Understanding SEO Content

Understanding SEO content is important if you’d like to make changes to your website. Without this knowledge, changes could be detrimental to your search engine optimisation.

This article was originally published in 2022 and has been substantially rewritten. Some of the advice that was standard back then, such as target word counts and keyword density percentages, has since been confirmed as having no basis. If you’ve read guidance like that elsewhere, the section towards the end explains what changed and why.

Start With Search Intent, Not Keywords

Let’s say you have a page on your website, which you’d like people to find in the search engines. The first thing to consider, is what phrase would you expect someone to enter into the search engine. It’s often best to use a keyword research tool, to find the phrase that people are searching for the most.

The important part comes next, and it’s the part most people skip. Ask yourself what someone actually wants when they search that phrase. Are they trying to learn something, compare their options, find a local supplier, or buy right now? A page that answers a “how do I” question with a list of products will not rank, however well optimised it is, because it doesn’t do the job the searcher came to do. Google’s own guidance on creating helpful, people-first content is built almost entirely around this idea.

Once you’ve decided on the main key phrase that your web page will target, and you understand what people expect to find, there are some requirements to meet. There are quite a lot of requirements, so they’ve been broken up into Essential Requirements and Further Requirements, as outlined below.

Essential Requirements

• One topic per page. It’s important not to target the same key phrase on a different page within your website, as you don’t want to be competing against yourself. This is known as keyword cannibalisation and it remains one of the most common problems we find.
• Write a clear SEO Title. The SEO Title is the main text in the result returned by a search engine. KWD IT use the Yoast SEO plugin, which allows you to set this just below your content. It should describe the page accurately and include your key phrase naturally.
• Watch the title width, not the character count. Aim for around 50 to 60 characters. The SEO Title width is what actually matters to Google, so titles using wider letters will be cut short sooner.
• Treat the Meta Description as advertising copy. The Meta Description is the smaller text you’ll see in each result returned by a search engine. It is not a ranking factor, and Google rewrites it more often than not, so its only real job is to make your result the one somebody chooses to click. Around 155 characters.
• Keep the URL short and descriptive. The URL of your page should describe the topic of the page. It’s best to keep it as short as possible and avoid using dates, as this will cause problems when keeping the content updated.
• Answer the question early. Don’t bury your main point beneath several paragraphs of introduction. Say what the page is about, and give the core answer, near the top. This helps readers, and it matters more than ever now that AI generated summaries pull short, direct answers straight out of pages.
• Cover your subject properly, then stop. There is no ideal word count. Write what the topic genuinely needs. A four hundred word page that fully answers a narrow question will outperform a padded fifteen hundred word one, and padding now works against you.
• Show who is behind the content. Google assesses Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. Real author details, genuine credentials, contact information and a clear company identity all contribute. For a small business this is one of the easier advantages to claim, because most competitors don’t bother.

Further Requirements

• Break content up with sub-headings. Depending on the length of your content, sub-headings make it easier to read. They should describe the section honestly. Writing them for readers rather than for search engines produces better results in both directions.
• Include at least one image.
• Write alt text for people, not search engines. The alt text for the images that you add should describe the image, because its purpose is to convey that image to people using screen readers. Forcing a key phrase in there is both an accessibility failure and a tactic search engines stopped rewarding a long time ago.
• Link to one of your own pages. Your content should contain at least one link to a page within your own website, providing additional information to the content on your page.
• Link to a credible third party. Your content should contain at least one link to an external website, providing additional information to the content on your page.
• Make sure the page loads and responds well. Google measures real world page experience through Core Web Vitals, which now includes Interaction to Next Paint, the metric that replaced First Input Delay in 2024. Large unoptimised images are the most common cause of problems here.
• Consider adding structured data. Structured data tells search engines explicitly what a page represents, whether that’s a service, an article, a set of frequently asked questions or a local business. It is increasingly how content gets understood and cited rather than simply listed.
• Keep your good pages updated. Revisiting and improving a page that already ranks is usually a better investment than publishing something new. This article is an example of exactly that.

What Changed, And Why

If you’ve read older SEO guidance, including the earlier version of this article, you may have been told to aim for a keyword density of between 0.5 and 3%, or that somewhere between 1,000 and 1,900 words is the ideal length for ranking. Both were widely repeated, and both were wrong.

Keyword density was never a metric Google used. It was inferred from the behaviour of early search engines and then repeated until it became folklore. Deliberately repeating a phrase to hit a percentage is now classed as keyword stuffing under Google’s spam policies. The word count figures came from studies showing that longer pages tended to rank well, but longer pages also tend to cover their subject more thoroughly, which was the actual cause. Writing to hit a number produces padding, and padding works against you.

The bigger shift is that the search results themselves have changed. AI generated summaries now sit above traditional results for a large share of searches, answering many of them outright. Content that is clear, well structured, demonstrably credible and genuinely useful is what gets drawn into those answers. Content written to satisfy a checklist does not.

The Risks That Actually Matter

If you’re editing your own content, the genuine dangers are rarely to do with phrasing. In our experience, the things that cause real damage are:

• Changing a page’s URL without setting up a redirect, which discards everything that page had earned.
• Deleting or merging pages without first checking what was linking to them.
• Leaving a “noindex” setting switched on after a redesign, which removes pages from search results entirely.
• Uploading very large images straight from a phone or a camera.
• Splitting one good page into several thinner ones that cover the same ground.

Summary

Write for the person searching, cover the subject properly, be clear about who you are, and be careful with URLs and redirects. That will take you considerably further than any checklist of percentages. If you’ve paid an SEO specialist to work on your content, you should still be careful who you give access to edit it, because an unnoticed technical change can undo a great deal of work. Take a look at KWD IT’s WordPress Search Engine Marketing page, for our available packages and consider letting the experts manage your content.