Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is a fundamental part of digital marketing for many online businesses, and can be hugely effective in increasing traffic, boosting sales, and generating more leads.
Content marketing has a huge role to play in your SEO efforts, whether it’s specific content marketing through blog posts or whitepaper downloads, or its content on your own website.
Good quality content is essential in order to improve your search rankings, along with a whole list of other technical details you will need to ensure are covered. We will cover some of the ways that you can use existing and new content in order to improve your website’s SEO, and increase your traffic from the search engines.
Generate new content
Having a good website is just the start of marketing your business online.
You will need to continually update your site with new content in order to get the best possible rankings.
Not only updating content, but you should add content to your site too. Whether this is through a blog, informational pages, or service pages, you can keep adding content to your site to provide the best possible experience for your customers.
How new a piece of content is, is also a key metric for Google when judging where to rank specific websites. So newer content will often rank better than old, outdated and un-updated content.
Create more visual content
You may have a great blog, but more businesses are creating content that is much more visual, and can be a lot more engaging.
Now that mobile phones have larger, better quality screens with mobile internet, and everyone has a tablet, there’s no real restriction as to when and where people can digest visual content.
Depending on your target audience, they may be able to digest visual content better than a big block of text. It can leave a better first impression, and it can ensure they have digested your information more thoroughly.
Whether you’re creating images or videos, you can still ensure it’s optimised for Google and other search engines, and that it helps your overall rankings.
Of course, Google cannot read an image, but it’s the text associated with this image you need to focus on. This includes the image title, the alt tag, and the image size. Ensure it’s compressed or small enough that it doesn’t lead to long load times.
Create content people will want to link to
Links are still a big part of SEO. And while the shady side of link building is pretty much dead, the way to do it now is to ensure you are creating content people actively want to link to.
Link building can help your content and website reach an audience it wouldn’t otherwise. This creates more referrals, and also indicates to Google your content is great and should be ranking higher.
Aim to get links from higher authority websites, and try reaching out to specific websites that may be in a similar or related field to what your content is all about.
Assess your content keywords
Keyword research is the all-important first step in SEO, and for content marketing.
Of course, it’s worth remembering you shouldn’t always be targeting the most obvious or vague keywords.
If you haven’t already targeted long-tail keywords that might be more successful, consider what longer phrases people may be searching for when looking for a business like yours.
Consider what content you can write that would help bring value to people searching for this. How can your content actively solve a problem of someone searching for these specific terms or phrases?
If you only target the most popular keywords, you stand less chance of ranking. If you can find different key phrases or terms that are less sought after, you can ensure you rise to the top of the search results when people are searching.
Revisit and repurpose content
It’s great if you’re continually updating content on your site, and adding new content to your blog or news section. But you could go back and revisit old pieces of content, and flip it around entirely, or repurpose it for something else.
Just because your content is old does not mean it’s useless. Some content will continue to rank for months or even years, and may not be too time-sensitive.
You can use, say, an old blog post in order to create a slideshow, or a video, or an audio podcast. Repurposing content can be great for revisiting old topics, analysing them in detail, and creating multiple different versions of content for different types of customers. You don’t need to keep coming up with new ideas, and gives you more valuable content to share on your site.
Formats of content you can create include blog posts, videos, infographics, quizzes, podcasts, checklists, slideshows, whitepapers, and much more. Choosing which all depends on your target audience.
