3 Types of Articles and How They Can Affect On-page and Off-page SEO

SilverServers provides SEO services for clients all over the world. Through the years we have done research and gained knowledge about the three areas that are important to our industry: technical, on-page, and off-page optimization. There is much written about those topics and how to take advantage of them. We want to look at how different types of the articles you put on your website affect all three of those areas.

Our Grassroots program is entry-level and focuses on the technical and on-page aspects of search engine optimization. If you’re a small or medium business that hasn’t had this kind of work done on your website before, then our two-year program can help you get started on the right foot.

After we optimize the technical pieces of your website to Google’s standards, we focus on adding text content on a monthly basis to branch out the search phrases that your company shows up for. By doing this, we’re able to make sure you’re ranking somewhere for every keyword you should, could, or want to be ranking for. From there, other more advanced strategies can be used to attempt to increase those natural rankings.

Here are the 3 types of articles we often see and how they affect your rankings:

1. Knowledge Articles

You know a ton about your industry and want to help potential clients trust you – you also want your peers to see you as a source of authority on the topic. Knowledge articles demonstrate your proficiency and experience by showing your website’s visitors how much you know and how much experience you have. When a well-read visitor comes to your page to research whether or not to use your services, a well-titled and well-placed knowledge article can put them at ease that you know what you’re talking about and what you’re doing. This kind of content is usually specialized and aimed at people who already know your industry.

These pieces aren’t often aimed at the general keywords that you’re hoping the potential customer is going to use in a Google Search. Because of that, there isn’t much on-page optimization that can be done. Some headings might be able to be tweaked to match some key phrases in Google’s Search Console tools, but most of the article is meant to ooze knowledge, not catch keywords.

For that reason, knowledge articles fit best into part of your off-page SEO strategy. From an optimization perspective, these posts are meant to get you attention from people who know your industry already and are writing about it or referring other people to good research sources. The goal with these types of pieces should be to get backlinks. Your hope should be that your article is so informative and relevant that other specialists or researchers in the trade will see you as an authority - and then link to your article.

Word count isn’t imperative here, but research shows that there is a strong correlation between ranking and word count. Google seems to love the 1500+ word range.

Off-page SEO isn’t the focus of the SilverServers Grassroots program, but we recommend writing knowledge articles as part of any SEO strategy. Our program will get your article into search engines so that it may be found somewhere in the results when using the correct search queries. However, our program isn’t designed to push your article to specific people so that they read and link to your great posts.

2. Company Highlights, Completed Projects, Testimonials, and other Geographically Focused Articles

Not only are you a knowledge leader in your industry, but you also do a lot of interesting, quality work within it. Whether that’s selling great products, providing incredible training, helping support a community, or engineering and building notable projects, you want your website to show that you are trustworthy and experienced within your service area.

Keywords will be plentiful here. You will see company names, city names, subdivision names, building names, and services descriptions. These are all important keywords that you can bet average people will be using in Google Searches.

The content itself may not be cutting-edge or what potential clients or knowledge leaders in the industry want to sit down and thoroughly read. However, when search engines read these they find exactly what they’re looking for and rank them somewhere in the results for search phrases that are typically more heavily used.

For example, although you may not think one testimonial is worth creating a whole new page for, having a whole page designed to highlight one testimonial can help you rank for many keywords related to your industry and the client you received the testimonial from. Check out our Client Portfolio page as an example then do a search for the company names of some of those clients. You’ll see that most of the time we rank on the first page with our clients – and they get searched for often.

Google says that word count doesn’t affect rankings. However, research has shown that word counts in the range of 500-800 are a good starting point for getting noticed by search engines. That word count is perfect for the type of content we’re talking about in this section.

This is an on-page SEO strategy. Depending on your industry, you may not get many backlinks for these articles. However, with the broad range of keywords used, these pieces will help you broaden out the base of keywords that you show up for in search results.

These types of articles are the focus of our Grassroots program. Over the 2 years clients spend on the program, posting many of these will result in a broad range of keywords that their websites show up as results for. The lack of backlinks means that they don’t have a ton of control over where they rank, but they will gain many, many keyword results and find out what Google thinks their company does. This is an important entry-level first step into long-lasting SEO benefits.

3. Quick News, Updates, and Sales

Your company is involved in the community, has occasional sales, needs to send out updates from time to time, and periodically needs to communicate brief snippets of information. You don’t want these posts to be long because for various reasons you need everyone to actually read them.

For SEO, these types of posts don’t have a noticeable effect. If they’re on-topic then they never have negative results. However, they’re also rarely positive, so it’s important to not only share these.

As a result of these being posted to get information to clients, the topics are never intentionally focused on common keywords. Because of that, word count doesn’t matter.

At SilverServers, we believe these posts have important functions. First, they put important information on your website and drive traffic to it. Also, you can use the URLs of the posts in emails, social media posts, and more in order to get clients to your website and be in control of how information is displayed. Many companies use social media exclusively for this purpose. Additionally, posting the links of social media gives you the dual benefit of having information on your website but also receiving engagement on the social media platform.

These posts don’t play a significant role in an SEO strategy. However, they’re important for your business and can be leveraged to gain increased direct and referral traffic. We’re happy to share some tips about how to take advantage of these the best way possible!

These are the 3 main types of articles we encounter in our work with business websites. We recommend working with an SEO specialist like SilverServers to create a strategy for each type! Give us a call today or get a free website review to see how well your site is optimized!

For more related content, check out the Content Writing section of our blog!