Why is Original Content Important for Enhancing Your SEO Efforts?
Browsing the web can help you find tons of content relevant to a particular niche. So, what can you do to cut through the noise? The answer is boosting SEO efforts. However, you can’t simply think of embedding a few high-performing keywords in your content, metadata, and descriptions to rank higher on search engines.
Search engines have changed their higher-ranking criteria long ago. They only value content that caters to the needs of the target audience in the best way possible. Given this, it is essential for a brand to come up with original content capable of promptly grabbing the attention of prospects and keeping them engaged until the end.
However, many brands fail to determine the importance of original content and waste a significant amount of effort and time on unnecessary tasks instead of prioritizing uniqueness.
This article helps you understand why original content matters and what you can do to ensure it.
Read on to learn more.
Why is Original Content Crucial for SEO?
Multiple reasons make original content a necessity for any brand aiming to thrive in SEO campaigns and rank higher on search engines. The originality of content published by a brand helps it achieve multiple milestones, such as:
Enhanced Credibility and Authority
Any brand aiming to boost its SEO efforts aims for higher authority and credibility. It is only possible when the target audience and search engines find it a trustworthy entity. Originality demonstrated through the content published by a brand signals its expertise and trustworthiness to readers and search engines alike.
Both these factors play a key part in aligning a brand’s content with EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) ranking criteria. Conversely, content that features instances of plagiarism makes a brand unreliable.
Higher User Engagement
The modern-day audience craves high-quality, original content. They desire content capable of answering their queries and providing them with real value. Search engines also value content that engages readers and keeps them on the page for longer. They value pages with higher dwell times and lower bounce rates.
Websites offering original content to the target audience witness a significant boost in their SEO efforts because of optimal user experience, proper structure, easy readability, and content originality. Given this, a satisfying user experience with well-crafted, original content is essential to send a positive signal to search engines and attain higher rankings.
Boost Organic Traffic
Keeping your focus on originality of content while crafting it for your target audience not only helps you ensure uniqueness but also gives you the opportunity to target various keywords and rank for them. This possibility leads to higher online exposure that results in a significant increase in the number of visitors coming to your website to get valuable insights.
Higher appearance of your website in search results enhances its online visibility, which also grabs the attention of the target audience and increases their likelihood of trusting your content.
This phenomenon leads to more organic traffic and an increased likelihood of higher conversions. Hence, unique, valuable content is the key to ranking higher and driving more organic traffic.
Obtain More Backlinks
When you focus on crafting original content that offers valuable data resources, such as unique insights derived from proprietary research, it also captures the attention of other websites.
These websites tend to link their pages with your content to help their audience easily access a reliable source of information.
This phenomenon helps you earn more backlinks. The number of backlinks earned by a particular piece of content is also considered a measure of quality by the search engines. In essence, the more backlinks your page earns, the higher its chance of attaining top rankings in search results. This phenomenon will also help you establish your stature as a thought leader.
Align with Search Intent
Search engines look for signals that help them determine whether a website is serving as a valuable resource of information to the target audience. A website can only signal value to search engines when it publishes content that perfectly aligns with the search intent of the target audience.
When search engines witness a higher number of clicks on a particular website’s URL displayed in the SERPs, they are more likely to improve its rankings over time. Hence, it is essential for a website to focus more on uniqueness and relevance of content to boost its SEO performance.
Stay Ahead of Competitors
Uniqueness not only helps a brand or a website perform better in terms of SEO but also enables it to stand out from the crowd. When providing unique, valuable content to the target audience is your topmost priority, search engines help you enjoy better online exposure.
This higher online visibility intrigues prospects to trust your content and value it more than that of your competitors. This possibility leads to better SEO performance than competitors because of your ability to provide prospects with something new and fresh.
How to Create Original Content for Improved SEO?
Here comes the main question: “How do you craft original content that boosts your SEO performance?” Although many brands consider it a tough ask, it is not as challenging as it seems. You only need to follow a few effective, actionable tips, and you will see a significant boost in your content’s SEO performance.
Here is what you should do:
Understand Your Audience
First of all, become familiar with your target audience. You should be aware of their pain points, needs, and preferences to provide them with the content they crave. After becoming aware of their requirements, you will be able to plan your content accordingly and put your effort in the right direction without any deflections. This possibility will help you ensure unique, valuable content for them.
Ensure Thorough Research
After knowing what your audience needs, it is time to thoroughly research topics that should be covered comprehensively to offer satisfying answers to the queries asked by the readers.
Instead of relying on a couple of sources, focus on comprehensive research covering a diverse portfolio of resources, including podcasts, videos, publications, and every possible source that is reliable. Doing so will help you come up with unique insights and provide your audience with something new.
Integrate Personal Analogies and Examples
Relying on 3rd-party sources to fetch relevant insights is not enough. You must demonstrate your expertise in the niche and establish yourself as a thought leader and reliable source of information to the target audience and search engines alike. It is only possible when you also embed personal analogies, illustrative examples, and a proprietary writing style nobody else can replicate. Doing so will help you reinforce the originality of your content.
Evaluate Originality on Your Own
Before publishing your work, you must evaluate it for originality and ensure that any part of your content doesn’t appear similar to already published content in terms of information or tone.
The best way to do so is to run your content through a free plagiarism checker for an automated check. Doing so will help you identify instances of duplication (if any) and eradicate them beforehand to ensure the uniqueness of content.
You can easily find a reliable tool online and use it to reinforce the quality and originality of your content.
In the End
Publishing original content in the modern digital era has become a necessity if you want to stay ahead of competitors and boost your SEO efforts. Unique content not only increases your authority, credibility, organic traffic, and number of backlinks but also enables you to align with search intent and cut through the noise. However, you must understand your audience, ensure comprehensive research, demonstrate expertise, and evaluate the uniqueness of your content to ensure originality and boost your SEO efforts. Follow the takeaways from this article to thrive in SEO and achieve success. We wish you luck!