Writing quality content can be an arduous task, especially when we try to rank higher for the target keywords. It may be tempting to engage in keyword stuffing to rank your content higher.
However, Google is a lot smarter than that. Thanks to different algorithm updates, it can tell when a piece of content is stuffed with unnecessary keywords.
In fact, engaging in such action can automatically harm your rankings and lead to the removal of your website. But the exact opposite happens with content quality. One cannot ignore the importance of adding keywords to a blog post. It is impossible when dealing with SEO. But you can stuff these keywords naturally without making them look forced or unreadable.
This article will walk you through content quality and keyword stuffing. You will learn about the two terms and how you create quality content without keyword stuffing.
What is Content Quality?
Content quality refers to the depth of information within a piece of content. It is how well your piece of content achieves its goals. It also refers to content that is engaging, relevant, and useful to the audience. It can help you to attract users, convert them into paying customers, and increase retention.
If you want to create high-quality content, you must understand your audience and industry. Although many think content mainly only revolves around blog articles, it can also be in different formats such as videos, ebooks, social media posts, templates, and more. What matters is how you tailor the perfect format to your target audience.
Why Content Quality is Important for SEO
Everyone understands that quality content is essential to SEO. But what is the reason behind it? In this section, you will learn about five reasons why you should create quality content for SEO.
It increases organic traffic
Creating high-quality content means that you are already creating a solid foundation for your website. Good quality content correlates with good SEO results. If your team can craft and implement unique SEO strategies, then Google will put you in the spotlight by placing you on the first page of the search results. This automatically drives organic traffic and will eventually increase your ranking status on the search engine result page (SERP).
It engages your audience
Good content is a great asset to your website. When your audience finds something informative and valuable, they tend to stick more longer on your website. It enables them to have positive experiences and compels them to always come back for more. In addition, it is the ticket to capture your reader’s attention and create a positive brand image.
It powers up social media presence
About 83% of marketers utilize social media to promote their websites and businesses. This helps them to reach their target audience quickly. However, you can’t boost your online presence without high-quality content. If you are one of those businesses that doesn’t have much engagement despite having huge followers, you need to consider using quality content to your advantage.
When you create a post or tweet on trendy topics, it can help to promote brand awareness. You can also witness an increase in the number of your followers and get more engagements. Hence, you need to always come up with unique content that can improve traction on social media.
It builds authority
When you create high-quality and relevant content that meets the searcher’s needs, they will begin to view you as an expert that knows their work. As a result, it builds trust in your audience. After all, a survey by Dragon Search Marketing revealed that 61% of consumers feel better about a company that delivers good quality content consistently.
Once you publish great content for them, you build a relationship with them and begin to see value in you. They will most likely trust your recommendations and this will have a positive impact on your website.
It improves conversion
Although many assume that advertisements often influence buyers more than article content, that assumption is wrong. In fact, 7 out of 10 customers prefer to learn about a brand via article-type content instead of advertisements.
Due to this, you can publish content with commercial and transactional intent to prompt them to buy. Creating content that informs your audience’s purchasing decision could help you to generate leads and eventually convert them.
When doing this, ensure that you use original graphics rather than stock photos. Also, ensure to include CTAs in your blogs as it guides your readers to take your desired action.
What is Keyword Stuffing?
Keyword Stuffing occurs when many target terms are jam-packed on a web page with the hope of ranking higher on the search engine result page. Web pages that are filled with keywords do not end up as natural content.
For instance, imagine you sell a designer bag brand and want it to rank in the search engine. Content stuffed with keywords will look like this:
“Welcome to ABC Company where you can get the best designer bags in the world. We offer designer bags that can make you look elegant and add to your flawless beauty. Our designer bags are of great quality and are better than other designer bags from our competitors. Ensure you get your designer bags from us today.”
You may have come across content like this on some websites selling some products before. Although they are trying to advertise their product, you can notice how the content becomes repetitive, unnecessary, and irrelevant to most sentences.
When the audience starts reading content stuffed with the same keywords, they can react negatively by leaving the page for another. Also, Google’s crawler bots can pick this up and frown at it, thereby negatively affecting your visibility on the SERP.
In the past, keyword stuffing was a popular technique to improve brand visibility and ranking for particular keywords. However, this technique is now frowned upon today. Thanks to the algorithm updates released by Google to fight keyword stuffing, SEO experts had to look for other means to rank, or else they get penalized.
Keyword Stuffing Examples
Here are some examples of keyword stuffing.
Invisible text
This involves matching the color codes of the text with the color of the website. This makes the text invisible to readers, but the crawler bots can still read it for ranking purposes.
Unnatural repetition of keywords
This occurs when you repeatedly use keywords on web pages but it doesn’t look natural or sound well to readers
Spamdexing
This kind of keyword stuffing is a bit different. It is the overuse of internal linking within a piece of content. By overuse, it could amount to two or three times in a paragraph. It’s great if you have lots of content on your site. However, it is to provide information to your readers and not send them to ten different pages on your website.
Metadata Stuffing
Metadata is the couple of lines you see on the SERP. People can fill this space with keywords to try and improve their SERP ranking. However, some people can also stuff the metadata with keywords. Although these locations aren’t visible to the readers, Google crawlers can read and index these locations.
The Dangers of Keyword Stuffing to SEO
Keyword stuffing is a bad idea for your website. Here are five reasons why you should avoid keyword stuffing.
