SEO and content marketing overlap, but there are key
differences.
Aspects
of SEO are more technical. This includes the use of correct URLs, title and ALT
tags, sitemaps and so on: the stuff that underpins your content marketing
strategy.
Content
marketing is broader and isn’t necessarily confined to SEO goals. For example,
a publisher should produce excellent content first and foremost as a way of
attracting and retaining an audience.
How Content and SEO
Can Work Together
There is a school of thought, or at least the perception
exists in some quarters, that SEO is merely about creating good content for the
search engines to index.
While I’m all for the quality content part, there’s more to
it than that. If you haven’t ensured that the on-site SEO groundwork has been
done, your content efforts will be wasted.
For example, if your site has a penalty, or Google isn’t
indexing pages properly, then you’re going to need some SEO expertise, great
content or not. This is why the SEO experts and content teams need to work
together. As the stats below show, this isn’t necessarily happening all the
time, but there is a desire for closer collaboration.
Here are some ways
SEO and content can work together:
1. Creating Original,
Quality Content
While thin content created to provide fodder for Google’s
crawlers may have worked to a certain extent a few years ago, it isn’t
effective now. Also, weak content produced to make up the numbers will not work
from a content marketing perspective, as it will not help to attract and retain
readers.
Instead, from an SEO perspective, original and engaging
content will set you apart from competitors, as it gives the search engines
something to index that can’t be found elsewhere. It also helps your content
marketing goals, as original and quality content is far more likely to attract
the audience you’re targeting.
Ask yourself whether your content inspires people to linger
on your site longer than a minute or so. Does it provide value, such as useful
advice that helps them to do their jobs better?
2. Evergreen Content
and SEO
Creating evergreen content is a great strategy for improving
search rankings, as well as making your site a more useful one. A piece of news
will often do well in Google while it’s fresh topical, but will fade
thereafter. It doesn’t deliver long-term traffic. However, a more useful
article that contains valuable advice and insight will attract the kinds of
links and engagement metrics that Google is looking for, and is more likely to
perform well in the search rankings over a longer period of time.
3. Keyword Research
Keyword research is essential for content marketing and SEO
to work well together. First of all, the quality has to be in the content you produce,
but you should also ensure that the content you spent time creating achieves
the exposure it deserves. To achieve this, your content needs to match the
search terms that people are using and answer these search queries effectively.
If you use too many technical terms in your articles, this
language may not match that which searchers are using. To avoid this, do some
keyword research to find out which terms are popular and match the language you
use to the way people search
4. Monitoring Keyword Goals
Once you have a list of terms and phrases to target with
your content efforts, it’s important to monitor and measure your efforts. Is
the content you produce hitting the mark? Is it having an effect on search
positions? Don’t expect overnight results; it can take time before you see any
shifts in search, and it may be very competitive for certain keywords.
There are no guarantees of success, but a well-applied
strategy using focused content will pay off on a long term basis. It’s
important to add that, while content can play a key role in achieving SEO
goals, it shouldn’t be a slave to those goals. Keywords shouldn’t be crowbarred
in so that content quality is affected. The reader shouldn’t notice too much.
5. Link Building
Good content attracts links. Just make sure it’s distributed
effectively so that it can get the attention of as big or influential an
audience as possible. There’s no great science to this; just create content
that people will want to link to and see how it works.
6. Internal Linking
This is an obvious way to use content to help with SEO
goals, as well as improving the user experience. Internal linking can help
Google crawl your site more effectively, help pages to rank well for certain
search terms, and also point users toward content that is relevant to the
article they’re reading.
It’s simple enough to put into practice, and should be a
part of the thinking when writing and editing content.
7. Measurement
It’s vital to measure the effects of the content you create
in terms of SEO goals. If you’re aiming to improve rankings, there are some
useful tools out there to track changes in ranking positions and see the
results of your efforts.
8. Headlines
Headlines are very important. They should be descriptive and
should work hard to convince people to click, but they shouldn’t try too hard.
For example, a title such as “10 useful tips to improve your landing pages” is
fine, as long as those tips are useful and deliver on the promise. However, “10
awesome tips that will improve your landing pages and make you a millionaire”
might be promising more that it can deliver.
Headlines must be written for the Web, and you need to
consider the keywords and phrases you use in headlines. How do people search
for these topics? How will people find your articles? What do you want to rank
for?
Headline length is important too. It shouldn’t be too long,
for a number of reasons.
Google
truncates long titles in search results. You want the full headline to be
visible in the search results so people are more inclined to click on it.
Social
sharing. For example, if you want people to share your articles on Twitter, the
headline should be short enough to allow people to retweet without having to
edit it, or to add a comment if they want.
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