Posted 12.08.2021
By Steven Titchener
Content marketing has grown in popularity recently as more and more businesses are understanding the importance of regularly posting and investing in high quality content. From blog posts to podcasts and video, content is the key to creating great brand awareness. In fact 70% of customers would rather read high quality blog posts about brands than learn about them through an advertisement. So, after putting time and effort into great content creation, how do you ensure it is being seen by the right people and ranking highly on search engines?
If search engines aren’t ranking your content highly, users aren’t going to be enjoying it and you can’t reap the benefits of your hard work. That’s where SEO comes into play to make sure your content is visible to the right people. Content optimisation underpins SEO efforts and by following our simple tips you can ensure your content is reaching your target audience.
Digital marketing has become much more collaborative over recent years, with Digital PR and SEO efforts working together to increase your online visibility. When it comes to adding links to your content, think internal and external linking and remember quality over quantity. By citing relevant sources when including stats in your content you will be seen as a thought leader in your industry. Users are much more likely to trust your posts and view you as a reputable source.
It’s also a great idea to link internally. You should link content back to past blogs and pages, products or any other type of digital content you have such as videos. Internal linking helps build your authority and encourages readers to stay on your site and decreases bounce rate.
The title of your blog posts is the first thing a user will see and will often inspire them to click onto the article. A great way to find a title for a blog post is to google your topic and look for interesting titles and questions that relate to your topic. Try and create a catchy title using google as inspiration.
We also love the google chrome extension called keywords everywhere – it helps you see what keywords are related to your search query. This can be a great place to start when deciding on a title for your blog and adding subheadings throughout the piece. For example, when we google ‘how to set up facebook ads’ you can see on the right the keywords that users also search relating to the phrase. Using this tool helps you find relevant keywords to your topic that you can include throughout your content.
Similar to the above tool, there are plenty of online platforms such as google trends and google keywords planner to help you discover keywords that have a high search volume. When creating content for your website, look for topics that are centred around highly ranking keywords in your sector. Keyword research will help you cater to queries you know users are interested in. You can then optimise your titles, meta description and copy with the keywords.
Add some fun and engaging visuals to your content. From images to GIFS and videos, break up text heavy blog posts with exciting visual assets. We tend to retain information better when there are visual cues alongside it, so it’s important to mix up your blog content. Don’t forget when uploading images to your site, add the alt text title to help google read your images.
Generally speaking, google favours longer articles and content pieces. Whilst quality is definitely more important than quantity, content sometimes you can easily be lengthened with a few simple tricks.
Try googling your content topic and scrolling down to the ‘people also ask’ section. Add some FAQs at the bottom of your blog post that answer some of these key questions to help increase your rankings and lengthen your blog post!
Equally you can use bullet points, lists and subheadings to break up long pieces of text. This can help keep users engaged throughout long pieces of content. Sometimes adding in a few more keywords throughout your blog can do wonders for lengthening your content and improving your on-page SEO.
Next, make sure you include a clear call to action to your content piece. Do you want users to download an eBook? Use a discount code? Or submit an online form? Make it really clear what next steps you want them to take after reading your post. Take a look at our 5 tips for using great call to actions in your marketing campaigns.
Finally, it is time to share and distribute your content to compliment your SEO efforts. After all your effort with keyword research, meta descriptions, alt texts and copywriting, don’t just hope users will stumble across your posts, be proactive and share them across other channels. Include links in your email marketing campaigns, across your social media channels and work with digital PR teams to find backlinks!
If you need any help with all things SEO, we are here to help! Get in touch with us today for an award winning SEO approach to your content creation.
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