A guide to content SEO
It’s pretty simple. If you have content waiting to be seen and used by your audience, the most common way they’ll find it is through Google and other search engines. So it’s fundamental that you learn the basics of SEO good practice.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of increasing both the quantity and quality of traffic to our websites, and the exposure to our brand, through non-paid (also known as organic) search engine results.
How important is good SEO?
The graph below provides the answer. It shows traffic to all Shelter sites for financial year 2019-20 - a total of 8,955,002 sessions.
Organic search dominates as the biggest source of our traffic. For our services sections (/get_advice, /get_help and /housing_advice) the share of traffic is even greater. Which makes sense. People facing housing issues have specific problems and they enter specific questions in Google. They’re more like to search on ‘Who is eligible for council housing?' than on ‘Council housing’.
What do you need to learn?
This guide focuses on content SEO, which any editor using Contentful (Shelter’s content management system) can control. SEO is a wide field of knowledge covering all digital disciplines: content, development, product, social, analysis, and UX. The agency Moz, founded by SEO legend Rand Fishkin, lists 7 pillars of successful SEO, only some of which can be managed through content. In brackets we’ve added the discipline that delivers each of them.
Make sure search engines can effectively crawl your website (development)
Provide compelling content that answers the searcher’s query (content)
Optimise web pages with keywords that will attract searchers & engines (content)
Provide a great user experience, including a fast load speed and compelling UX (UX and development)
Create content that’s share-worthy, and earns links, citations, and amplification (content and social)
Give your web page strong metadata and URLs (content and development)
Use snippet and schema markup to stand out in search engine results pages - SERPs (development)
Tips for writing SEO-friendly content
To help search engines find, understand, and connect content to a user’s search, we can use the following best practices.
1. Perform your keyword research before writing about a topic
Each day, ~20% of Google searches have never been searched before. Keyword research will help you determine what topics users are searching for and understand how difficult it may be to rank for a topic. Generally, the higher the search volume for a keyword or phrase, the more difficult it will be to rank near the top in SERPs.
Use keyword planning tools (a few tools are listed at bottom of page) to see what people are searching on, and how competitive those keywords and phrases are
Each piece of content you publish should have a unique primary keyword target - the main keyword(s) users should search on to find that content
Look for natural variations of your primary keyword. The best place to do this is the search engine itself. For example, if writing about evictions, natural variations would include notice and ban
The Search Marketing Manager can help you with keyword research before writing large pieces of content
Extra tip: Don’t assume you know which keywords you need to rank for. Chances are, your audience is using some keywords and phrases you hadn’t anticipated. For example, illegally evicted tenants may search on kicked out before they search on illegal eviction.
2. Create quality content that's well-written and provides value to the user
People come to our website with needs. They could be serious housing advice needs, or homelessness campaigners wanting to know what action they can take, or fundraisers who’d like to find an event near them - or any other need related to Shelter’s work.
The content you publish should meet one of those needs clearly, and make certain a visit to our website is a valuable one.
Research your users' needs. Focused, dedicated investigation of user needs is a standard part of the process for content design, product, and service design teams
Plan and create content designed to meet those needs
Build web pages that clearly cover a specific topic in-depth
3. Weave your keywords into your content
Where it makes sense, use keyword-rich phrases in page titles, headlines and throughout content, alongside natural variations of your primary keyword.
In the early days of SEO, Google would assess a page’s topic based solely on the repetition of keywords on the page. Today, we can be penalised for this ‘keyword-stuffing’ and Google now aims to understand the page’s authenticity, overall topic, and relevance to the keywords being searched on.
4. Improve page readability with a simple layout and easy-to-understand language
Google has something in common with the average user: they both like web pages that are usable and easy to read. So follow our basic guidelines of writing for the web, including:
Use of headings & sub-headings to break up long paragraphs
Formatting the content for skim readers and use shorter sentences
Highlighting the most relevant parts of your content through subheadings and bold text
5. To tell search engines and visitors about your content, use your metadata
Every web page comes with metadata: invisible tags sitting in the page’s code. Web crawlers read the metadata to determine how relevant a page is to what someone is searching for.
Title tag: Always include the primary keyword in the title, preferably at the beginning. There should be a unique title tag on every page.
Meta-description: Although this doesn’t directly affect search engine ranking, this tag can have a major effect on the rate of users clicking through to our sites, because it normally forms part of the search result ‘snippet’ in Google. Include your primary keyword here as well, and best practice is to keep to <160 characters to avoid truncation in the snippet:
This Google snippet displays the title tag (yellow highlight) and meta-description (red highlight)
Header tags: Use these within the content itself to structure your page, improving user experience and ease of reading
Image alt tags: Use alt text on images to describe visual content to search engines by telling them what the image is meant to represent
6. Add links to relevant content on the Shelter website
Google not only scans the page to determine how relevant it is, but also measures authority by the number of trustworthy links pointing to that page
Link building works on the premise that what other people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself
Linking to relevant content will improve user experience and ensure the user can continue their journey without returning to the search engine to make a new search
For example, our how to get your deposit back page also links to leaving your house in good condition as well as looking for a bond scheme
Questions to ask before publishing
What is the primary focus keyword for this piece of content?
Is the primary focus keyword in the page title (preferably at the beginning)?
Is the primary focus keyword in the meta-description?
Have I included natural variations of the primary keyword in the text?
How does the length of my copy compare to competitor sites for that keyword search?
Have I included all meta-tags?
Is the content linking to additional Shelter content (where relevant)?
Why wouldn’t we be ranking highly?
Competitors may have more useful content that is more relevant to the primary focus keyword
Poor link-building practices
Site speed may be slow with content taking a long time to load
Poor technical SEO - for example duplicate content, or multiple pages with the same title
Poor UX - for example clunky navigation or a confusing page structure
If we’ve recently launched a page or changed a URL, Google needs time to re-index the page
Have new content you want to ensure gets indexed? Contact the Search Marketing Inbox
Keyword research tools
Free tools:
LSI Graph for natural variations of keyword research
Google Trends for additional insight into search volume for focus keywords
Using a search engine itself to identify what competitor websites are ranking well for the target keyword
Subscription tools:
SEM Rush - used by our Search Marketing Manager and Digital Advice team
Moz - used by our Search Marketing Manager
Learning resources
Beginners' Guide to SEO from Moz
SEO Training course from Hubspot
Free browser extensions
SEO Minion, an all-rounder tool for identifying missing tags, headings and images without alt text
Backlink Checker to verify links on a page and finding broken links
Questions about SEO?
Contact the Search Marketing Inbox
Learn the lingo
For a range of definitions of digital terms and roles, visit our digital glossary