Ranking not tanking: how to make your content work for search
By Ros Fordyce
Ros Fordyce has nearly 30 years’ experience in content design, beginning with managing online content for the Scotland Office before moving on to lead publicity campaigns at the Department for Education and Skills. One of the first designers to join Scroll in the mid-noughties, in 2011, she joined the Government Digital Service to work on the first release of GOV.UK and later moved into digital learning as Head of Content at Skill Boosters, where she specialised in creating training content for leadership, workplace behaviour and inclusion.
Content, SEO and alchemy
Much like alchemy, the craft of designing content that ranks highly in search still carries a faint air of magic. Algorithms are complex and constantly changing, and given that the exact weighting of factors is a closely guarded secret and the results aren’t always immediate or predictable, as content designers we can often feel like we’re throwing in a load of random ingredients and hoping to create gold.
When I first started working as a content designer in the late 1990s, keyword stuffing was all the rage and it wasn’t unusual to come across websites with vast lists of keywords hidden away in the corners. Fast forward 30 years and today’s search engines are highly adept at identifying the good content and weeding out the slop, but there is still this belief that it’s somehow possible to game the system – and no shortage of people promising secret ‘hacks’ to boost your content’s visibility.
High-quality, useful, credible content
In reality, SEO work is about creating high-quality content that’s useful and credible. Today’s algorithms look at why a user is searching for something and rank content that meets a specific need, rather than just matching keywords. They also look for signs that a source can be trusted – so expertise, consistent quality, regularly updated content, backlinks, clear authorship and accuracy all earn you Brownie points. Over time, this creates a virtuous circle in which useful content builds trust, trust improves visibility and that visibility brings in yet more opportunities to demonstrate value.
In no particular order, then, here are the five things you really can’t ignore if you want your content to rank.
1. Understand user intent
A keyword isn’t just a word or phrase – it’s a vital clue to what someone actually wants. ‘Best women’s yoga pants’ suggests that someone is just yoga-curious, while ‘buy women’s yoga pants’ indicates that they’re ready to get a pair and practise their downward dog.
If you’ve been handed a massive list of keywords by a client and are struggling to know where to start, it can help to begin by grouping keywords by user intent – for example ‘learn’, ‘compare’, ‘buy’ or ‘solve a problem’ – and then filtering out anything that doesn’t align with a meaningful user action.
2. Write for people, not algorithms
Search engines are constantly changing, and they have also become far better at understanding things like context, intent and quality, which means that clear and useful content should always outperform stilted, over-optimised copy.
So while it’s still important to use your keywords where they matter most – title, headings, opening paragraph and meta description – beyond that, it’s far better to just let them surface naturally rather than trying to shoe-horn them in.
Using synonyms and related terms helps to make your content richer and more readable, as well as catering to the different ways in which people might express something.
3. Understand keyword volume and competition
A strong SEO strategy is all about spotting opportunities, but it’s important to be realistic about what you can achieve. It can be tempting to go for those high-volume keywords, but in practice they can be extremely hard to rank for and are often dominated by the major players.
Lower competition keywords, on the other hand, especially long-tail keywords, give you a chance to target specific queries and niche demands and build visibility, and you can start targeting those higher-volume keywords as your presence and authority grow.
4. Delve into internal search data
It sounds like a no-brainer, but you need to speak the language of the people you’re talking to. People often tend to describe problems in messy, emotional language rather than clean, keyword-optimised phrases, and understanding this can be the key to unlocking real intent.
External SEO tools can often miss these sorts of terms, so try and get your hands on internal search data from things like customer support calls, enquiry emails, FAQs or chat logs to find out what people are actually saying.
5. Close the loop of intent
Search engines don’t just rank pages - they also rank what are known as ‘satisfaction patterns’. Today’s search systems are increasingly able to work out whether a page has fully resolved a user’s need, and they do this by looking at whether they quickly returned to their search results or whether they continued exploring your site.
Good content anticipates what someone is likely to ask next and then builds those answers into the experience. So if you can address those follow-up needs within your content, you’ll reduce the chance your user will go back to searching and potentially end up with one of your competitors – and you’ll also boost your own content’s search rankings in the process.
It’s all about good content
In the end, there’s no smoke, mirrors or secret formula when it comes to SEO. The content that performs best is usually the content that understands what people need, answers it clearly and earns trust over time.
Search algorithms will continue to evolve, and tactics will come and go, but the fundamentals of good content design remain remarkably consistent. If you focus on intent, write with clarity, use data intelligently and keep closing the gap between what users ask and what your content delivers, your content will be in a far stronger position to earn search rankings - and, critically, to meet user needs.
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