Aligning content with user intent

Your website's content must be pertinent to both the audience's expectations and the site's goal. When you completely understand your niche market, this becomes much simpler. Good content solves your users' problems, gives them what they want, and anticipates what they need. It doesn't just promote your product or offer. To do this, you'll need to identify your target audience and conduct research on what they want. This could involve anything from analyzing how well competitors' content performs to conducting user surveys. 

Check out these articles on developing a content strategy and market research 101 for advice on how to do this.

Presenting good research and expertise

You must produce the content your ideal user wants once you've identified it. Research is the first step in producing valuable content. If you want users (and Google!) to believe in your knowledge, you must be an expert in your field. Instead of simply recycling the same content as other websites in your niche, consider how you might give it a personal touch. Present yourself as an authority in your field and, when appropriate, seek advice from other experts.

Writing well

No matter how thoroughly researched or ideal your content topic is, if it is not readable, it doesn't matter. Good copy does not require flowery language. In fact, clear, concise copy with short sentences free of grammatical and spelling errors is crucial for online content. If you struggle with writing, here’s a list of 15 free tools that will help improve it.

Perform keyword research

Your content's chances of ranking highly for particular search engine queries will increase if you incorporate a few pertinent keywords and phrases into it. Learn how to perform keyword research.

Google claims that high-quality content encompasses more than just a piece's writing and research skills. According to John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, "The quality of your overall website can encompass the quality of your content. And that covers every aspect, including the design and layout. such as how you present information on your pages, how you incorporate images, and how quickly you work.

Similar to how good design is more than just how a website looks, the presentation of quality content on your site matters. Let's proceed to the following points to see how you can do it correctly.

2. Page quality is equal to good UX

User experience (UX) should be taken into consideration when designing any website. This is advantageous not only for Google but also for your users. Have you ever visited a website and been put off by the design? Nothing is more annoying than trying to find something simple and coming up empty-handed. 

Because of this, you must organize the content on your website so that it is simple and intuitive for users to use. You must carefully consider your site's information architecture in order to accomplish this. Before building your website, creating a wireframe can be beneficial. 

Layout and navigation are important, but so is the overall usability of your website. Any website would benefit from fixing broken links and sluggish page loads, so be sure to do so. When a website loads slowly, here are some tips for speeding it up.  and How to speed up your website

3. Prioritize accessibility

Accessibility is a feature of web design that is frequently disregarded. Your website may be difficult or impossible for users with specific disabilities to use if accessibility is neglected. When creating your website, you should keep the following accessibility considerations in mind:

Structuring content properly with header tags

Screen readers are frequently used by people with visual impairments to access online content. Using Braille or text-to-speech, screen readers convert visual content into a form that people with visual impairments can understand. Because of this, it's crucial to organize your content in a way that makes it simple to navigate and comprehensible to screen readers. Header tags like "h1", "h2", and "h3" are crucial in this. With these headings, you can divide and organize your content. However, keep in mind that going from h1 to h3 may cause the screen reader to become confused. Learn more about screen readers here

Including alt text for images

Screen readers depend on alt-text to interpret images. Basically, alt-text is a description of what is shown in an image that is part of your website. Give as much information as you can about the image, including any text, if any. 

Being mindful of color

A color distinction can be challenging for many people due to color vision deficiencies. You should try to restrict the use of certain colors to make it easier for these users to access your site. The most prevalent type of color vision impairment is red-green color blindness, which is followed by blue-yellow. So make sure these aren't the only colors on your website! Look at this tool for evaluating the color contrast of your website.

4. Don’t sleep on technical SEO

People frequently make the huge error of forgetting that SEO is more than just keyword research, which could harm your search engine rankings. Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to make it easier for search engine crawlers to access, crawl, and index it. 

What does any of that mean, though? Your website will appear in Google's search results pages through indexing. Crawlers are specialized bots that browse the Internet in search of new pages to add to their search engine. Beyond accessibility, this is another justification for the importance of a good layout and appropriate internal linking. Crawlers might not index every page on your site if it doesn't make sense. 

You should make an XML sitemap and include a robots.txt file on your website to facilitate the work of web crawlers and guarantee that your site is indexed correctly.

Contrary to what the name of the document might suggest, an XML sitemap is a list of links rather than an image of your website's layout. By making one, you can have a little more control over the crawlers' path by prioritizing and including the pages you believe to be most important while excluding pages you believe to be irrelevant. This sitemap can be submitted directly to Google to hasten the crawlers' arrival on your page.

You can add a file called robots.txt to the root directory of your website that provides search engine crawlers with more detailed instructions on how to index your site. You could, for instance, tell them to stay away from specific pages or even not to crawl your website at all. Additionally, you can include an XML sitemap in the file. 

An XML sitemap and robots.txt can be created in a few different ways. Using a plugin is among the simplest ways to go about doing it. Yoast SEO or a free sitemap generator.  Google explains how to create and add a robots.txt file to your site.

For more information, this article is an excellent introduction to technical SEO. 

5. Put mobile-first

By ignoring mobile design, you may be ignoring a sizable portion of your audience. 50.72% of US internet users browse the web on their mobile devices, according to Statcounter. Your website might not work properly on phones if it was primarily designed with desktop users in mind. 

Additionally, Google favors mobile versions of websites for ranking and indexing (and is probably going to do this for all websites by July 2022), so not having a mobile site could hurt your SEO. 

Here are some mobile-first best practices to ensure your site ticks all the mobile boxes.

Designing a site that Google likes

It's time to put what you've learned here into practice now that you know what factors Google looks for in a website's design. You can raise your site's position in Google search results by producing high-quality content, implementing a positive user experience, prioritizing accessibility, taking technical SEO considerations, and developing a mobile version of your site.

I hope this article was informative for you. You can tell your friends about it if you like it.