you can build extremely strong SEO content that will last a lifetime.