It drives away visitors from your website
Search engines such as Google can remove websites that rely on keyword stuffing from their SERP. The web crawlers can spot pages that overuse a word or phrase, and then send an alert to the algorithm to demote the site. Ultimately, keyword stuffing can stop you from reaching your target audience, as they won’t be able to discover your site.
Google prides itself on providing quality and relevant results to its users. Due to this, they won’t present something that looks like spam or repetition to them. Just as how you won’t buy products from a spam email, your prospects won’t buy products from spam content. In fact, they will leave your website if they find out that you have spammy content. This will make you lose your audience as they will go to other sites to search for better content.
It hides brand and domain authority
Take a look at the example below.
You can see how the paragraphs are stuffed with the term “red apples.” If you are scrolling through a social media platform such as Facebook and then you see that as a post, will you share it with your friends and followers? The answer is probably no.
In a time where social presence is essential to the success of a brand, you need authoritative content that can stand out and command authority. The content brands post can make or break them very fast. Hence, they need to publish highly relevant and shareable content. Just like website content, they should understand what their audience is searching for and curate content that matches. The keyword will flow naturally into the content, instead of forming content and stuffing it with keywords.
The search engine can penalize keyword stuffing
Search engines such as Google focus on providing users with a good experience. They dislike keyword stuffing such that they release algorithms to combat the issue and present more relevant content to users.
If the crawler bots identify that you have stuffed your websites with keywords, you can face penalties on the relevant pages or the whole site. In some cases, Google can take down the site from the SERP entirely.
Best Strategies to Create Quality Content Without Keyword Stuffing
SEO keywords are essential to attracting your target audience and ranking on the search engine. But how do you use them naturally without compromising on content quality? Here are some tips to help you create quality content without keyword stuffing.
Understand your audience
If you own a blog, you want your readers to get to know about the topic that interests you. If you have an e-commerce site, you want your audience to know about the products or services you offer. While this is important, you also need to consider what your audience wants to read about. What interests do they have? What problems are they trying to solve? What answers are they searching for?
High-quality content contains the information your audience is searching for. It addresses their goals, solves their problems, and answers their questions. To discover what information your audience is searching for, you have to conduct proper keyword research.
This will help you to understand the topics to write about and the phrases your audience uses in the search query. You can use tools such as Google Trends, Google Analytics, and social media to discover these keywords. Then, tailor a piece of content to meet their needs and expectations.
You can also ask your customers about the type of content they will find useful. Survey tools such as Google Forms or Typeform can make this activity effortless. If you need more content ideas, you can research and analyze your competitors.
Choose relevant and specific keywords
Not all keywords are created equal. Some are too competitive, broad, or even irrelevant for your content. But you want to choose keywords that are specific to your niche, relevant to your content, and have a good search volume.
To do this, you can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Moz, to discover and analyze keywords that match your content goals. Each piece of content you want to write about must have a single primary keyword that matches the user’s intent. The primary keyword is a popular search term that you want to rank for.
Once you have selected the primary keyword, choose around two to five secondary keywords that are related. This can be long-tail keyword variations of the primary keyword, synonyms, or closely related to the topic.
For instance, if your main keyword is “cake.” Based on keyword research, you can find some long-tail variations such as “how to bake a cake” or “best cake mixer” in your SEO strategy.
Optimize your metadata
Your metadata is the cues your readers and search engines see when they first discover your content. This includes the title, meta description, and headings. They give insight into what your content is about. They should be clear, informative, and catch your reader’s attention. They should also include your primary keyword or a variation of it.
Your title should give insight into the content and appeal to the readers. The meta description should summarize the main ideas. Meanwhile, the headings should break down your content into scannable and logical sections. Use H1 for your title, H2 for the main headings, and H3 for the subheadings.
Write naturally
Your content is primarily designed for humans, not robots. Don’t sacrifice your voice, tone, or style for SEO. Instead, write naturally and engagingly for your audience. Use simple and clear language to communicate effectively.
Also, use synonyms, long-tail keywords, or closely related words to add to the depth of your content. Connect emotionally with your readers through stories. Use formatting, images, videos, and other media to make your content visually appealing to your readers.
Edit your content
In a bid to include the keywords with high-ranking status, you could end up adding incorrect phrases and sentences. Besides, no matter how well you write, it is essential to edit and proofread your content.
Editing helps to improve the flow, content structure, and clarity. It also helps to eliminate incorrect phrases, spelling, or punctuation errors. For instance, eating apples isn’t correct. You need to add ‘an’ before apple to make it grammatically correct. Even if your keyword density is acceptable to the search engine, incorrect phrases can make it difficult to get the results you are looking for.
That is why editing and proofreading are necessary to ensure quality content and credibility. You can use tools such as Grammarly, ProWritingAid, or Hemingway to edit and proofread your content.
Measure and improve your performance
Once you are done with all these stages, it’s time to measure and improve your performance. Most times, your SEO and content goals are the checklist you use to evaluate the performance of your content. Use tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or Moz to track and analyze how your content is performing and how your audience is engaging with it.
Examine metrics such as organic traffic, click-through rate, page per session, impressions, bounce rate, conversions, and social shares. Identify what works and what is working, and make the necessary adjustments.
Conclusion
As an SEO writer, you can write quality content without keyword stuffing. Try to understand your audience, choose a specific keyword related to your niche, and write naturally to engage your audience. Avoid keyword stuffing no matter what it takes as it ends up ruining your content and efforts.
