Search engine optimization is the sum of a lot of moving parts that compound to make a real difference to the ranking of your website. It’s a common mistake when businesses build or revamp their website and think that the search engine optimization included in their website contract takes care of everything. It does not, without a multi-pronged approach you have a slim chance of ranking your website favorably on search engines.
When a web designer or developer mentions SEO that they performed on your website they are usually only talking about technical SEO or on-page SEO. These are things like site speed, headings, titles, and meta descriptions. Installing a plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math has a positive impact, but the off-page SEO is where the magic really happens.
Google and other search engines don’t rank WEBSITES, they rank WEB PAGES. Every page on your site should only target one, possibly two primary keywords. You can rank for dozens of terms and supplementary keywords on a single page, but you should never focus on too many keywords in a single post. This is where your content strategy comes into play and this is what makes content crucial for SEO.
What does Content Mean?
Content is information and data that people consume. It can be used to build authority, share information, or to trigger an emotion. Good content should keep people engaged, entertained and provide value to the consumer.
Content marketing is a powerful tool when used correctly. From a business perspective, having high-quality content available for your customers and clients allows you to build relationships and help build authority in your industry. Look at it this way, everything on your website can either serve as valuable content that will improve your SEO or it can just be content that is serving no other purpose than providing information. You have to be smart with the content that you put on your website. Each image, piece of information or video that you use on your site is a potential tool for you to climb up the rankings on search engines.
Types of Content
The quality of your content can be magnified if it is delivered on the right platform and with the right medium. It’s a common mistake when businesses create one piece of content and share the exact same thing across their blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Every platform has its own audience and different mediums have different impacts. YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest are audio and visual. Blogs and Facebook have a visual component, but they are heavily based on written content. LinkedIn requires a little more professionalism.
Search engines also reward different mediums. Evidence suggests that they prefer video, then images, then text. Basically, search engines promote and prefer content that is the most engaging. The type of content that you use on your website is going to matter when it comes to Search engine optimization.
Here are a handful of different types of content:
- Video: Video is by far the most preferred medium for content delivery in search engine algorithms. The visuals allow content creators to better resonate with their audience and trigger emotional responses. Being as personable as possible is important, and by getting in front of your audience, you can provide a face and a personality to a voice; which can exponentially increase a business’s sales.
- Audio: Podcasts and audio content is becoming more and more popular, especially after the events that took place in 2020. Podcasts allow for dialogues to occur between industry experts and can be produced rather inexpensively. Audio content is an excellent platform for business owners or entrepreneurs with limited production budgets or for those who aren’t quite comfortable on camera just yet.
- Images & Graphics: Images have the ability to stimulate your audience and drive emotions. Colors, shapes, and environments can shape a reader’s entire mood, and that’s a powerful consideration. Alternatively, infographics are a great way to visually represent otherwise boring information. Facts, numbers, and hard evidence are important; but no one will comprehend them until they’re delivered in a consumable fashion. Infographics allow creators to deliver their message and information in a more digestible and visually stimulating format.
- Blog Posts and Articles: Posts are the industry standard way of delivering information. Blogs are effective because they allow for sites to organize and inter-link their content as well as target specific keywords more aggressively. If you’re strategic, you can add videos, images, and infographics to your posts in order to better interact and engage with your audience.
- Newsletters: Emails and newsletters are effective because they allow you to reach your audience in a more personalized manner. It’s a very inexpensive way to deliver messages, offer promotions or keep your customers and subscribers in the loop.
- Memes, Gifs, and Short Clips: As technology advances, consumers want to be able to digest information as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is where content can be transposed into memes, GIFs, or brief entertaining clips. People like to be entertained; they don’t like to sift through pages of information in order to get their questions answered. An effective cartooning strategy is a great way to deliver key points in a quick, memorable, and easily digestible format.
Optimizing your Content
Content optimization is something that you should seriously consider before publishing any content on your website. Repurposing and optimizing older content is a great way to practice this and identify weaknesses in your content SEO. By doing this you will learn to position your content more competitively and ultimately improve the overall SEO of your website.
