Complete Guides

Instead of creating individual pages for each exact keyword of a topic, you create one page that bundles all the content. In other words, a very comprehensive content page that covers all aspects of a topic. A kind of e-book in the form of a blog post, so to speak. This is what bloggers and SEOs call a complete or definitive (or even ultimate) guide.

What is the point from an SEO perspective?

Google is becoming increasingly clever and understands search queries better and better. Google (e.g. with RankBrain) is now better able to recognize and bundle similar search queries with the same search intention. Slightly modified formulations in the search query no longer lead to completely different results. Therefore, you can also bundle the content and do not have to create a separate page for each formulation.

User signals play an increasingly important role for Google. As Google no longer relies on links alone and at the same time is better at unmasking spam links, the quality of hits when assessing the quality of content increases significantly. The creation of high-quality content is more often rewarded by the search engine with good rankings than it was a few years ago.

Choosing a topic

It’s difficult to find an idea you like to write about. Ideally, your topic should be something you know well enough to feel comfortable writing about. At the same time, it should be something that others will want to read about.

Remember that your topic should be somewhat unique. There are hundreds of guides on search engine optimization, but fewer guides on niche areas of search engine optimization, such as e-commerce sites. Choose something that will make your guide stand out from the many other competitors. enough to read it.

Keyword research

The first thing to do is to gather as many keyword ideas and keywords as possible. Start with your natural resources: Your brain should be the first port of call when it comes to spotting the appropriate keywords. Look at the keywords that led users to your site. Search Console data will give you some clues about customer needs. From this data, you can glean some important things to use as the basis of your research.

With tools like Google Keyword Planner, you can now duplicate keywords and keyword combinations and add more related keywords. This way you can multiply your existing ideas and expand your keyword set.

Collecting keywords was the easy part. You should now have a long and probably messy list of keywords. This mountain of keywords will serve as the basis for the content of your ultimate guide. Now let’s see which terms are worth something: It’s time for analysis and selection.

Think about subcategories and group all keywords and keyword combinations that are very similar. Think about which keywords cover a common subject area. Ideally, each keyword group should end up with variations, synonyms, and different short-head, mid-head, and long-tail queries for the same keyword or topic. Each topic group then becomes a chapter of your ultimate guide.

How to find out the interesting questions & problems

On Reddit, you can often find some people who have already written something about your problems and questions. There you can already get very good inspiration. Also on Amazon there are often clues which problems and questions plague the target group. Look for books on the topic and look at their table of contents. You can often find a very good structure here that you can adopt.

To really find as many open problems as possible, I recommend doing extensive keyword research.

Cover everything

It can be a little intimidating to write something called the “ultimate guide.” How can you make sure you cover all your bases? Here are some ideas to help you stay on top of things:

• Do a keyword search to see what search queries people are asking related to your topic.
• Do some research on Quora to see what questions people are asking about your topic.
• Read other ultimate guides on your topic and determine what’s missing.
• Communicate with experts in your field to find out what they want to see in the ultimate guide. You may be able to absorb some voices from the industry.
• Find the links you want to include. Make sure you stick to quality sites that expand further into the areas you don’t cover.
• Create a detailed plan to make sure you don’t forget anything.

Stick to the theme anyway!

A long text doesn’t automatically mean it’s also high-quality. So, complete guide does not mean “the more, the better”. Even if the term suggests particularly comprehensive research and elaboration. Texts with several thousand words do not automatically perform better in the ranking or provide the user with the desired information. Because it’s not the length of the text that adds value to your content, but the actual content.

Editing

Because ultimate guides are longer than usual, they need to be prepared in an appealing way so as not to scare or overwhelm readers. The content, which should focus the target audience, must be structured in a meaningful way. At the beginning of the article, a table of contents is a good idea so that visitors who are in a hurry can jump straight to the appropriate passage. Subheadings, highlighting, bulleted lists and tables are not only useful from an SEO point of view, but also increase readability. The same applies to simple, not too long sentences.

Images aid comprehension. In addition, they loosen up the large amount of text and direct the reader’s eye. Videos and audio elements can help to better understand complex issues and contexts and also increase the time spent on the page. In general, the appealing presentation of information has a direct impact on the ranking-influencing user signals.