The Only Listicles Guide You’ll Ever Need 📝

3. Optimize your listicle

Now that you know your target keyword(s) and your future article outline, start writing your listicle with SEO in mind.

There are, of course, general SEO considerations you need to follow for just about any article, including listicles.

These include using your target keywords, taking care of image SEO, and using internal links.

Yet, there are also a few SEO recommendations that are more or less specific to list-type content. Here they are:

3.1 Use subheadings

Subheadings introduce new sections of your article. They are usually marked up with H2, H3, or H4 HTML tags.

Subheadings help readability and make any article easier to scan.

Subheadings also help SEO because Google is using subheadings to better understand how the article is structured and locate answers to related questions.

Based on the outline of your future article, your subheading structure may look like this:

• H2 subheadings to introduce list sections (e.g. list items that fall under a defined set of properties or price ranges)
• H3 subheadings to introduce each list item

3.2. Use schema

Google doesn’t have well-defined rules on how to markup your list using Schema.

However they do have loose documentation called “Carousel Search Results” that sounds like it only works for courses, movies, recipes and restaurants.

Yet, I’ve been seeing it work in other niches. Here’s what it looks like: