By Jayne Schultheis - While technical SEO and domain authority are both crucial components to a high-performing website, they're not enough. You need to reach the right audience with your content, and that's where relevance comes into play.

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At this point in the series, you're probably familiar with the four pillars of search engine optimization and how they work together to help your website achieve maximum results on search engine results pages (SERPs).

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• Step 1: Technical SEO
• Step 2: Domain Authority
• Step 3: Relevance
• Step 4: User Experience (UX) and Usability

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These four pillars work together toward optimizing your website, but relevance can sometimes seem to be the most elusive. If you're able to master this area of SEO, you'll see significant gains in your web performance.

What is relevance?

Quite simply, relevance refers to how important or "relevant" a keyword or phrase might be to your article or audience.

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When content marketers research a topic, they'll see a seemingly endless supply of keywords, questions, and other potential things to include. But which of these terms provide relevant information, and which ones don't actually matter?

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For example, suppose you're writing an article on tea. Keywords could include terms like tea sandwiches, cookies, cream, sugar, herbal, green tea, and antioxidants. If you are a food blog writing about how to host the perfect high tea, you'll want to include the first few terms. In contrast, if you're writing on the health benefits of tea, the latter terms will provide more relevant content for your audience.

How do you write relevant articles?

Before you can write relevant articles, you first need to identify your objectives and your target audience and hence your context. What types of search results will compel someone to click on your content? Ask yourself relevant questions like:

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• What do I want to accomplish with my article?
• Who am I trying to (inform, persuade, direct) with this writing?
• What does that audience really care about?
• How can I connect with them in a meaningful, relevant way?

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After you make a mental checklist of those things, think about the topics that might interest your audience. How can you create articles that provide the greatest possible value to your readers?

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Most of the current search tools have limitations in relevance since they'll often analyze data based on top-performing articles on Google in a category like the tea example above. If you don't have a clear sense of your objectives in your writing, you might get several terms that aren't necessarily the right context for your work.

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That's why platforms like Rellify are so beneficial to assist in boosting the relevance score of an article. Its unique blend of machine learning and expert analysts work together, ensuring you produce relevant content for your intended audience.

Why is relevance important for successful SEO?

Search engines like Google want to provide value to their users. So they want the best, most relevant results to appear at the top of your search results. The more you search for terms on Google, the more they'll make in ad spend.

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So if Google determines that your content has the right words and information that your audience is looking for, it will move you to the top of the organic search results. Your domain authority isn't quite as high as you'd like. But with relevant articles, you can often leapfrog over your competition in the rankings by providing high-quality content your readers will click on.

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You might even boost your domain authority with relevant articles. High-quality articles in relevant categories will spur social shares and links to your excellent work.

The connection between relevance and links

In an ideal world, the best, most relevant articles will also rise to the top and receive recognition and links from other sites. But this dynamic isn’t always the case.

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You can’t control who links (or doesn’t link) to you, but you do have control over which sites you link to from your page. All links aren’t created equal. Be sure that you are linking to relevant content that provides value to your users. At the same time, make sure the page you’re linking to isn’t too similar, so you don’t inadvertently raise their relevance while hurting yours.

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Some content marketing teams actively pursue backlinks by sending emails to domains that have published similar content. But this whack-a-mole approach often isn’t the most effective use of time, as the response rate is only about 8.5%. If you opt for that approach, be deliberate in the sites you contact, making sure they’re relevant and quality domains.

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While links can increase your article relevance, focus on writing quality content to a targeted audience. Then, you’ll almost certainly increase your domain authority, links, and Google rankings. You’ll notice an increase in all of the additional content performance metrics that will help you drive relevant results to your business.

Write relevant articles with rellify

We all want to connect with our target audience in meaningful ways. But given the vast quantities of data, filtering out irrelevant results can challenge even the most seasoned content marketer. That's why the technology and team at rellify can provide you with all the tools you need to write the best articles for your audience.

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rellify's expert analysis within the appropriate categories will empower you to write the articles your audience wants to read. You'll get to the top of SERPs in the right categories without paying for ads.

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On top of that, rellify's team of writers, analysts, and editors ensure that your article isn't just optimized. They’ll make sure it will resonate with your audience, so it delivers the results you need.

Preview – Step 4: User Experience and Usability

Now that you have a strong foundation in technical SEO, domain authority and relevance for your website content, it’s time to think about creating a user experience (UX) that brings you the results you need. So keep reading the series for more great insights on how to create content that not only achieves Page 1 rankings, but also compels your audience to take action.

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Contact rellify today to learn how you can create better, more relevant articles that generate the type of web traffic you need for maximum growth.

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