How to Create SEO Content That Ranks

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Magnifying glass inspecting SEO content with AI citation panel beside it

By NewSunSEO September 15, 2026

A page that ranks for a relevant term continues to draw organic traffic long after publication, and search-driven AI tools can quote the same page in their answers.

What is SEO content?

SEO content is content built to be found the moment someone searches for what you offer. It can be a product page, a blog post, a video, or an image. What makes it SEO content is that it is optimized to rank in search engines like Google and to get cited by AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Earning that visibility means satisfying three audiences at once: users who want answers, search engines that decide what to rank, and AI systems that decide what to cite. Each one judges a page a little differently.

A working example: search "what are the best walking shoes for plantar fasciitis," and running brand RunRepeat's guide is cited five times in the AI Overview and ranks first in the organic results. That page was built to rank. As of this writing it draws about 15,000 monthly visitors in the U.S., all from organic search, ranks for about 1,600 keyword variations that are almost all commercial, and is mentioned or cited in Google AI Overviews across 629 prompts.

Which formats count as SEO content?

SEO content is not a single format. The right one depends on what the searcher wants to do, such as learning about a topic, comparing options, or completing a specific task.

Blog posts and guides: answering a question or teaching something.
Product and service pages: helping someone evaluate what you sell.
Comparison pages: helping people choose between options.
Landing pages: getting someone to take one specific action.
Pillar pages and topic clusters: covering a whole subject, with supporting pages linked to it.
Images and infographics: ranking in image search and earning citations when other sites embed them.
Video: demonstrating something and ranking on YouTube as well as in Google.

Start from the search intent behind your keyword, then look at the results page. The format Google already rewards for that query is usually on display.

Step 1: Target the right keyword and read search intent

Pick topics that have demand and relevance. Demand means people are searching for it. Relevance means the visibility reaches people likely to buy or sign up. A keyword research tool shows search volume and how hard a term will be to rank. In Semrush's Keyword Overview, "best walking shoes for plantar fasciitis" returns 3,600 U.S. searches a month with a keyword difficulty of 21%, so enough people are looking and ranking is realistic.

If a topic is bigger than one page, cramming everything onto a single page makes each part thin. A topic cluster fixes that: one main page, several supporting pages, all linked so readers and search engines can move between them.

To read intent, type your keyword into Google. Autosuggest shows variations by gender, foot type, and brand. Ads at the top signal a term commercial enough for brands to pay for, which points to a searcher close to buying. An AI Overview that lists features and specific recommendations tells you searchers want both education and product options. To see a clean results page, use a VPN set to your target location in a private window while logged out, or open a SERP preview in Semrush and view the live results.

Step 2: Add original information

Original information is what sits on your page that is not on the other pages: your own data, a test you ran, or what you found by doing the thing yourself. Repetition confirms what a reader was starting to believe, which is useful, but it gives no one a reason to choose your page. Originality does, and it builds trust by showing you know the subject beyond what is already published. AI systems can already write the answer everyone else gives, so repeating it gives them no reason to reference you.

Google holds a patent called information gain that describes scoring a page by how much it adds to what the reader has already seen. Google has not confirmed whether it uses this, but a page that copies the ones above it tends to be harder to rank. Decide what you are adding before you draft: original data, first-hand experience, expert input, a repeatable framework, or custom visuals and tools.

Step 3: Prove your credibility with E-E-A-T

Users, search engines, and AI systems all have to decide whether to believe you, and none of them can check everything you claim. Google's guidelines for this are E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Quality raters use them to assess the content, the person who made it, and the site it is published on. Trust carries the most weight, and it matters most on money and health topics, where a bad answer can do real harm.

AI systems make more of that decision themselves. A results page lists links and lets the user choose; an AI answer gives one response and cites the sources behind it, so the system has already decided which sources were worth using. The proof on a page falls into three groups by how hard each is to fake. You can claim something, which counts for almost nothing. You can show it with a photo, a screenshot, or footage of the work, which costs something to produce. Or someone else can confirm it through a review you did not write, a certification you had to pass, or a client who will go on record. RunRepeat does most of this at once: it publishes the exact method it uses to test shoes, down to wearing every pair in the same size, its reviewers have real experience and specialties, and it criticizes shoes it earns commissions on.

Step 4: Make your content extractable

Search engines and AI systems interpret your content using natural language processing. They split text into words and sentences, pick out the words that name real things like people, products, and places, and work out what a passage means from context rather than the exact words typed. Google announced in 2020 that it ranks individual passages, not just whole pages, and AI systems retrieve passages too. Each section has to make sense on its own. Pulled into Semrush, the RunRepeat guide gets no more than about 4% of its traffic from any single search; the rest is spread across hundreds of variations, many ranking first, because each section can surface on its own.

Three choices do most of that work:

Put the most important information first. Lead with the answer to the title question on a blog post, or the product and price on a product page. In 2006 the Nielsen Norman Group tracked the eyes of 232 people reading web pages and found the F-pattern, where readers scan the top, drop down, scan a shorter line, then trail down the left edge. That is what people do when a page gives no clue where the useful part is. Search engines and AI systems also tend to pull from the first part of a page, so a main point buried halfway down may not get extracted.
Label sections for exactly what they answer. "Common Mistakes When Choosing a Primary Keyword" matches a search better than "Common Mistakes," and it tells the reader whether to keep going.
Name things specifically. Say the actual product, service, or brand. "Omnisend's SMS automation integrates with Shopify's abandoned cart data to trigger personalized recovery messages within two hours of cart abandonment" gives entity recognition something to work with, where "our automation features" gives it nothing.

Step 5: Get the on-page mechanics right

On-page elements are the attributes search engines and AI systems read to work out what a page covers, and people read them in the search results. Include your primary keyword in the title tag, the H1, the URL slug, the first paragraph, and at least one H2. Go no further, because Google treats keyword stuffing as spam. Use secondary keywords in subheadings and body copy where they fit naturally. Write a title tag and meta description that state clearly what the page covers, since that is what someone sees before clicking. Give every image a descriptive filename and alt text, which screen readers read aloud and search engines use to work out what the picture shows.

FAQ

What makes content count as SEO content?

Content counts as SEO content when it is optimized to rank in search engines like Google and to get cited by AI systems like ChatGPT. It can be a product page, blog post, video, or image; what defines it is that it is designed to be found the moment someone searches for what you offer.

Why does SEO content keep earning traffic after publishing?

A page that ranks for a relevant term keeps pulling in organic traffic for months or years. The RunRepeat walking shoes guide draws about 15,000 monthly U.S. visitors from organic search and ranks for about 1,600 keyword variations, and it is also cited in Google AI Overviews across 629 prompts.

Where should the primary keyword appear on a page?

Include the primary keyword in the title tag, the H1, the URL slug, the first paragraph, and at least one H2. Do not push it beyond that, because Google treats keyword stuffing as spam; use secondary keywords in subheadings and body copy where they fit naturally.