Brands are prioritizing content more than ever. For The Drum’s Content Marketing in Focus, Connor Cohen (SEO & content executive at The Drum) explores why SEO is such an important part of content and how it can be incorporated into a brand’s content strategy.
Content marketing has seen significant growth as brands produce creative content strategies that drive traffic, leads, and conversions, while also growing their brand across countries, channels, and platforms.
One of the most important pillars in building a content marketing strategy for the future is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is crucial to a content marketing strategy as it helps people find your content on search engines, increasing its visibility.
Here’s why SEO matters, how to combine it with your content strategy, and our top five tips for creating a solid SEO strategy in 2023.
What is SEO and why is it important?
Contents
- 1 What is SEO and why is it important?
- 2 Why you should combine your content and SEO strategies
- 3 5 key tips to creating a successful SEO content strategy in 2023
- 4 Key takeaways
- 5 How can I improve my SEO skills?
- 6 Is SEO easy to learn?
- 7 What makes a good social media post for business?
- 8 What is a successful SEO strategy?
SEO is the process of optimizing a website to improve its position on Google and increase the quantity and quality of search engine traffic. This process is multifaceted: it includes multiple elements such as technical audits, link building, keyword research, content optimization, and more.
The goal of SEO is to improve the visibility of your site; therefore, it is paramount for brands looking to increase traffic to their website or position themselves as authoritative and trusted sources in their field or industry.
Why you should combine your content and SEO strategies
While SEO itself is an important distribution channel, it also plays a vital role in improving the visibility of content on other channels. Here’s how some key elements of SEO can contribute to your overall content strategy:
Keyword research
Before you create content, you need to know how a user is going to find your content. Keyword research is critical to understanding what terms your target audience searches for and how often they search for them.
By combining your SEO and content strategies, you can get a list of keywords that you know your target audience uses to find similar content. You can then include the keywords from your research as social media hashtags, in the descriptions of your video content, or in the copy of your long blog posts.
Search intent
In addition to understanding which keywords are being used, incorporating SEO into your content strategy can also help you determine the intent behind the keywords.
By understanding the user’s search intent, you can position your content to be most relevant.
For example, for informational content such as blog posts, finding the most relevant keywords with the right search intent can give you an edge over less optimized content, as Google’s goal is to provide the user with the most relevant result for the query.
Content format & structure
Creating content in an optimized format and structure is another reason why you should include SEO in your content strategy.
SEO not only gives you an idea of what content format is likely to yield the best results, e.g. guide, review, video, etc., but it also gives you a structural guideline to help you provide the best content experience and opportunity for your content is seen.
5 key tips to creating a successful SEO content strategy in 2023
With 90% of marketers adopting a content marketing plan, brands are finally starting to prioritize content marketing and spend more on creating content across channels and platforms. With more competition, brands will need to optimize their content to gain as much visibility as possible. That is why SEO optimization is essential.
Here are five tips brands should keep in mind when creating their SEO content strategy and getting more exposure to their brand.
1. Create video content
There are a number of reasons why video rules content marketing and how it has become one of the most effective forms of content to engage your audience. Short form video is extremely effective on social media platforms and is one of the main ways people consume content. This is why short video has the best ROI compared to all other media formats and why social media platforms focus on and invest heavily in the medium.
Consumers use video platforms as both a source of education and entertainment and as search engines. Therefore, brands should not only create video content that resonates with their target audience when they watch, but they should also prioritize SEO optimization to ensure their content is easy to find among a sea of other videos.
2. Optimize for voice search
The introduction of Siri and other voice assistants has forced brands to adopt innovative strategies to take advantage of new opportunities. With 27% of the global online population using voice search on mobile and more than 4 billion voice assistants used on devices worldwide, brands that refuse to optimize their content for voice search leave significant opportunities on the table.
There are several important aspects in optimizing voice search, but one of the most important SEO elements in optimizing for voice search is featured snippets; a search result that appears at the top of the search results page, specifically chosen by Google as the best answer to the user’s query.
