What Is SEO Content, Exactly?
To grasp what SEO content means to marketers, it's
helpful to break the word down into its constituent parts:
- "SEO" stands for "search engine optimization," or the technique of making a website easier to find using search engines like Google.
- Any material that lives on the web and can be consumed on the web is referred to as "content" (more on the various types of content below).
Putting these two
ideas together, we have: Any content prepared with the intention of garnering
search engine traffic is referred to as SEO content.
I’m not going to tell
you everything you need to know about optimizing your content for search
engines here; that’s a whole ‘another guide. But here’s a super-quick refresher
on what you’ll need to do in order to SEO your web content:
- Keyword Research: Before you start writing, undertake keyword research if you want to attract visitors through search. This allows you to concentrate on keywords with a
high search volume — in other words, write about topics (or find keyword niches!) that people are already looking for information about.
- Keyword Optimization: For
optimal searchability, know where and how to employ keywords in your
material. (SEOMoz has a terrific on-page optimization guide.)
- Information Organization: Your website's content should be logically
ordered. This is not only helpful for SEO, but it also makes it easier for
readers to find additional related information on your site. (It's best if
people stay on your site for as long as possible.)
- Content Promotion: Make new
content you publish more visible by sharing it on social media and
establishing links to it (both internally and from external sites).
A Few Words About
Intentions
It's crucial to
remember that if getting traffic from search engines is your primary goal, your
results will most likely suffer. You must provide value above and beyond search
engine optimization in order to delight both search engines (who will reward
you with high rankings over time) and potential consumers and return visitors.
To put it another way, don't create "thin" material that ranks and
gets clicks but doesn't give any value to the search engine user. Google may
punish websites that push "thin," poor-value content; they also tend
to have high bounce rates and low conversion rates.
SEO Content Types SEO content can be any of the following:
- Product
Pages — Product pages are the lifeblood of every retail e-commerce site. A
solid product page can be used as both SEO content and a landing page for
PPC campaigns..
- Blog Posts - One of the
simplest methods to develop a consistent supply of great SEO material is
to start a blog. Blog entries, in general, are more interesting and more
likely to draw links than product pages, so they can be a wonderful
approach to establish your site's authority. (Keep in mind that blogs are
quite adaptable, and you may use them to host any of the content kinds
listed below.)
- Articles — Consider a news
storey, an interview, or a feature piece. On most newspaper or
magazine-style websites, this is the most common type of material.
- Lists - A list is essentially
an article, but presenting it as a list (e.g., "10 Ways to Lower Your
Energy Bill" or "101 Things I Hate About Google") makes it easier to skim. When found in search results or social media feeds, these titles also appear to be more clickable.
- Guides - A guide is a
larger piece of information that describes how to do something in great
detail. (While it's great practise to allow readers to browse long
information as a single page if they desire, guides are frequently divided
up into numerous web pages.) You can either put a full guide on your
website or a summary or extract, with visitors being required to fill out
a registration form in order to read the whole guide. This is a good
technique to create leads, but bear in mind that setting up a registration
barrier will likely decrease the amount of SEO traffic you can send to
that guide.
- Videos – Because there are
less videos on the web than text pages, publishing a video instead of an
article can make it easier to rank on the first page for a competitive
keyword. Videos can be a terrific method to attract and reach an audience,
depending on the type of site or business you run. Consider making video
tutorials for your items' use. Or depict a procedure connected to your
business — a plumber, for example, could make a video explaining how to
unclog a sink. (A tip on SEO: You might consider including a text
transcript of your video. Here are some more video optimization
suggestions.)
- Infographics —
Infographics, which are large-format visuals containing a lot of data
(typically in the form of graphs or charts) about a single topic, can
generate a lot of page views and links. However, because so much of the
content is incorporated in the image and thus not readable by search
engines as text, the rest of the page must be carefully optimised. To get
started, pick one of these five free infographic templates.
- Slideshows - A slideshow is
a visual presentation of a group of connected photographs. If you're
trying to show what all the stars wore to the Oscars, photographs are
sometimes more significant than text. Because there is less for the search
engines to "read," SEO of your title, captions, image file
names, and so on is crucial.
