14 Best Practices You Must Follow to Create Top Ranking Content

Did you know, content marketing remains incredibly effective even in 2025 when the recommended practices are followed. With the right strategies 58% of B2B marketers report that content marketing increased their sales and revenue. 

However, creating high-quality content is not everyone’s cup of tea. Writers need to understand their target audience, perform substantial research and stay on top of the latest SEO trends. So, how can you ensure quality assurance?

For starters, you can get the help of the content experts to create high quality SEO content for your website.

 

But if you are a DIY-lover then this blog is exactly for you. Keep scrolling to find content best practices that you must implement to get optimal performance. 

Top Content Best Practices to Follow in 2025

Here are 14 essential best practices that content writers must follow to create relevant, helpful and engaging content for first-page ranking:

1. Create People-first Content

Over the years, many websites have tried to exploit the limitations of search engine algorithms to rank higher. However, success through algorithm manipulation has always been temporary and subject to severe penalties. 

A much better approach, according to Google, is to focus on creating helpful content meant for people and not search engines. 

To create people-first content, follow content creation best practices such as learning thoroughly about the topic, providing useful information and mentioning your first-hand experiences. Helpful content builds goodwill and trust with people. 

2. Provide Value to Your Readers

Today’s search engines are designed to find helpful and reliable information. To rank higher, your posts must genuinely benefit the readers. Ensure your content is providing enough value to people by asking yourself the following questions:

• Does your content provide a comprehensive description, original research or interesting information?
• Is your page providing something that other pages are not?
• Is your content produced well, or does it have quality issues?
• Have you simply copied or rewritten someone else’s work?
• Would you share the page with your own friends?

If your content does not have relevant original information or if you are unwilling to share it among your peer group, chances are – it will require rectification. 

3. Give Your Readers Something Memorable

While presenting useful information is the right approach, your content also needs to be interesting. Try asking thought-provoking questions, sharing relatable stories and presenting your ‘hot take’ to stand out. 

Social media today is filled to the brim with posts vying for people’s attention, you need to make something that grabs the attention of the users. Your content needs to be distinct from the competition or it risks falling into obscurity. Having a distinct style – with specific tone, looks and presentation, is one of the best practices for creating memorable content.   

4. Create a Striking Headline and Title 

Your blog’s meta title is often the one shot you have to achieve success on the search engine result pages. A catchy title can increase the CTR by upto 1.7x as they tend to be good explainer or an eye-grabbing spectacle. 

Taking calculated risks to make humorous and shocking ‘click baits’ can be a good measure. But make sure first if your industry allows such sensationalised promotional tactics.  

Give some thought to creating headers (H2s & H3s) that encourage readers to click on your article or page. There are many different approaches you can take to create unique headlines – direct and simple, descriptive, curious or emotion-heavy. 

5. Research and Understand Your Audience

Having a clear understanding of your target audience is no doubt one of the best SEO content best practices. To produce helpful content as mandated by the search engine giant, you must first learn how you can help them through your content. 

Get the demographics of your target audience, including their age, location, job title, interests, etc. to understand their needs. Use the information you have gathered to create audience personas to get an idea about their needs and pain points. This will help you solve their problems with your content. 

6. Set Your Content Marketing Goals 

Everyone writing content has a purpose – whether it’s promoting a product or service, entertaining the audience or publishing on someone’s behalf. While it’s easy to get caught up in the intricacies, having a unifying strategy for important decisions is one of the essential best practices for content writing. 

Before you start writing, quantify your end goals – increasing brand awareness by 2x, getting 10+ organic leads, attracting a larger audience, generating more sales or convincing people to download your app? This will help you target the relevant keywords, create a list of topics and create content that caters to these needs. 

In case you are struggling to quantify your marketing campaign – you can click below and get a taste of our product! 

Let us add the conversion factor to your content! 

7. Prepare a Content Strategy

Just like you wouldn’t start building a house without a builder’s plan, you shouldn’t start writing before creating a content development strategy. Create a clear strategy to set everything from brand to target audience and keywords. 

Some of the best practices for content strategy include the usage of a content calendar to maintain regular posting and creating topic clusters to build authority. 

8. Spend Some Time Researching Keywords

After you have created a buyer’s persona, find the keywords that will draw audience that will relate to your content. Keyword research involves searching for the relevant key phrases that people are inquiring about and selecting which keywords to use in your content. 

Look at information like monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and click volume to select the right keywords. You can use tools like Keyword Surfer, Semrush’s Keyword Generator, Ahref’s Keyword Generator Tool or AnswerThePublic to find relevant organic keywords. The best content writing practice for keywords is to use them naturally and organically and to avoid keyword stuffing.  

9. Check Your Competitor’s Sites and Rankings

An effective content practice is to use your competitors as a benchmark to set up your content strategy. If you need to get a new website or a blog started, you can take ideas for topics from your competitors. Check via Semrush to find what your competitors are posting and their top-ranking keywords to understand their content strategies.  

Stay on track with the content publishing schedule of your competitors and assess how they are drawing traffic and converting sales. Competitor analysis also lets you identify gaps in your content strategy to overcome your shortcomings or to make more comprehensive content. 

10. Set Guidelines for Writers 

If you employ the services of a content writing agency, you need to have guidelines in place to ensure content quality standards. Create a document or an email detailing everything from general guidelines, formatting rules and your own preferences. This is quite necessary when you have multiple content creators working across different projects and teams. 

Here are some of the things you should include in your guidelines:

• Company voice and tone
• SEO best practices 
• Formatting styles, including casing, fonts, layout, etc. 
• Writing conventions
• Guidelines for sourcing information
• Personal preferences 

11. Follow Google’s E-E-A-T Guidelines

EEAT, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, is a framework of guidelines used by the search engine giant Google to assess the quality of content. Since Google’s search algorithms use this framework to rank content, writers need to be familiar with it. 

12. Avoid Promotional Tone When Writing 

While the objective of any content marketer is to promote their products or services, it’s important to avoid directly selling your product – especially with Top of the Funnel keywords. Sales should be the natural consequence of the trust you have built with your brand as you put the needs of your audience first. 

With the exception of product or service pages, a directly promotional tone causes readers to lose interest and click out of your webpage. Instead, follow the best practices for content writing, providing useful information, industry insights, and solutions to your customers’ problems.

13. Follow Trends and Popular Media

If you need content ideas, current events and popular media can provide you with inspiration. You can check the feed of social media sites and Google Trends to see what’s hot and trending and use it for your content. Offer something new, like a new insight or perspective, when discussing trending topics to capitalise on their popularity. 

You can also reference popular media to create relatable and viral content. Even when you are not directly posting on trends and media, you can reference them through memes and external links. 

14. Incorporate Visuals in Your Content

It’s a well-known fact that online readers prefer visually rich content over long texts. Include images, videos and infographics to captivate your audience and increase your traffic and sales. 

Use pictures to tell a story or provide your readers with additional information in the form of infographics. If you have a content-heavy page, breaking up sections with images is an excellent content optimization technique you should implement. 

Takeaway

There are many different ways to create effective content for your business. To get the maximum rewards for your content, you must learn how to ensure good quality on a consistent basis. Follow the best practices for creating content, from using simple and conversational language to following Google’s latest SEO guidelines.   

Besides following the best practices, you must create an overall strategy to streamline content creation. Establish your brand name through content marketing by taking the help of a reputable content writing agency to do the heavy lifting for you.