Kristopher Jones while insisting on the importance of content for SEO said and I quote, “No matter how niche or mainstream your market is, great content remains a significant focus for SEO.”
Often SEO and content marketing are seen as two faces of a coin, and if contemplated in sync, they form the wheels driving your business visibility, lending it stability in the market. Your content strategy and SEO game must be top-notch and synchronized for online visibility in the right neighborhood and ahead of your competition.
What is content?
Content is the tool used to disseminate information to your audience. It expresses thoughts, views, expertise, features, and offerings through writing, speech, and oral communication.
In marketing parlance, “Content Marketing” is using content as a strategic tool to create, explore, and distribute valuable, accurate, reliable, and consistent information to attract a large audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
The content can be disseminated through various tools and may take the shape of :
• Blogs
• PR pieces
• Press Release
• Case Studies
• Videos
• SM content
• Website Content
• Podcasts
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, a tool employed to enhance visibility and authority ranks on a search engine’s result page (SERP). It is a system of methods and tactics used to increase the possibility of your website appearing on the first page or the top in response to a search of relevant keywords on any of the search engines Yahoo, Google, BING, Yandex and so on.
In an era where the belief “Search engines know it all” is predominant, that is the first place individuals go to seek information, whether it’s a product or service or even an interpretation of a diagnosis and its remedies. Hence, being visible on the internet has become paramount for every business.
Why is content important for SEO?
The most critical part of SEO is content, not just content but QUALITY content.
Content that imparts information in a user-friendly format is relevant, has the stickiness to hold the reader’s attention, and engages them to spend time on the page or take action.
Search engines regularly update their algorithms to ensure that relevant content is offered to users in SERP, and developers are not resorting to tools and methods to get a higher ranking with poor quality content. Hence site owners need to stay updated and regularly optimize content.
Why is content critical for SEO?
Helps Visibility – Regular updates keep your site fresh with search engines as it pushes them to scan it at regular intervals. Regular updates require creating optimized content tailored to the interests of your audience, enhancing your products and services and your authority on the subject.
Improves Click-Through Rate – Good engaging, relevant content increases the click-through rate and time spent consuming the content giving search engines a signal that the content is good and appropriate, thereby helping increase the site’s credibility and authority score.
Helps attract Backlinks– Backlinks are third-party sites carrying content about your coming and linking it back to your site. If the authority score of the third-party site is high, the backlinks add to your site’s credibility. This tool needs to be employed with care as Google algorithm observes for link farming activities to weed out the genuine from the spurious.
Target Keywords– The internet is a busy and crowded space making it challenging to be visible to your customers when they seek your product/ services. How does one do that?
You need to understand how your customer seeks your product or services. What words do they use? What are the words you would want them to use? These are then identified as keywords. To ensure that the search engines pick your site when these keywords are used in search, you need to integrate them into the site content on the pages with relevant information – This is called keyword integration.
Keyword-rich material is fundamental to the success of the SEO, SEM, and SMO initiatives.
Effective SEO involves content optimization.
What does this mean? Why is it important?
SEO initiatives are designed to make content search engine friendly. When search engine bots crawl your site, SEO initiatives highlight the pointers they should tag for the best results in SERP to get relevant traffic to your site.
How does one do that?
- Spend time to know your Target Audience-Knowing your target audience can help you choose the ideal keyword and tailor the content to appeal to them. Create content that resonates with them.
- Identify the appropriate Keywords-. For users to find you online through content, undertake in-depth keyword research. Identify the top 20 words and integrate them into your content. Do this with caution; stay away from stuffing all words on one page. Segregate them in line with the product/ service you focus on across your site’s pages.
- Role of Longtail Keywords- Long-tail keywords are a string of words that users are likely to enter into search engines for a generic search. Marketers usually keep their keywords short-tail, making long-tail keywords easier to rank.
- Stay Focused. SEO is a slow process. Don’t stray from your topic or keyword. Keeping it simple is the key to success. Stay within your keyword and chosen topic when writing content, and avoid adding too much variety of subjects or incorporating numerous keywords in a single piece of content.
- Check Readability – Flesch score is a suitable parameter to check the readability score of your test. The simpler it is, the wider the circulation span and the higher search engines rank. Keep it short and simple – that is the search engine mantra with clear demarcation of headlines and sub-headlines to highlight important text.
- Be sure to include Backlinks – Whenever contributing content to third-party sites, add Backlinks; that is the only way you can drive traffic from that site to yours or get them to authenticate your content.
SEO and content are different elements but not independent because optimized content can significantly improve visibility.
If your website engages visitors to remain longer, your website is considered relevant, and the quality of content is good, this will earn it a higher rank.
Whether you want to be just another content published online or you wish to be devoured, shared and engaged with, the choice is yours – in fact, the REAL option is whether to engage in SEO or not.
What do you choose?