Instead of producing content haphazardly you need to have a content strategy. Your SEO content strategy is going to pay off in the long run as you will see your website climb the ranking slowly but surely with each SEO optimized upload that you make. If you are feeling a little overwhelmed by this whole idea, then just take a deep breath and relax. It is not as hard as it might seem to you right. In fact, here are some easy steps that you can use to understand and make your own content strategy:
- Defining Goals – The first thing that you are going to need to figure out and define when it comes to your content SEO strategy are your goals. What are you looking to achieve with your website? Are you looking to boost your sales? Are you looking to increase traffic so you can earn more from ads or are you just looking to attract more quality leads so that your business can get more exposure? When you have an understanding of what it is that you want, you are automatically going to know which type of content would be best for your content SEO strategy. For example, if you are looking to boost your sales then perhaps a more video and visual-based content approach would be more suitable as it will help you with your SEO and lead to better conversion rates at the same time. You might want to focus on content that promotes your products or content that shows how your products can be used etc. On the other hand, if you want your website to have more general traffic to drive ad revenue then you would ideally want long-form articles and longer videos on your website to maximize the amount of time that people spend on your website.
- Target Audience – The audience that you are looking to target is also a big part of your content SEO strategy. You want your content to be reflective of the interests of the people that you want to attract. Different age groups will react differently to certain kinds of content. So, your content SEO strategy must be in line with your intended audience. If you are looking to target teenagers then less text and more visuals would be better but if you are looking to target professionals, then maybe you would like your content to be more professional.
- On-Page Optimization – A major part of your content SEO strategy is going to be your on-page optimization. You want every web page of your website to be perfectly optimized for the kind of search queries that you are anticipating. This part of the strategy includes optimization of internal links, title tags, URLs, etc. So, for your content SEO strategy, not only do you want your content to be optimized but also all the on-page elements that are going to bring search engines attention to the content as well.
- Off-Page Optimization – This is perhaps the most crucial part of your content SEO strategy. Off-page SEO is everything that you do to improve the ranking of your website. This includes link building, social media marketing, being mentioned by other websites, etc. Off-page SEO helps you build to improve the authority and trustworthiness of your website among other things. So, your content needs to be presented in a way that encourages the use of backlinks and gives your content a higher chance to be mentioned by others on their websites or blogs.
Content and SEO Value
It’s no secret that Google is the most popular search engine by a long shot. It processes more than 6.5 billion search requests daily. But how does it decide which search results to show you first and which ones to show you the last? Well, apart from the obvious SEO practices, there is an important aspect that Google uses, the value of your content.
The SEO value of your content is determined by Google on two merits: how useful it is to the person searching and how relevant it is to the search query.
If your content is truly useful and beneficial for the user then Google will consider it to have high SEO value but if it just fluffed up marketing material, then Google will consider it to have low SEO value. It is important for the SEO of your website that you focus on producing and publishing high SEO value content. Here are some things that you would want to include in your content SEO strategy to make your content high SEO value for search engines:
- Informative – Any piece of content that you put on your website should be informative. It should provide some new information about the topic to the user. It is the only way that the user will find that content helpful and search engines will consider it high SEO value.
- Value – You have to remember that any content that you publish on your website is going to be competing with others for the attention of users. One way to beat the competition is to pack your content with value. You want your content to give the most value to the user.
- Credibility – Links, testimonials, research, citations, and studies. The more of them you can incorporate in your content, the more credible it is going to look and the higher SEO value it will be considered by search engines.
- Engagement and quality – If you want your website to rank well and your SEO value to be high then your content has to be of high quality and engaging. There is no way around it. If you produce a high-quality piece of content that the users find helpful, then the engagement rate is going to go up as a byproduct. This is going to leave a good impression on search engines and your search engine rankings are going to rise.
In today’s digitally focused world, it is not only important but, in many ways, necessary to know as much as you can about SEO. If you have a website or an online store, then SEO is the only way that is going to bring you sustained and long-term exposure. We hope that this article helps you improve the SEO of your website. Content is the most reliable way to improve the SEO of your website. Best of luck and happy writing!
