Is Content Marketing delivering results for you as expected or are you just working at it without the SEO results you expected? In this post we are providing a list of a few good practices you need to follow to ensure SEO success through content marketing and make your efforts worthwhile.
First of all, you need a strategy for keyword research. If you aren’t researching your keywords, it’s unlikely that you will succeed in SEO. Keywords are the foundation of success in any SEO campaign. The key to keyword research is to find specific keyword phrases without any stereotypical marketing sounds. The keywords phrases should be conversational just like in real life use of search engines.
Another thing you need to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t get bogged down to get that perfect keyword optimization in the content you write. This approach will only slow you down and make it difficult for you to compete with the others for the top spot in search engine rankings for keywords related to your business niche.
Therefore, it is important that you focus on long tail keyword approach. You should try to publish high-quality, compelling and relevant content that will naturally include all the related keywords that you have found in your keyword research which will allow you to capture long tail traffic. This search traffic usually comes from keyword phrases that are unlikely to be found during keyword research. Since these keywords are highly targeted, these also lead to better conversion rate.
Unique and Original
Once you have figured out the keyword phrases you need to work on; you need to focus on creating original content. It is important that to make sure that same content or duplicate content isn’t published on two separate URLs on your site as it is not good for SEO. When you republish articles taken from other websites, you are posting duplicate content on your site, and it is not taken lightly by major search engines. It may also lead to complete loss of search rankings for your site. You also risk being sued for potential copyright infringement when you take articles from other sites instead of creating your own.
On-Site Optimization
You also need to focus on optimizing all the on-site elements on the entire website. Among other things, you need to make sure that the title tags and meta descriptions are relevant and well optimized for SEO purposes. All the pages of the website should contain these elements and should be pertinent to the content on the web page.
Your SEO efforts may be hampered in case the descriptions or tags are too long or too short. One of the better methods to see if there are any significant issues with these elements on a website is to conduct an audit. While title tags may be more vital concerning SEO as compared to the meta descriptions, these are also critical as an intriguing meta description is capable of generating much higher clicks from readers in the search engine result pages. In our tests at Coronation Internet Marketing – Victoria SEO we’ve found that having your keywords in your description make no difference for better rankings, but descriptions are essential as your first opportunity to sell to prospective clients.
Don’t Get Trapped
One of the the most significant errors made by many businesses is that they give in to the temptation of buying links from other websites. It is against the Webmaster Guidelines issued by Google and keep in mind that search engines have become extremely accurate at determining unnatural and suspicious links. In simple terms, your website could lose all the rankings almost instantly in case Google detects that it is engaged in buying or selling website links. Therefore, you shouldn’t fall into the trap of buying links.
Instead, you should save that money and spend your time and money on creating high-quality content that will naturally attract high-quality inbound links. For creating digital content, you should focus on creating valuable content for your readers. You shouldn’t worry about the keyword density or strive to include specific keywords into the content to improve SEO as this will drive readers away. In case you are trying too hard to include a particular keyword phrase into your content, you need to rethink your strategy.
Search engines are getting excellent at detecting keyword stuffing and in case, your focus is on including as many keywords as you possibly could in the content, it is most likely that search engines like Google and Bing will penalize your website, and you will lose your search engine rankings. Also, you will also annoy people who read your content as they won’t find it readable and enjoyable which will lead to loss of credibility for you.
Feedback
While it’s important to write content naturally to attract visitors and essentially, customers, you should also focus on their comments. When you engage with the users through comments, user reviews or another type of feedback offered by them, you also enhance the visibility of your website in the search engine result pages. More authentic and positive feedback means high rankings for your site in the search engine result pages.
Therefore, you should try to encourage users to give feedback and engage with you. Also, you should thank them for their feedback and in case, a customer has a negative thing to say; you should ask them what you can do to make things better and solve their problem.
2017 is shaping up to be a significant year when it comes to SEO changes as it will see a further increase in mobile local search and the role of digital search assistants. Search engine optimization is for improving the usability and user experience, and you can follow the above-mentioned steps to boost your SEO for the year to come.