7 Types of SEO-Friendly Content to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Website

Content marketing is a powerful digital marketing strategy that attracts businesses of all sizes and industries. In fact, 70 percent of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.

There’s just one problem:

When developing a content marketing strategy, it can be hard to know which content types will help increase organic traffic to your website.

All content isn’t equal. Some increase your organic search traffic, conversions and revenue while others don’t.

So, what’s the solution? how to make SEO friendly content that is efficient for your brand?

Today, I’ll share with you 7 types of content that will boost organic traffic to your website.

Let’s get started.

1. Create an Epic Content

I bet you’ve heard that ‘Content is King’. But, did you ever try to find what type of content is a king?

Let me answer for you.

Quality content is the king.

Here is what I mean:

When I say quality content, I’m talking about content that everyone suggests to others when they are searching for information on a specific topic. For example, if someone wants to start a blog, I would refer him to a step-by-step guide on how to start a blog over, let’s say, a simple checklist.

Why? Because a step-by-step guide will have more information and value than a 100-word checklist. When you want to drive organic traffic to your website, you need to focus on creating epic content that’s of value to the reader.

Here is the step-by-step process to create valuable, engaging and epic content.

Kickstart with relevant keywords

Keyword research is a crucial factor of SEO, along with link building and content marketing. The difference between a website that gets huge search traffic and the one that doesn’t is the keywords they use.

And, when it comes to writing epic content, keyword research should be your priority. Because there is no benefit to creating content that no one can find.

Here are three tips on how to make SEO friendly content.

Start with the seed keywords

You can use a keyword research tool like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner to find a high search volume, easy to rank keywords.

These can be your primary keywords around which you can create your epic content.

Find relevant secondary long tail keywords

Add relevant long tail keywords in your content to get the most value from it.

Use these keywords as heading and sub-headings to structure your content. It will help you two ways: first, it will bring you search traffic as they have high search volume, and, second, it will satisfy the user’s intent, so they will be back again for more.

Add LSI keywords to help Google 

Back in the day, Google and other search engines would understand a page topic entirely based on the keywords they saw on the page.

But, now the rule has been changed. After Google’s Rank Brain algorithm update, it completely relies on LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords to understand the content.

For example, if you published a post about ‘content marketing strategy’, Google will scan your page to find other related terms such as content marketing plan, B2B content marketing, content marketing budget, etc. to understand the topic.

Use LSI Graph to find the LSI keywords for your content. You can also take the help of Google Autocomplete to uncover LSI terms to use in your content.

For example, I want to write a post about content marketing strategy, so I typed ‘content marketing strategy’ into Google and see what it suggested to me.

These bold words are LSI keywords. You should use these terms into your content because these are the terms human users look for when they search for anything related to ‘content marketing strategy’.

You can also use ‘Searches Related to…” to find LSI keywords. It is similar to Google Autocomplete.

They give related terms at the bottom of the SERP.

However, some terms might not fit in your content, so you should avoid them.

Find the right topic ideas

You have a topic. But how to make SEO friendly content knowing that your topic is the right fit for your business, website or audience?

Short answer: Topic validation.

Of course, you have an awesome list of keywords to create content, but researching and validating the right topic is also important.

There are plenty of content discovery tools such as Buzzsumo, Quora and Google Trends to research and understand your content topic’s potential.

Don’t start writing content until you see if people are talking about your topic or not.

Outwork the competition

Epic content is the best of the best. And, to create such content you’ll have to answer the following questions.

• What topics have already been covered?
• What resources are available?
• Is the content out there long enough to satisfy a user’s query?
• Can you write something better than what already exists?

The best way to find the answer to these questions is to start spying on your competitors’ content. Make a list of top 10 pages on the first page for your target keywords.

By researching your competitors’ content you’ll be able to measure your content against them, as well as find the missing elements that you can include in your content to make it epic.

Remember, competitors’ content can be helpful but you shouldn’t copy them. Make sure you create your own unique content to prevent the duplicate content issue.

2. Create Stunning Infographics

The best content you can create is the one that educates and adds value to your audiences, so they come back later for more.

And when it comes to educating people, what can be better than infographics?

In fact, infographics are 30x more likely to be read than text content. It is because visual content helps users to scan content faster and memorize it better than text content.

Starbucks recently used an infographic to announce their commitment to becoming a resource-positive company over the next couple of decades.

As you see, the above infographic educating its audience on Starbuck’s commitment to sustainability. To convey the same message using text content might have resulted in a lengthy 1500-word post.

Additionally, articles with infographics get 178% more backlinks than standard articles, which can ultimately increase your website traffic.

There are plenty of free infographic tools like Visme and Canva that you can use to create stunning infographics yourself. If you have some budget to spend, then hiring a professional graphic designer would be the best decision.

3. Write in-depth How-to Posts

How-to posts are the best when it comes to educating your audience and establishing yourself as an authority in the industry. They are popular because they help users to solve a specific problem they are struggling with.

When writing how-to posts, make sure you provide in-depth information to your audience, sharing exactly how they can use your product or services to solve their specific problem.

For example, in this post “How to Maximize Your Stackla Results in the Least Amount of Time Possible”, Stackla’s teaching its users how they can save time in their platform while getting better content results.

Things to remember on how to make SEO friendly content when creating how-to guides:

• Solve a specific problem that your audience is struggling with – A how-to guide is only successful when it satisfies users by providing answers to their questions. For example,  if someone wants to start a blog. She doesn’t just want to learn how to set up a blog, but also how to find the best WordPress theme, plugins, hosting, etc. If your post would contain all this information, it would be an ultimate how-to guide that your audience would love to read and share.
• Outline your content – Before writing your how-to post, create a structure for it. Writing your post within a structured outline will help you write faster and stay on track. How-to posts have higher chances to go viral and provide you huge organic traffic if everything is done right. To flow information smoothly, use lots of subheadings, bullet points, visuals, etc.

