Many content marketers believe organic traffic earned through SEO is like a bonus: It’s super nice to have, yet no one is planning their monthly budget around it.
People think about content and then plan to have a social push. However, good content should be driving your organic traffic on a regular basis. Still, what can they do about SEO? It doesn’t belong to the content creative team, right?
Unfortunately, the answer is a big NO. The days of clear distinctions between the content team and the SEO department are long gone. Content marketers should not only be aware of how their work affects search engine rankings, but also actively use that feedback and awareness to optimise their work.
Here are seven things that content marketers should be doing right now, according to some of the most masterful minds in SEO.
1. “SEO first, create later”
For experienced marketing teams, the content creation process has become a high-level assembly line. The problem is that SEO is often only considered after the fact. Rather than waiting until a piece of content is complete and then handing it off to the search expert, content marketers should keep SEO in mind from the very beginning.
The research can guide content creation in a couple of ways. It exposes both what users want to know and, with a bit of additional digging, what questions existing content has already answered. Instead of retrofitting content to accommodate those keywords, content strategists can then build stories around them, organically incorporating SEO from the start.
The same goes for link building. Thinking about what will inspire people to share and link to a piece of content before it’s created is much more effective than trying to figure out how to make finalised copy more appealing to influencers.
2. “Tap into title tags”
If there’s one easy fix content marketers can use to maximise the impact of their work, it’s not some sneaky SEO trick. Title tags are the headlines that show up in search results. Where so many brand publishers go wrong is making their title tags the same as their headlines. While a great headline is certainly a strong ranking tactic, it doesn’t serve quite the same function. Rather than rehashing the headline, which is typically engagement-focused, title tags should directly reflect the keywords you want people to use to find the article.
3. Map your competitors
When it comes to SEO, no one loses points for peeking at their neighbor’s work. In fact, checking out your competitors’ content is the first logical step when deciding what you want to create. For example, consider a travel website that sells flights and hotels and wants to rank for keywords such as “flights to New York” or “apartments in Rome.” Looking into competing travel sites that will also rank for those terms is simply a matter of common sense and basic research.
However, you also need to look wider, and in this example, you’d look at travel bloggers. They don’t compete for these kind of keywords but do produce content that does well online, so you can probably learn a lot from them.
4. “Links are forever”
What type of content is more valuable: a topical take or something more evergreen? Is it better to attract lots of visitors right now or build long-term link equity?
Well, the right question to ask is “why not both?” Keep URLs evergreen whenever possible. Still, you can modify the meta title and the H1, so that they are tailored for the audience.
Take the link equity of an annual gift guide, for example. The URL shouldn’t be “http://www.asdfghjkl.com/2015-holiday-gift-guide”: the extra specificity isn’t worth sacrificing the possibility of using the URL as a long-term content investment. A better option would be “http://www.asdfghjkl.com/holiday-gift-guide.”
This way, we can reuse the same URL year after year, making the page stronger each year. However, the meta title and H1 can still say ‘2015 Gift Guide,’ so that the content appears to be relevant and timely to its target audience.
5. “Think SEO even when you are doing social”
Even marketers who feel at home with both social and SEO can no longer think about the strategies separately. Search and social are colliding, and content’s job is to keep up. Twitter is integrating and indexing with traditional Google Search more and more. That said, you better be applying some of your traditional SEO treatments in the Twittersphere.
Some important actions to focus on include picking keyword-relevant handles, adding keywords to tweets, and thinking about SEO with regard to the names of videos and images being shared. If you look at how Twitter handles populate the regular SERP [search engine results page] results, even now, we can see traditional keywords at play.
6. “To be or not to be”
Stop looking for shortcuts. Every piece of content that you produce needs to be the absolute best of its kind. Previously, marketers could use SEO tactics like link building, keywords, and title tags to make content perform well in search regardless of the quality. That, however, is no longer the case.
Plenty of businesses that crank out a quick, short blog post every single day, believing that the more they publish, the better. This mindset must change. You should publish content only when you are able to produce something that is significantly better than what already exists on the web. If Google sees that a large portion of your site consists of content that rarely engages anyone, then this could trigger a demotion by the Panda filter.
Essentially, it’s time prioritise quality over quantity. Google is getting better at recognising content that truly is useful to people.