How Can Your Content Marketing Use SEO Effectively?
Content marketing has been in use for many years, helping to attract customers online through a mixture of blogs, news stories, features and more that can gain interest, engage consumers looking for products and services and turn them into customers.
But it is not a simple thing to do.
Various factors make such marketing effective, but the first of them is to make sure you are seen. That is not easy in a crowded marketplace. Anyone looking on search engines might easily find your rival’s content instead of yours.
How can you win the race?
How Does SEO Work?
This is where search engine optimisation (SEO) comes in. This is the means by which you can get your content onto the first page of the search results on engines like Google and Bing (but mostly Google, which dominates search).
The fact is, most people using search engines do not look beyond the first page of results. One study put the number as high as 91.5 per cent.
However, content does not achieve a page one ranking by accident. Search engines rank content according to algorithms. These contain hundreds of factors, but some are of particularly high importance.
Among these are:
· The right keywords
· Quality and relevance
· Authority and trust
· Backlinks
· User experience
· Technical SEO
Not all of these are content specific. For example, user experience can be partly determined by factors such as fast download times, while technical SEO depends on matters like having a good site structure that is easy to navigate and being mobile-friendly.
How Should Keywords Be Used In SEO?
However, your content should focus very strongly on having relevant keywords, as these are central to search. You shouldn’t add in too many (known as keyword stuffing) or repeat the same keyword, nor use them out of any relevant context.
These techniques, used to game the system many years ago, are now penalised by search engines.
Instead, relevant keywords should fit with relevant copy and the keywords should be updated from time to time. Keyword analysis can help by showing what keywords are most popular in search.
Keywords are also not always just one or two words, but can consist of extended phrases. These are known as long tail keywords and can be very effective.
How Does Bounce Rate Show If You Need To Improve?
Authority and relevance are connected and very important, because this makes readers more likely to stay on the page, return to read more of your material and, crucially, navigate to another page on your site, beginning the buyer journey.
If this does not happen and the site visitor navigates away after visiting just one page, this is known as a ‘bounce’ and the proportion of visitors doing this is known as the bounce rate. The lower the ‘bounce’ (people navigating away) is, the better for you and your SEO ranking.
User experience can be improved by some aspects of content, such as embedding high-quality images or videos. This reduces bounce rate and can boost SEO as you can get more visits through image and video searches.
Finally, backlinks can boost your rating. This is where others hyperlink to your site. You cannot control this directly, but if your content is authoritative and of high quality, you are more likely to get these.
With our SEO expertise, we can help you develop a content strategy that enables you to do all these things and find your way to that magical page one.