by N6A Team3 Key Components to Empower Your SEO Content Marketing Strategy
“Optimization” is crucial for creators and marketers alike.
People tend to view search engine optimization, or SEO, as something that’s extremely confusing and analytics-driven. For the most part it is, and professionals have spent countless hours trying to capitalize on constantly changing algorithms that determine search results. But even when you don’t have a mechanism to run every single number, there are steps to take and habits to form to capitalize on the complexities of SEO.
Part of solving this problem is not only for those implementing SEO and creating content, but also for those building a marketing framework that includes it. The creators think about the medium and the message, while the marketers think about the outcomes. Optimization is the key for everyone involved, and the main driver of the overall strategy.
Every piece of content is a potential marketing asset, but to really understand how to successfully and holistically execute the marketing approach with regard to content components like SEO, we need to take a step back. Elevating a company’s content marketing effectiveness involves these steps.
1. Set Your Keywords
The real meat and potatoes of SEO lies in your use of keywords, and taking advantage of topic segmentation.
Creators must determine and separate the semantic themes or topics of the website as a starting point for deeper research into specific seed terms. Once the key themes of the website or target audience are identified, that list of seed terms will represent the most important high-volume words within each topic that users will search for to ultimately find your destination.
These terms should be relevant to the business and topics you will write about — in N6A’s case, something like “public relations” or “New York City agency” is the foundation to start from — and drive SEO recognition in search results.
Additionally, there typically needs to be a sort of keyword universe that creators can continue to use over and over again of keyword permutations, synonyms, and long-tail variations of the seed terms that will present the best opportunity for traffic and revenue via organic keyword visibility.
2. Match Continual Topics
Building SEO is like a game of chess — patience and strategy will win out. You can swing for the fences with overloading key terms and jumping immediately on timely news topics, but you risk losing focus on what will truly drive ROI from your prospects’ perspective.
While general terms will be pretty much owned by the sheer volume of content from much bigger and more active content creators, there are great opportunities to organically build SEO by utilizing a long-tail approach to highlight your best topics differentiators.
Working with long tail phrases unique to your POV that take the keyword approach to the next step will allow you to create content with a better opportunity for ranking.
3. Optimize Your Page
While not a rigid process, there should be some uniformity to how each piece on your page is structured, including providing clear and concise definitions of topics near the beginning, utilizing the relevant heading to introduce and answer relevant topic questions, and capitalizing on your CMS platform’s proper html tags.
Metadata is also important marketing copy that should be written to drive click-through engagement directly from search results pages. Normally 160 characters or less, metadata using the primary keyword of the page and a strong call-to-action will only help increase SEO.
Top notch content marketing strategies can strengthen the retention of target audience members and drive ROI. But it’s essential to set up the SEO-backed foundation behind it. Your SEO rankings won’t matter unless you strategize across content marketing and amplification channels and vice versa.