It’s no secret that content drives action on the web, it’s what attracts visitors to your website in the first place. But did you know that your content’s structure is equally important for ranking well on search engines? Consider, for a moment, the way you’ve searched for information through Google in the past. When you scour websites for information, do you read an entire blog post or do you skim through the headlines and first paragraph?
Most readers perform the latter because they want to confirm an article has relevant information before taking the time to read through it.
Google, like most readers, scans your website copy in a similar manner. Structuring text appropriately will ensure your content performs better. Not sure how or where to begin restructuring your text? No problem! Here are some great tips to give your text structure the makeover it desperately needs!
Organize Your Content With Headings
Headings are one of the first things visitors notice when they land on your website. Readers use headers to locate important information because they summarize the main idea in that section. From an SEO perspective, headers give you the opportunity to add targeted keyword phrases and increase the overall keyword frequency.
Make A Great First Impression With a Compelling First Paragraph
First impressions matter, and you only have a short window of opportunity to grab your web visitor’s attention. Writing a captivating opening paragraph persuades visitors that your post, thoughts, and arguments align with their search intent. You need a strong opening paragraph so that readers stop skimming and begin reading. Think back to a great article you stumbled across during a search. What made it better than other articles?
If you want to grab your reader’s attention, get into their mindset and try empathizing with them. You can do this by asking a question, telling a story, or present an eye-opening statistic. Your reader’s curiosity will entice them to continue reading your content.
How Sentences Can Make or Break Content
When visitors skim a web page, they tend to look at the first couple of sentences of a paragraph to determine if they should continue reading. Like a strong opening paragraph, you need to grab and keep their attention from the very beginning with strong sentence structure. Avoid writing long sentences with diverse vocabulary as your visitors may become turned off quickly. Your goal should be to write in a manner that appeals to visitors of all levels. Furthermore, you’ll also want variation in sentence length; otherwise, your writing style may feel a bit too robotic.
Don’t Forget to Use Transition Words
Your content doesn’t have to be written at the same caliber of professional articles, as seen in the New York Times, in order to rank well in Google. Google’s algorithms are more interested in your content’s readability. Transition words come into play because they make your content easier to read, guiding readers by linking words, sentences, and paragraphs together. They also help readers to transition from one idea to another to ensure visitors don’t become lost or confused.
Hiring An SEO Agency to Optimize Your Content
Taking the time to plan out your text structure will put you on the path to achieving the results you seek. Your text structure must keep two audiences in mind: visitors and search engines. For visitors exploring your website, you want the pages that easy to navigate. Search engines need to be able to crawl through the page and index your content.
If you are looking for best-in-class SEO services, you’ve come to the right place! At Premiere Creative, we know how to strategically structure content to keep readers on your site. Contact us to find out more about how text structure can improve your rank on search engines.
