When it comes to on-page SEO, content is king. Google currently uses a helpful content system that helps determine organic search rankings by favoring sites that post original, helpful content to users. All businesses should aspire to rank highly in organic results, as it often leads to a huge increase in qualified website traffic without the need for any ad spend. However, ranking at the top of organic search results is extremely competitive, and a lot of work goes into maintaining those top positions.
Content Marketing and SEO
Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. One cannot be entirely successful without the other. SEO makes your website rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs), which in turn causes your site to experience a higher level of traffic. On the other hand, content marketing is the creation of material that doesn’t promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services. High-quality content gets potential customers interested, educates them, and gets them to spend time on your site. It also positions you as an expert in your industry, helping to build credibility with your target audience. In short, SEO gets people to visit your website, while content marketing keeps them there.
If you focus purely on SEO, you will get people to your site, but they will likely leave quickly without quality content. Conversely, if you focus purely on content marketing, you will have a site that could keep people engaged, but they will have a harder time reaching it through organic search results. You must nurture both sides of this symbiotic relationship in order to be successful.
How Do You Optimize Content for SEO?
You probably already have content on your site, such as blogs, case studies, or infographics. Starting an SEO content strategy does not mean you have to remove this pre-existing content and start all over. It simply needs to be optimized.
What Are the Keys to Content Optimization?
There are a couple steps you should take to ensure you are ready to begin optimizing your content.
First, you need to find the right keywords to use. Keywords are the words and phrases that users are entering into search queries. Using a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs, helps immensely with keyword research. These tools provide you with real user data to show the volume of searches for specific keywords and how difficult it is to rank for those keywords.
Second, you must research your competitors. Look at their content, what keywords they are using in it, and how engaging it is. Your competitors’ content sets the benchmark you must beat with your own content if you want to be in the top search results. A gap analysis provides insight into what keywords are lacking from your competitors’ site. This information can generate ideas for your own site’s content.
Best Practices
Once you are ready to start optimizing your content, there are a number of best practices you will want to make sure you’re adhering to. These are:
- Leverage the keywords from your research.
- Align content with search intent.
- Utilize compelling title tags and meta descriptions.
- Optimize your headers
- Provide alt text for images.
- Write useful and engaging content that keeps users on the site longer
As long as you have high-quality content and keep these practices in mind while optimizing, you should have no problem moving up in organic search results.
Developing a Content Strategy
After optimizing pre-existing content, it is time to turn toward future content. To ensure this content is fully optimized from the start, it is important to have a comprehensive content strategy. This strategy will guide the planning, development, and management of all content moving forward.
SERPs
When developing your content strategy it is important to keep user intent in mind. What are people asking? What information do they need? You can use this to target specific SERPs seen by a large number of users. Your content should be focused on being relevant to the search queries that generate these SERPs, so that your site is able to rank highly on them, and thus experience more traffic.
Keyword Research
Keyword research should be a massive part of planning content. Using keywords will help you create content that matches search intent, and ranks highly in organic search results. The keywords you discover should be used to determine what your content will be based on. For example, if you own a scuba gear company and find out that a keyword is “wetsuit size” , it would be a good idea to write a blog titled “How to Find the Right Wetsuit Size”. All content should be based on the keywords you discover in your research to ensure that it is relevant, engaging, and ranks in search results.
Competitor Gap Analysis
When developing your content strategy it is paramount to conduct a competitor gap analysis. This is a tool which generates a report on keyword rankings for you and your competitors. You will be able to see the top opportunities for each site, total keyword overlap, common keywords shared by all sites, and more. This is all invaluable insight.
First, you can determine which keywords your competitors are targeting that you are not. In order to remain competitive, you should begin targeting these keywords in your content as well. Second, you can determine the inverse, which keywords you are targeting which your competitors are not. You should continue focusing on these keywords in your content to give yourself an edge.
Pillar Content Marketing for SEO
Pillar content marketing is an extremely useful strategy for organizing content, and is capable of achieving amazing results. It involves creating a main pillar, which acts as a content hub. In this main pillar you will place links to sub pillars dealing with specific topics that align to the main pillar. Inside the sub pillars you will include internal links to other relevant pages on your site that provide more in-depth information to support content on your sub-pillar and main pillar pages.
While this may seem like a large undertaking, pillar content strategies are an easier way to break down a major task by smaller steps. It helps you see the overlying structure of organization, detailing how several content pages link together on your site. This strategy also positions you as an expert on the topic of your main pillar.
List Your Topics
First, decide on your main pillar. Next, make a list of all topics you would like to have featured as sub pillars supporting the main pillar.. More is much better than less here, do not leave anything out. For example, let’s say you operate a realty company. You would list all topics related to buying a home, such as inspections, how to find the right neighborhood, how to apply for a mortgage, and anything else related to the purchase of a home.
Write Pages for Each Topic
Once you have completed your list of topics, it is time to start writing. Create a page for each topic you have listed. This content should be educational, engaging, and in-depth, including all of the details and minutiae of the topic at hand. The main pillar page should be the longest, followed by sub-pillars. Content underneath sub-pillars can be shorter, although the exact length may vary depending on your topics and strategy. Although pillar content can be long, it’s important to maintain focus on quality over quantity.
Create a Link Building Strategy
Now that you have your pages written out it is time to connect them. All sub-pillars should link to the main pillar. From there, look at your topics and decide which sub-pillars are relevant to each other and should be linked to one another. Well done link building will not only help with SEO, but will also keep users on your site for longer durations, as they keep clicking links to more sub-pillars including topics that they are interested in.
Does Blogging Help SEO?
Blogging is not only about creating content that is useful to your users, it can also be a huge help to your SEO efforts. Blogging positions your website as a relevant answer to search engine queries, especially if you do a thorough job of peppering your blogs with the keywords you discovered in your research. This will cause your site to rise in search engine rankings. In fact, blogging is so helpful to SEO, that an SEO strategy cannot really be considered complete if it is lacking a blogging component.
Building Authority as an Industry Leader
Producing quality content that is relevant, educational, and useful will lead to your business being seen as an authority and leader in your industry. Being known in this way is of course a great way to lure in users. They will see your content as trustworthy, and thus will want to come to you for answers to their questions, making them more likely to choose your site from the SERP. However, being an industry leader also helps with SEO. Search engines give sites an authority score, and having a high authority score will result in search engines placing you higher in search rankings.
Why Is Having Duplicate Content an Issue for SEO?
Content is like anything else, in that being rare or unique makes it more valuable. Having duplicate content dilutes the ranking potential a single, unique page can have. This is because duplicate content, for lack of a better word, confuses search engines. When search engines see duplicate content they don’t know which page should be featured in search results. The search engine won’t know whether to direct the link metrics to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions. This often results in both pages being seen as less valuable than a single page featuring the same content, which in turn causes them to be ranked lower in search results.
How Often Should I Write Content?
There is no magic number when it comes to writing content. However, at the very minimum you should be writing new content once per month. For optimum results, it is best to post new, high-quality content 1-2 times per week. Creating new content regularly ensures that your site is staying relevant and up-to-date. This helps to make sure you are continuously ranked highly by search engines. Users are also more likely to use a site that stays relevant and has the current information they need.
