Now you know how to identify low-value content, let’s run through some of the most common ways to improve pages that could be harming your overall search ranking. Here’s a quick preview of the steps we’ll be looking at in this section:
Deliver real value: Make sure you’re providing what users look for when they click through to each page.
Differentiate: Evaluate competitor pages for the same query, analyse their content and make yours unique
Format pages: Structure content so users can find value easily (headings, styles, bold text, images, data visualisations, etc.)
Prune pages: Remove or update pages generating little or no traffic
Updates: Keep your content fresh with overseas data updated information, stats, quotes, references, visuals and external links.
Expand “thin content”: Expand thin content or remove pages that add no value.
Merge competing content: Identify pages that are competing for the same traffic and merge them into one, higher-value page.
Check your visuals: Update visuals where necessary and make sure they’re optimised.
Technical SEO: Check loading times, links and other technical SEO essentials.
For some pages, you may need to follow all or most of these steps while others may only require one or two of these steps.
Step #1: Deliver what users are looking for
From the user’s perspective, high-value use virtual office services to expand a business content delivers what they’re looking for and satisfies their needs to the extent they have no instinct to click back to the search results. There are two key interactions taking place in the search experience where you have to deliver for each user:
The results page: Your organic listing must be visible, relevant to the query and compel the user to click through. It should demonstrate that the content on the following page provides what they’re looking for.
The landing page: When a user clicks through to your page from organic search, your content must deliver on the expectations you set up in your organic listing and the expectations they had when typing their query.
Users have expectations when they type queries into search engines and you have to understand the search intent behind keywords and phrases to deliver what they’re looking for. This informs the topics you cover, the titles you publish and the information you provide in your content and also helps you optimise your search listings (titles, meta descriptions, etc.) to encourage clicks.
You want to show users that your page provides
The best content for their needs and your austria business directory listing allows you to differentiate from the other results.
For example, if a young student has decided on their career path, they might wonder what they need to study in further education. They could type in something like “what courses should I study to become a criminal psychologist” into Google and see a results page that looks like this:
Search results for ‘what courses should I study to become a criminal psychologist?’
Interestingly, we’ve got a featured snippet showing at the top of this results page and it’s not a university or online learning platform taking the top spot, but a recruitment company based in Ipswich.
If you take a closer look at the search listing, you can see a few reasons why this has won the coveted featured snippet and why this is the most compelling listing in the primary viewport.
SEO listing which has won the featured snippet
First, you’ve got the title that promises to unveil the “best” path towards becoming a criminal psychologist and the meta description clarifies that the next page explains the complete journey from high school through to higher education. As soon as this results page loads, this listing matches the user intent with 100% relevance, positions itself as the best result to click on and accurately represents the value users are going to get from clicking through.
Crucially, when our future criminal psychologist clicks on the listing, the page delivers on the promise made in the listing by describing the specific courses people should take at each stage of education.
Step #2: Make sure every page is unique
We touched on this in step #1 and the importance of using search listings to differentiate from the other results on the page. The thing is, you have to deliver on this differentiation and this requires you to produce content that’s truly unique from the other pages ranking for the same query.
To achieve this, you have to analyse the content of your rivals and strive to offer something of value that your target audience won’t find elsewhere.
In the example we looked at above, we saw a recruitment agency cover the entire academic journey of criminal psychologists to illustrate the entire path students need to take, rather than simply covering the higher education stage of their studies.
For competitive keywords, you’ll need to analyse your rivals’ content and know what matters to your target audience. For example, the three listings below all cover the same story of supposed leaks of Apple’s rumoured M1X Macbook Pro line – a topic that’s been covered in thousands of similar articles.
