Is there a real relationship between the information (title and meta-description) that appears in Google’s results pages and the content you have created for your page (website or blog)? Is the content you create relevant to your reader, your potential customer, or are you simply writing to improve your SEO? Do you think Google only values how well suited are the keywords or keywords in the content of your pages?
Today, content is essential for your SME’s website, and not only because it is necessary for your SEO strategy. We know that many SMEs that have moved to the online world and have begun to implement strategies to position themselves in search engines, know how important content is. But who do they write for?
We have learned to adapt the search terms that bring us traffic, we have applied different techniques that allow us to adapt texts according to the keywords relevant to our business. However, when creating content, we must never forget that it is real people who consume it. Because at the end of the day, what the big search engine demands is quality content and some bad practices sing too much. And Google has ways to determine if this content is relevant enough for our users. One of its content ranking factors being the TF-IDF formula.
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1. What exactly is the TF-IDF?
The acronym TF-IDF stands for “Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency”. But what exactly does this mean? Basically, the TF-IDF is a formula that calculates the frequency of appearance of a keyword (TF) on a page (of your website or your blog) in relation to its frequency of appearance throughout the domain of your SME.
That is, the TF calculates the number of times a keyword appears in one of your URLs, while the IDF takes into account the number of URLs or public pages (website and blog) in which this keyword is found, so that both determine that there is no abuse of this same keyword.
2. But how does this really affect the content?
On the one hand, the TF-IDF identifies the relevance of a given keyword within a page, relevance that decreases as it is used more in other URLs. And in a way, the formula helps us to check that there is no duplicity of content, that each page is original and has interesting information for the user. That is, it helps us not to create content that can be considered duplicate and that can channel to other pages.
On the other hand, it helps us to create quality content even trying to position the relevant keywords. Google’s idea is that we work the content, that this is relevant to our users and, abusing a particular keyword on a page is not going to help your positioning at all. Think that there are also factors that can influence as the session time of users on your pages, because if the content is repetitive and of poor quality, the abandonment rate will be high.
Also, Google is continually changing the rules of the game with changes to its algorithms to show more relevant results to its users, changes often related to the TF-IDF formula. For this reason, you must choose relevant keywords for your users and create quality content. Think that in the face of so much competition, on many occasions you should opt for longtail keywords, combinations that are more useful for your users
3.And how to decide which keywords are more relevant?
The first step is to know well who your readers are, but even more your potential customers. And determining what is the buying process of the latter, which we know as buyer’s joureny, is fundamental. The idea is that you divide this process or marketing funnel into three distinct phases and perform a mapping (distribution) of your content and obviously your keywords:
- In the exploration stage, the first phase of the buyer’s journey, users generally perform searches because they have a type of need or curiosity. Your job is to identify what these problems are, those that relate to your industry, to make a list of keywords relevant to this moment in the buying cycle of your potential consumers.
- In the customization stage, the first phase of the buyer’s journey, users generally search because they have a type of need or curiosity.