4. Reviews and Visual UGC

Product reviews and visual social proof are other great forms of content that can bring you a lot of traffic and conversions.

People always look for quality reviews and customer photos about a product before they make an actual purchase. According to BrightLocal, 82 percent of consumers read online reviews, with the average consumer reading 10 reviews before being able to trust a business.

A good product review and customer image can bring you lots of organic traffic and sales, so make sure to prominently showcase these across your product and services pages, making it easy for customers to submit rate, review and post photos and videos of your products.

5. Incorporate Video into Your Content Strategy

Video is by far one of the most consumed contents on the internet, and the reason is all age groups watch videos.

According to a study, 99 percent of marketers who use video in their content marketing strategy will keep continuing to create video content, and 87 percent of marketers say that using video marketing has increased traffic to their website.

Video is an amazing way to share information about your product or services. You can easily share a lot of knowledge with your audience via videos.

The only problem? Creating a professional video can cost a lot of money because it requires a studio, production equipment, scripts, etc. Luckily, there are other ways to produce videos on the cheap.

Using a smartphone and video editing software like Camtasia, you can make professional videos cheaply.

There are many ways you can use video in your content marketing:

• Create an explainer video to introduce your business to your audience
• Create a video showing features of your product or services
• Create a step-by-step tutorial video explaining how to use your product

Avoid shooting a long video. The shorter and more to the point, the better. Additionally, you don’t need to host these videos on your website; you can upload them on video streaming sites like YouTube and Vimeo.

Don’t forget to put a link in the description of the relevant page or blog post when publishing a video on third-party sites such as YouTube or Vimeo.

6. Authoritative Link Resources

If you don’t want to write content, curate them.

Content curation is the process to collect useful information and share it with your audience. Therefore, they can get high-value information in a single place. According to Curata, 76 percent of marketers use curated content.

Link resources make useful information easily accessible to your readers when they need it. Here is an example:

There is plenty of valuable and informative content (text, video, and images) on the internet that you can share with your audience. It will bring you massive organic traffic to your website because you are offering them valuable information.

7. Guest Posts

Guest posting is still one of the best types of content for generating organic traffic, and establishing authority when published on high-quality sites.

When you publish an amazing guest post on other authority websites, it doesn’t only boost your personal branding but bring traffic to your website. Because the audience of those sites looks for other content from you.

You can instantly boost your organic traffic with a single post, if it gets published on high authority sites such as Forbes, Inc.com, etc.

Yes, you can indeed increase your organic traffic using guest posts but only if you do it right. Publishing a guest post on low-quality sites won’t get you any benefit and could be a waste of your time and effort.

Here are some tips to guest post the right way.

Find the right guest post sites

There are many ways to find sites for guest posting but the popular one is using search operators like:

• Your Keyword “guest post”
• Your Keyword “write for us”
• Your Keyword “guest article”
• Your Keyword “guest post opportunities”
• Your Keyword “this is a guest post by”

You can also spy your competitors’ backlinks to find sites where they are getting mentioned. To save your time here’s a huge list of 300+ guest posting sites that someone already created for you.

Now you have a handful of websites for the guest posting. It’s time for the next step.

Send your pitch

Remember, sites that accept guest posts get tons of guest post pitch every day. To get the approval you will have to send a different pitch from others.

Here is the guest post pitch which I send to sites for guest posting. You can use this guest post pitch template.

Hi Name,

My name is [Your Name] and I’m a founder of [Your Site Name]. I love the content you publish on your site [Your Target Website Name]. 

I’m writing to you because I’d love to contribute a guest post on your website.

I’ve been brainstorming some topics that I think your readers would get a ton of value from:

Topic #1
Topic #2
Topic #3
To give you an idea of the quality I’ll bring to your website, here are a few links to guest posts I’ve written recently:

Previously published guest post link #1 
Previously published guest post link #2
Previously published guest post link #3
And I’ll make sure the piece I write for you overflows with information that can’t be found anywhere else. You can also share if you have any specific topic ideas in your mind. 

Let me know if we can work together. 

Thanks & Regards,

Your Name

Why does this guest post pitch work so well?

• Starts with a short introduction and something specific about their website.
• Given topics make their job easy to choose the topic
• Previously published post help them understand your writing
• Soft sell
• Short and sweet pitch less than 150 words

And, now it’s time for…

Write your guest post

After you get an approval of guest posting, the next step is to write content for them.

Start with keyword research and find low competition keywords that rank faster. Create a content structure once you have a list of keywords.

Write the guest post with the same quality as would write on your personal blog. Don’t compromise with the quality just because you are writing for another website.

Best Practices to Increase Organic Traffic

The seven types of content that I showed you are proven to bring a lot of organic traffic. However, they all have some common features that you should know about.

Create content that deals with important things – Whether you are picking a trending topic or a general one, you should always look for the content to solve specific problems.

Be honest – You shouldn’t hide any facts or truth from your audience. It will make them trust and respect you. And, they might become your loyal audience and refer your content to others.

Provide value – Your goal should be quality content, not quantity. If you are not providing value to your audience you will lose them.

Support facts with a source – If you claim something in your content make sure you back it up with the source. It will increase trust among users that the information you provide is truthful.

Use simple words – You aren’t writing for English graduates but for audiences who like to read content in simple language. Therefore, you should avoid using jargon in your content.

Which types of content are you going to create first?