To improve SEO rankings, you can’t just focus on creating content for your audience. You also need to consider search engines and their part in helping traffic reach your site.
You may have heard that one of the benefits of content marketing is that it can improve SEO rankings and, in turn, improve your online traffic. But what does SEO have to do with the content you create? Why should you pay attention to SEO?
You’re not just writing for your readers
The main point to remember when starting your content marketing strategy is that you are not just writing for your audience but also for the search engines. Although you may direct all of the content towards audience engagement, ask yourself: How is your audience finding this content? Through the benefits of content marketing of course!
A search engine’s main purpose is to make sure that the most relevant results appear when someone searches for a term. In order to identify which links are the most relevant, the search engine crawls your site to determine how legitimate your content is. Numerous factors determine the legitimacy of the website, but one of the most important factors is the site’s keywords.
How keywords can impair and improve SEO
When a search engine crawls your site, it wants to understand what you do and what you talk about, and it wants to know that you aren’t trying to trick it. Search engines determine this by crawling your main pages, pillar pages and blog posts for keywords. The hierarchy of the pages, the level of audience engagement, the number of times you use a keyword and the number of times you post new pages tell the search engine everything it wants to know.
Long before search engines were as advanced as they are today, people could simply fill a website with keywords and easily come up as the number one result. Over time, search engines continually updated to prevent people from cheating the system. Now, a search engine will punish you if it finds evidence that you’re trying to trick it into giving your site a high ranking. These tricks can include keyword cannibalization, fraudulent backlinks and obvious keyword manipulation.
Google rewards hard work
SEO is a vital part of any business, but it requires consistent work and attention. The easiest way to avoid any search engine penalties is to be natural with your SEO optimization and put in the work. If you show Google that you are consistently trying to improve SEO for your site, it will reward you over time.
Some ways to naturally optimize your website to improve SEO include:
- Creating a content marketing strategy before implementing anything new on your website.
- Researching how often the leaders in your industry post on their websites and trying to keep up with that frequency as much as possible.
- Researching keywords to find what search terms are getting high traffic and optimizing future content for these keywords.
- Making sure you fill out all metadata correctly before posting to your website.
- Ensuring that all of the images on your website have titles and metatags in order to tell the search engines what is in the image.
- Hiring a company like Tempesta Media to do all of this for you!
In summary
Although it may sound like a lot of work, the benefits of content marketing are worth it. With proper SEO optimization, you can be the first result when someone searches for your industry. Being the first result in a high traffic keyword can make your online conversion rate skyrocket!
Need help?
If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our e-book 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.
This e-book will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.
