It’s been said for years: content is important for growing your brand. But it’s not as simple as posting a blog to your website every week. Brands have to write relevant content on the right platform for the right audience — and put content optimization for SEO into practice.
SEO is about optimizing your site to show up on search engines. While content marketing is often used to promote your business, it’s also a component of successful SEO.
For a small investment, content marketing, including SEO content development, overhauls your SEO to rank better on the SERP, earning more organic traffic and business.
While SEO is a science, content marketing is an art. Blend the best of art and science to get more mileage out of your marketing efforts.
How Content Marketing And SEO-friendly Content Coexist
Think of content as the beacon that brings users to your site from a search engine.
When a user searches for a query on Google, the search engine lists your content. The user thinks your content sounds interesting and clicks through. The result is that the content has helped you get more traffic from your SEO efforts.
By boosting your website engagement with content, you boost customer loyalty. That means more quality leads (and easier sales), better conversions, and improved ROI for both your content and SEO initiatives.
That’s why your brand needs not just any content, but SEO-friendly content.
SEO-friendly content is optimized so users can locate it more easily on search engines. And this isn’t just text content, either. “Content” refers to any piece of consumable information, whether it’s text, audio, video, or even augmented reality. Contrary to popular belief, SEO and content aren’t at odds. Use their combined powers to write content through content optimization that appeals to both human users and search engine bots.
Content Marketing Trends
While there are plenty of best practices for content marketing, it’s important to understand how content marketing trends affect SEO.
We’ve compiled our favorite SEO-friendly content trends. Integrate these with your content efforts to improve SEO.
1. Provide Breathtaking Value With Quality SEO Content Development
The internet is full of content. To grab your audience’s attention, you need to create something that’s truly special.
Human users can tell the difference between a keyword-laden, 300-word post and a high-quality 2,000-word how-to guide. Search engine bots can also tell the difference, which means that a low-quality blog will only be a waste of your time.
Spend more time on better quality development of your SEO content. When you focus on quality and actionable tips, you’ll build a reputation that keeps users coming back for more.
Shoot for no more than 2,000 words for each piece of content. Publish useful guides, checklists, or walkthroughs. Add statistics and plenty of examples, along with links to reputable sites for better link building.
2. Taming the Content Writing and Optimization Process
Most brands don’t have a formalized content marketing process, which is why a lot of content marketing fails.
Wow-worthy content isn’t created on the fly. Every piece of content you create has to be carefully planned and executed with SEO in mind. All content has to be aligned to strategy — otherwise it’s a jumble of words without value to your customers.
Create a master content plan for the year. Use your SEO keywords and business goals as a basis for content ideas. Brainstorm topics based on your keywords and align these topics to a dated calendar.
Map out a process for outlining, drafting, and editing. This may take some magic out of the content creation process, but it will ensure that every ounce of content will improve SEO.
3. Making SEO-friendly Content Accessible to All
Businesses are becoming more aware of website accessibility. This trend has bled over into content marketing, where many brands have started creating accessible content.
Accessible content opens up your website to a wider audience. It means people using screen readers or other assistive devices can enjoy your content without hassle.
Accessibility requires simple backend adjustments to your content. These adjustments, which are simple to execute after the content optimization process, send useful information to search engines, which then index more of your content.
Accessibility isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s also a win for your users and it can even boost SEO.
4. “One and done” content strategy
Although you should choose your content channels carefully, it benefits your SEO to distribute quality content through multiple channels.
But it takes a lot of effort to create SEO-friendly content for multiple channels. That’s why brands have started doing a “one and done” strategy for their content.
This is where you create one piece of content with the idea of repurposing it in several ways. By creating one piece of content, you can do effortless omnichannel marketing to boost your SEO. You’ll get more links to your site, increased engagement, and search engine relevance just by repurposing your content.
Let’s say you film a one-hour video. You would then turn that video into a downloadable webinar and a video series for Facebook. The video’s audio is turned into a podcast, and the podcast is transcribed into a blog. From there, you could go deeper, using the blog to create infographics.
The “one and done” process saves more time and gets your brand on more channels, increasing the likelihood of views and backlinks for SEO.
5. Natural Language
Over 20% of all mobile search queries are done with voice search. This number is expected to rise as more customers buy smart speakers.
Content marketing will help you appeal to voice search users by using natural language.
But thanks to voice search, content is becoming more colloquial. That means brands have to change how they write content.
Create content that answers long questions that start with “what,” “why,” “who,” and “how.” Target complete sentences as your keywords to stand out to voice search users.
The Bottom Line
Just like SEO, content is always changing. Keep on top of the latest content marketing trends to not only engage your audience but to increase your SERP rank. If you want to become an SEO master, you must first master the art of content marketing. Need a boost with your content? Logical Media Group’s team of SEO and content experts is here to grow your brand. Get in touch with us for a free brainstorming call.