- Glossaries — I swear, more people look up terms on Google than in dictionaries. (Do you even remember where you put your dictionary?) A well-constructed glossary can be a useful approach to acquire some search traffic if you work in a specialist field. Consider the following: culinary terminology, medical terms, fashion terms, architectural terms...
- Directories - A the directory is a taxonomy of links to sites or resources related to a specific topic. A perfume blog, for example, might compile a list of places to buy perfume, ranging from huge department stores to little boutiques across the count
How to Create a Content Strategy for SEO
If you've been haphazardly producing content in the hopes that some of it may rank, now is the moment to buckle down and commit to a more rigorous SEO content plan for the web.
To define and refine your SEO content
strategy, follow these four steps:
Define your objectives.
Determine your website or business's goals first. Do you want to increase
your website's sales? Do you use advertisements to monetize your blog and just
wish to improve traffic and return readers? What types of information you
should concentrate on will be determined by your objectives.
If you want to increase product sales, you should prioritise appealing,
informative product pages that are optimised for both search and conversions.
Your secondary focus could be on useful blog content that demonstrates when and
how to utilise your items, with appropriate links to those pages (but it's
preferable if your blog isn't wholly self-promotional).
If your site is based on advertising and you want to
attract new readers through search, you should focus on rich content (such as
long-form articles or video resources that are informative, entertaining, or
both) and “stickiness” (content that keeps visitors on your site longer or
encourages them to return).
Consider who you're
writing for.
Know your target
market - surveys and analytics tools can assist you in gaining a better
understanding of your typical visitor or client. Consider creating marketing
personas, which are fictional individuals who represent your ideal site
visitors and consumers. Then consider what kinds of content those personas
would be interested in.For example, if you
operate a B2B website that targets C-level executives, you might want to create
high-level white papers that can be downloaded and saved to read later.
If your company caters to teenagers and
tweens, you should provide regular updates with less text and more graphics and
video. You'll also want to make sure your site is mobile-friendly.
- Make a schedule for your
articles.
You can start creating an editorial calendar after
you know who you're going after and why. An editorial calendar is a schedule
that specifies when new material will be published and what type of content
will be published. This will help you stay to a regular schedule (creating new
content on a regular basis is especially vital if you have a blog), as well as
avoid you from fumbling at the last minute to come up with a theme for fresh
content.
A few pointers on how to make and stick to an editorial calendar:
- Use Outlook (or Google
Calendar) for scheduling – Your whole marketing team should have access to
the editorial schedule. Set up reminders for authors so they know when a
deadline is approaching.
- Consider developing
recurring items, such as a vegetarian recipe every Monday on a food blog.
Many blogs publish weekly link roundups (including this one). Create a
category page for each continuing item so that visitors can easily access
all of your Meatless Monday recipes and link roundups.
- Allow plenty of time for more complex types of material, such as movies and infographics, to be created. These are more difficult to optimise for search and often require numerous rounds of revisions to perfect.
- Don't plan too far ahead of time — Calendars are prone to becoming derailed after a month or two owing to changes in marketing goals, finances, or employees, so don't try to plan out a year's worth of activities and risk wasting a lot of time and effort.
Analyze and re-evaluate
Finally, keep an eye on your site's statistics. Analyze your SEO material
on a regular basis to evaluate what's working and what isn't. Page views,
links, comments (on blog posts and other types of content), social shares
(Facebook likes, tweets, etc.) and conversion rates are all good indicators of
success and engagement. Two objectives should be the focus of your
investigation:
- Analyze your triumphs so
you can replicate them – Keep an eye out for patterns. Do you have a
video-obsessed audience? Then go ahead and produce more videos! Adjust
your editorial calendar in the future so you can devote more time and effort to the types of content that are most popular.
- Make time to update and
improve existing SEO material — If you try to optimize an article for one keyword but it's getting more traffic for a different variation of that phrase, go back and re-optimize it for the new keyword. By include that term in the headline, for example, you might be able to considerably improve traffic.
Please let me
know if you have any further questions regarding developing and optimizing
content for SEO in the comments section.
