3 Ways SEO & Content Work Better Together
- Updated on: 2017-07-12
- Read original article here
The relationship between SEO and content marketing can always feel a bit complicated – specifically in how the two fit together. Do they get along? Are they at odds with each other? If so, is it possible to ever make them work together?
If you’re trying to grow your qualified search traffic, you can’t do it with only one; you have to combine your SEO efforts with engaging content.
But what’s the most effective way to do this?
One way to look at the relationship is from the perspective of SEO making requests of content marketing (although their synergy isn’t as aggressive as that sounds).
Let’s look at three essential ingredients SEO requires – keywords, backlinks, and a technical site audit – and how SEO and content work together to help you achieve your digital marketing goals.
There is no such thing as SEO without keywords, and the most astute content marketers understand that the best content helps your rank for the terms that are most related to what your consumers are already searching for – which is why every effective content strategy starts with keyword research.
A comprehensive keyword research session starts with some simple brainstorming. Think about the main goals of your site and jot down some keywords. From there, expand this list with the help of keyword tools.
Below are two ways you can identify keywords beyond those you currently rank for:
Once you’ve got a set list of keywords, think about how you can use them effectively beyond just technical means. Beyond meta descriptions and title tags, here are a few other ways you can use your keyword research:
Google uses links to measure relevance, authority, and trust of websites. So producing lots of linkable content will help boost your rankings.
So what’s the secret to linkable content? An analysis of more than 300 content marketing campaigns by Moz and Fractl (disclosure: my employer) revealed there are four key ingredients to highly shareable content:
Consider this project from Bulimia.com that reimagines superheroes with more realistic body types. With the help of Photoshop, designers replaced bulging biceps with less-toned physiques to offer a new way to discuss body image issues.
The result? Nearly 1,300 press mentions and more than 100,000 social shares.
This campaign worked because it checked off every box of shareable content. And when it was paired with the right promotions strategy, it generated a diverse set of high-quality links and mentions – including dofollows, co-citations, nofollows, and text attributions – a “healthy” mix that signals to Google your links are natural and not bought.
A comprehensive site audit allows you to take a closer look at the more technical aspects of your site (e.g., are sitemaps and redirects setup properly, are the URLs and title descriptions unique for each page and properly formatted, is your internal linking useful?)
But what this audit can also do is reveal which pages are falling flat – which is where engaging content comes back into play.
Pages that are generating a ton of traffic might be outdated, have little to no content or be too cluttered, but there are some easy ways to remedy the situation:
There are tons of great strategies out there to get your content in front of the right audience, but understanding how SEO and content complement one another will make your strategy more effective.
Optimizing the technical aspects is what allows search engines to crawl your site, but valuable content is what makes your site get that top spot.
