We all know that the rules around organic SEO are changing rapidly. We’ve all struggled to keep up with Google’s ever evolving updates. (Google made over 1,600 changes in 2016 alone.)

Despite recognizing the need to keep up with the updates, there seems to be one outdated aspect of SEO that many companies can’t seem to let go of — keywords. Sure, keywords used to be the powerhouse of organic search. Use the right ones and you’d rise to the top of the heap.

However, like all good things, hackers abused the tactic by employing keyword stuffing. So, Google started penalizing the black-hat practice. Instead, of stuffing you had to use keywords naturally in context.

But even that practice has evolved. Today, keywords are out and user intent is in.

What does this mean for content creators? Think: deeper and wider.

How to Go Deeper with Content

So, what is “user intent”? Simply stated, it means giving users exactly what they are searching for.

Remember, the primary purpose of search engines: to provide the most relevant results for any search. That’s why top-ranking companies are obsessed with providing customers with precisely what they desire.

To meet user intent, your content cannot be shallow. It needs to have meat on the bones to grab and hold users’ interest. It needs to answer users’ questions fully. In other words, your content needs to dive deep into the subject matter.

“Content depth is measured by expert coverage of a broad range of subjects around a given focus topic,” according to MarketMuse, a company bringing AI and machine learning to content creation. “Article length alone is not enough for depth to occur.”

So, how can you create deeper content? Here’s one approach:

• Start with a focus topic that relates to the content you want to publish
• Look at the top SERP results for that focus topic
• Search for term variants to expand your search
• Discover new topics and subtopics to include in your content
• Analyze the distribution of subtopics within your current content
• Expand your content strategy to include writing about these topics
• Create content briefs for writers to guide their content development
• Link the new content to highly authoritative and helpful external pages

How to Go Wider with Content

The starting point for going wider is understanding content clustering. “Clustering helps Google’s search algorithm identify a site as having content that is highly relevant to a user’s search. This is because Google now has, as another part of its algorithm, a matrix of related subjects for any given search. Yes, Google has a topic-clustering algorithm,” says Market Muse.

To successfully go wider with your content means educating users more broadly on an entire topic cluster with the aim of answering each and every question they might have on a given topic. This requires you to produce informational and education content that covers a topic from a wider range of adjacent topics.

Content clustering helps satisfy search requirements of implicit intent as well as direct intent. Implicit user intent includes all the questions a user might be interested in that weren’t necessarily part of the initial search. This is achieved through strategic internal linking from one page to another in your cluster, so users have the opportunity to engage with your subject matter on a horizontal level.

Content clustering will not only hold users’ interest, fully answer their questions, and expand their knowledge on the topic, but also it will raise the ranking of all of your content within the cluster — and, consequently, your domain as a whole.

So, how can you create wider content? Here’s one approach:

• Find adjacent topics within a content cluster
• Assess your website’s current content inventory
• Find the cluster gaps in your content
• Create new content that widens your content clusters
• Add internal link to the adjacent content

Gain the Benefits of Deeper and Wider Content

If you haven’t demoted keywords yet and elevated user intent and content clustering, it’s time. Producing deeper and wider content will determine whether visitors will stick around to read your content or bounce back to the search engine result page to find websites that better fit their needs.

The top benefits of creating deeper and wider content are:

• Rank higher in searches
• Attract more targeted consumers
• Lower your bounce rate
• Build online authority and influence
• Stand out from your competitors
• Boost your sales potential

Bonus Pro Tip: There’s one more essential tip to satisfying user intent and ranking higher in organic searches — speed. Producing deeper and wider content alone will not achieve your search, authority, and conversion goals. You also need velocity. This means you must produce more deeper and wider content at a rapid pace to continue to maintain your relevance in today’s content-driven world.

Do you need help creating deeper and wider content faster? If so, contact me today to discuss how we can work together to achieve your marketing goals.