In 2023, despite the revolutionary AI, SEO remains the most important part for marketers to drive traffic to websites/ You need to ensure that your content is ranked highly in SEO and brings traffic and leads. The best way to do this is to always bring it back to the reader. Remember that they are the most important people in your business and your aim should be to establish a long-term relationship with them.

Related: Top 4 Reasons Why your Blog Posts Don’t Get Good Traction for Your Website

We have compiled a few actionable and useful tips that will help you in creating your best SEO content for 2023.  

1. Keyword Research

We hear ‘targeted keywords’ thrown around a lot, but do you really know what they mean?

By researching your audience and discovering where they go online, you can talk to them and find statistics on personal habits and preferences.

Research your keywords and discover if they overlap with your audience’s preferences.

And finally, research your topic so that you can provide your audience with the knowledge that they want to know.

By doing these three research tasks, you are effectively answering the following key questions and creating targeted keywords:

-Who is my audience?

-What do they want to know?

-Why do they need to know?

-Which words are they using to ask for this information online?​

2. Keywords by Funnel

Your keywords and keyword-oriented content should follow the buyer's journey closely. In order to do it efficiently, use this process that we have been using for many projects successfully.

• Define the funnel for your product/service
• Define a modifier list for each stage of the funnel
• Find short-tail and long-tail keywords based on the funnel stages, your user research
• For bottom-of-funnel keywords: Combine modifiers and keywords to have another list of keywords that you can use
• Mapping your keywords via the content mapping framework
• Decide the types of content pieces for each stage of the funnel

Credit: Neil Patel Page

Consider mapping keywords to these types of content pieces for the bottom of the funnel:

• Customer stories
• Webinars, mini-classes
• Product Live demos
• Evaluation and comparison sheet

3. Declutter Your Content Pieces

By deleting content that is too short, irrelevant, outdated, and unpopular and redirecting followers to your new and updated content will not only allow a more cohesive user experience for you and your customers, but it will also boost ranks.

Sometimes it is not important to constantly create content if the content is not relevant. Remember that the audience’s response is more important as engagement and feedback provides you with more positive results than anything else. Don't wait a few years to do your website decluttering. Consider doing decluttering yearly or quarterly depending on how much content your website has.

Have struggled with decluttering your content? Check out this awesome blog post published in Foundation: What Marie Kondo Can Teach B2B Companies About Content Creation

After you finish your content mapping for 2020, you move on to declutter your website content and gated content. The guides to decluttering website by CrazyEgg and Themeisle are among the best guides to use.

4. Think of the visual

Video and imagery aren’t going to lose its appeal in 2020 and if you want to engage with your followers and boost your rankings, then you are going to need to jump on the bandwagon and entertain through visuals. Content is viewed a whopping 94% more times when coupled with an image.

However, keep in mind that most shoppers will not wait more than 3 seconds to access a page, so don’t clog up your pages with lengthy and long-winded videos that slow down your page speed.

More and more websites (especially SaaS blog pages) pay more attention to their branded images. SaaS marketers have paid more attention to creating the illustration, feature images to ensure that the overall look and feel of the website is consistent and branded. Examples below show the consistency Buzzsumo wants to maintain in their old branding and their new branding.

Buzzsumo 's old blog page with the iconic mascot.

Buzzsumo 's new blog page: no mascot anymore but the blue color is consistently used in all feature images

5. Use more high authority sources

People are all becoming more aware of the fact that the Internet is full of opinions and people can say whatever they want, back it up with falsified research, and claim it as true. Make sure you do your homework and cite your research properly. Give credit where credit is due and ensure that where you get your information from is also a reputable source.

With this in mind, make sure that you know that you are the expert in your field, or else, why would anyone want to follow you or buy from you? Believe in yourself and provide as much knowledge as you can about what you know.

Original research with your own statistics, documentation, and studies will provide an incredible amount of additional information to your audience and the industry that you work in. Use more academic and high authority sources to cite. Google algorithm favors trusted sources and will rate your content more credible and reliable when you have inbound links from the high ranked pages like Harvard Business Reviews, Hubspot blog, and others.

6. The 20/80 Rule

20% of your content will drive 80% of your traffic

Remember that the top 20% of your content will account for 80% of your traffic. So focus on this if you want to see results rather than spending a lot of time on the straggling content that brings you no results.

Update old content to make it fresh and relevant as you do not want to have your name expressing a view that is outdated and perhaps now downright wrong.  By doing this, you will see a jump in traffic from old posts and bring in old, valuable customers who had long forgotten their pleasant experiences with you.

7. Invest in useful content for your audience

The days for creating content fluff to jump your SEO ranks are pretty much over. Google now prefers blog posts based on the length as well. According to Hubspot, the ideal blog post length should be 2100 - 2400 words. However, avoid producing words just to hit the length. If the audiences cannot read your articles from the top to bottom because your article is repetitive and lengthy, they will leave your page even faster than the shorter blog posts.

I have seen some of our shorter blog posts (1500 words) that we have produced that have worked very well for our clients as much as the long-form blog posts. There are several factors: keywords, captivating writing, useful information.

Consider investing your time in creating some labor-intensive works like long-form blog posts (around 5000-8000 words), topic clusters, video series. These types of content will help you improve your SEO ranking a lot and keep visitors coming back for relevant content.

Final thoughts​

Our tips for creating the best SEO content for 2020 are mainly geared towards being more focused on creating a relationship with your audience and keeping them engaged with your old and new content. By introducing visual imagery to your content, you are catering to the attention of the fast-paced buyer, still showing that personable and human side of you that we all crave in the market today.