Optimizing for featured snippets is generally a good SEO practice, but the added importance of featured snippets to voice search means that brands that don’t optimize their content in this way are missing out on an opportunity to make their content more visible to people’s homes and businesses. on the move.
3. Repurpose your content for different channels
Content repurposing involves recycling and transforming content for use on different channels. For example, converting a long video into short videos or fragments for social media channels. It is a creative way for brands to create new content and helps to reach different audiences who prefer different formats to consume media.
Other content repurposing ideas include turning a blog post or article into a video or social media thread, transcribing podcasts into blog posts, turning presentations into infographics, etc. Since there are a plethora of options, Brands should make sure they style the content to the channel they want to use.
Some practical tips for reusing content include:
Prioritize popular, evergreen content.
Timing the release of repurposed content with trends, news and events.
Use visuals to give your content the best chance of being shared.
4. Optimize your site and improve user experience (UX)
Creating a successful SEO content strategy is built on the fundamentals of SEO, which is why it is important to optimize your site.
Some of the key SEO optimizations brands should consider include:
The result of these optimizations are two important SEO principles to provide the user with a good experience on your site and make content as accessible as possible on mobile devices.
Mobile accounted for nearly 60% of global traffic in the first half of 2022 and will become more popular than desktop in the near future. As social media and entertainment become so mobile, people are now more than ever consuming media on their mobile devices. As the use of mobile devices continues to grow, providing a seamless mobile experience will be crucial in 2023.
5. Keep up to date with Google’s algorithm updates
Google is constantly updating its algorithms to provide the best results for a query. Most of these updates are minor, but major updates can have a significant impact on SEO and content strategies.
Google’s ‘Helpful Content Update’, released in September 2022, is a good example of this. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has grown in popularity as it has enabled brands and writers to streamline the content development process. Google’s response to this was the “Useful Content Update” designed to devalue automated content and prioritize content that comes first.
We don’t know what algorithm updates Google has planned in the future, but be sure to stay tuned as it can help you understand why your content isn’t performing as you expected.
Key takeaways
Visit our Content Marketing in Focus hub for more content marketing news, insights and strategies.
How can I improve my SEO skills?
Follow these suggestions to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and see how your website ranks higher in search results.
- Publish relevant, authoritative content. …
- Update your content regularly. …
- metadata. …
- Provide a link-worthy site. …
- Use alt tags.
Can I learn SEO myself? There’s no better resource I’ve found as a starting point for learning SEO than Moz’s The Beginner’s Guide to SEO. It’s free and it starts by answering the most basic questions like “What is SEO?” Read the entire guide once and you’ll know more than the people who send you those spam SEO emails every day.
Is SEO easy to learn?
SEO is not that hard to learn. All you need to do is be willing to spend the necessary time and effort learning the different SEO concepts. If you are just getting started with SEO and wondering what it takes to go from beginner to expert, this post is for you.
Can I learn SEO in 2 months? It takes 1-3 months to learn SEO at a basic level and as long as 6-18 months to learn SEO at an advanced level. How much time it takes to learn SEO depends on how many hours a day you can study search engine optimization.
How long will it take to learn SEO?
If you can learn SEO for a few hours every day, then you can master the basics of SEO in 4-8 weeks and land your first SEO job in 3-6 months. In fact, if you can learn SEO full-time, you can master the basics in 1-2 weeks.
Post about your company’s culture Showcase your company’s culture with an image or article that emphasizes what your company is all about. It could be a behind-the-scenes view of your employees doing something quirky or an article about how your company does something a certain way.
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What is a successful SEO strategy?
An effective local SEO strategy will bring your content to the forefront in customer searches in your area, letting them know your business is there to meet their needs.
What makes an SEO campaign successful? There are several important factors to consider when planning a successful SEO campaign. The main ones are: find your audience, understand how SERP works, conduct keyword research, improve internal links, create quality content.
