Content Strategies and SEO
Content strategies and SEO. Content is the lifeblood of your website, and good content can boost your search engine rank. But how do you know if your content is working? The answer lies in its effectiveness at:
- Building brand awareness and trust with a target audience.
- Helping readers understand how to solve their problems or achieve their goals.
- Providing value through helpful information that increases customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention.
In this article, we’ll go over some key principles for creating effective content that supports SEO strategy.
READ: What is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
5 content strategies that will boost your SEO
You know you should be writing and publishing content that’s useful, helpful, and engaging. But how do you do it?
The best way to think about content is through the lens of SEO—it’s all about search engine optimization (SEO). This means creating content that readers will want to read and share—and search engines will love.
SEO is the art of getting your site ranked higher in search results by using certain keywords or phrases on your website’s webpages. When someone searches for something related to your business or industry, they’ll find it on their screen when they click on a result from their search results page (SERP). You want them to click through so they visit your site, which hopefully leads them further down the conversion funnel toward becoming a customer.
1. Performance and Quality
Performance and quality are two of the most important factors that influence SEO. Performance refers to how quickly your page loads and how many people view it, while quality is a measure of how well the content on your site is written and presented.
To check your page load times, check out Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This will show you how your page loads and will identify issues affecting your sites load times.
Other factors include backlinks (links from other sites), social media mentions, number of pages on your site, keyword density (how often you use keywords in relation to non-keywords), etc.
By focusing on these two factors, you can improve your SEO with little to no investment in paid advertising. For example, if your site loads faster than competitors’ sites due to better performance, users may decide use it instead of a competitor’s site.
Quality content is the key to SEO. The best way to make sure your content is high-quality and will rank well in search engines is with a content plan. Create an editorial calendar that outlines how often you will publish (weekly? monthly?) as well as what topics should be covered.
READ: How-To Create A Social Media Calendar That Works!
2. Multimedia is a Must
You’ve probably heard that multimedia content is a must in today’s digital world. In fact, the average consumer spends more than 26 minutes watching videos on social media each day and almost 38% of B2B marketers use video marketing as part of their overall strategy for lead generation.
So what does that mean for you? It means you need to start using multimedia to support your content! Here are some ideas:
- Use infographics to explain complex topics: Infographics make it easier for consumers to digest information and can also help them remember what they learn from your brand. They’re especially great if there’s a certain topic that’s important for people who use your product but difficult to understand without visual aids (like an electrical engineering degree). Plus, when someone shares an infographic on social media, it has more staying power compared with other types of content like plain text articles or blog posts alone do because they’re so visually compelling!
- Use audio: Audio can be used in podcasts or vlogs which allow potential customers access through mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets instead.
3. Find the Right Keywords
You need to find the right keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that people use to search for information online, they’re the building blocks of your content, and they represent the foundation of your SEO strategy.
The first step in creating content that is optimized for search is determining which keywords you should be targeting with your content. Identifying what people are searching for will help you create better content that meets a user’s needs and drives them back to your website.
Knowing which keywords you want to rank for is important to your SEO strategy. In organic search, the more popular a keyword is, the harder it’ll be for you to rank for that keyword. This is why it’s so important that you choose the right keywords. You should not only select quality keywords with high search volume, but also ones that are relevant to your content and business goals.
4. Include Internal Links
Internal links are a key part of content marketing. They’re a great way to help users find the content they need on your site—and they can also be used to build trust.
Content marketers often have a lot of pages and posts coming out, so it can be difficult to ensure that each piece of content has been properly linked back to from other relevant pages.
However, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make sure that all of your pieces of content are internally linked!
Internal links are a great way to build trust and establish credibility for your site. They can help you rank better, and they’re also one of the best ways to build a cohesive site with lots of relevant content. If you have an internal link strategy in place, it’s important that these links be established as early on in your content marketing lifecycle as possible—ideally before you start publishing anything new.
5. Offer Valuable Content
Offering valuable content to your audience is a surefire way to earn their trust and respect. When you provide useful information, you are being helpful. When you entertain them with a positive experience, they will remember that brand fondly. When relevant topics are covered, it shows that the company is invested in its audience’s interests and concerns. And when content is engaging and authoritative (but not so much so as to be off-putting or intimidating), people will want more of your information in the future.
For all these reasons, among others, well-written content is key to SEO success—and it has been since long before search engines existed!
Well-written content is also well-structured, organized, designed, edited, and formatted. It’s no coincidence that these key components of good writing have been perfected over the centuries.
You might think that creating an effective content strategy is easy. But like everything else in life, it takes time and effort to get good at it!
Conclusion
We’re sure you have your own ideas about the best way to create effective content, but we hope that these five strategies will give you some inspiration and help you create content that supports SEO. If nothing else, it’s important to make sure that your content is well-written and engaging for both humans and search engines alike.
We know this can be difficult, especially if you don’t consider yourself a writer or don’t think writing is your strong suit. But don’t worry—we have plenty of resources available for accomplishing just that! We wrote an article on how to write more effectively using storytelling tips from Pixar (and yes, it does work). And if all else fails, let us help with our SEO services!
