After hearing gazillions of techniques in how to optimize your content using keywords years after years, this year would be different.

This year, your aim is to simply create content that readers will enjoy and mind you, if your readers enjoy it, Google will definitely love it too.

Use keywords that you’ve organically found throughout your writing, keywords you’ve gathered after listening to your customers and your ideal clients. However, to tell Google that your content is actually what your readers are looking for, use the following checklist for each content you create and publish:

The Headline and Meta Title

Google chooses this as the clickable link in search results, so adding your keywords in the title helps to increase the organic click-through rate because searchers know that it’s relevant to what they are looking for.

URL Structure

URL along with the title also shows up in search results and attracts users’ eyes. Therefore, make sure that you add your main keyword on your URL title with dashes for spaces.

First Paragraph

Readers skim and scan content to see if it’s the content they are looking for. That is why the first paragraph of your content is crucial. Tell your readers right away what your content is all about and more reasons why they should stick around.

Subheadings

It is essential that you cut your content into chunky parts by adding subheadings and bullet points. This will make it easy for your readers to fo through your content and will give them more time to read through. Nobody wants to read through a huge clump of words, right?

By adding subheadings, you are also telling Google further information about your content and which ones are important which will help you improve your ranking.

Image alt text

Google is not perfect. In fact, it is not smart enough to fully understand images. Therefore, using image alt text is very helpful. Make sure you rename your images properly and be as specific as possible. This will also help you rank in image search results.

There’s no doubt that keywords are the most essential part of content marketing.

It helps content marketers on so many different levels, from understanding readers, planning, designing and structuring content. It may take time to figure out which keywords best to use but it’ll surely be worth it.