Most companies are pursuing search engine optimization (SEO) at some level, and budgets for content marketing are increasing, but the smartest companies integrate SEO and content marketing as a part of a set of SEO best practices designed to encourage growth. Content and SEO strategies often fail to capture the potential momentum that can occur with integration.
There are a few key areas you’ll want to invest in so that your company boosts your SEO results:
Keywords: Every SEO strategy should begin with some in-depth keyword research. You want to know more than just what your target audience tends to search when they look up a product or service like yours. You want to know which keywords are already being heavily used in your competitors’ SEO strategies so that you can choose keywords that may be more overlooked.
Once you’ve established some short and long-tail keywords, you’ll need to include them in your content, such as blogs, videos and infographics.
Digging Deeper: Search engines crawl websites like yours, looking for a variety of factors that influence ranking. They look at items like the title and what the content actually says, but it takes a deep dive to look at the data that the user typically doesn’t care to see. For instance, the search engine gathers information about the meta description and also looks at internal and external links.
The search engine also looks to see how often your company posts new content, how much engagement it’s receiving and what the format is. More recently, Google began giving more weight to sites that favor video in their content.
Integration: You can probably already see why SEO best practices tend to include a shared strategy between content marketing and SEO. After all, it’s key if the person managing content creation has access to the keyword list or knows that they should be focusing more on video than text.
Of course, an integrated strategy between content and SEO kind of assumes you have a strategy to begin with. Not so much? Well, contact SJC Marketing, because we don’t mind saying it: we actually like working with SEO best practices to get algorithms to work for you. And you’ll see the growth that proves it.