Digital marketing expert at NUVEW, helping businesses expand their online presence through custom website design and development & SEO.
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Every digital marketing strategy relies on content at its foundation. Without well-written content, agencies would be missing out on a key part of their SEO efforts. No matter how detailed your behind-the-scenes SEO work is, content is at the forefront of representing your brand and attracting new clientele.
Content informs, entertains and serves as a bargaining piece to help clients see what you have to offer. By providing your audience with valuable, reliable information, you can retain current clients and signal to Google’s algorithm that your website is worth visiting.
If your current content is lacking, don’t panic. There are many ways to enhance your content according to SEO practices, both in the written content itself as well as the behind-the-scenes strategies on your website.
Plan Your Keywords
Rather than choosing keywords at random, be selective. Use keywords that match patterns in your rankings and trends. Strategize your keywords to suit seasonal changes. Whether that’s a holiday, an event (such as back to school) or a coincidence (like divorce rates increasing at the beginning of the year), keywords should reflect trends relative to your business.
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Consider the following as you plan:
• How often do you publish content?
• What does your writing team look like? How many pieces can you assign while maintaining quality?
• What kinds of content are you producing (e.g., infographics, webpages, blogs)?
Having a variety of keywords and content increases its diversity and value. By using a deliberate strategy, you can further your efforts to improve your website’s rankings and increase the likelihood of appearing on the first page of SERPs (search engine result pages).
Create And Use Writing Style Guides
Before delving into content creation, have a clear strategy in mind. Rather than just giving your writers complete freedom over topics and tone of voice, I’d recommend that you create writing style guides to maintain a cohesive experience. Style guides promote consistency among your writing team. Even if each writer has a unique voice, guides are effective references in producing content that’s similar in tone.
A few possible attributes to determine in your style guides include:
• What type of imagery do you want your content to create?
• Is there a specific style of voice you want your writers to use?
• Are there specific font sizes or header images that would work best when the content is posted to your website?
• When writing content for legal clients, are there any references that writers should know about?
Posting content to websites has more to do than just style alone, too—you want every page to appear consistent as well. Make sure that every page is posted the same way to create a seamless customer experience.
Leverage Trending Topics To Appeal To Interest
Are you up to date on the latest trending topics? If you aren’t, it’s a worthwhile investment. Content that reflects an ever-changing field ensures your information is evergreen and current.
Find trends and new updates to various laws and other information relevant to your fields. Use marketing data to analyze which topics gather the most attention on your social media channels, for instance. Sharing your content through social media posts is an excellent strategy—doing so ensures the content receives more clicks and increases traffic to your website. As such, choose sharable content that resonates well with the public to promote sharing.
Choose The Right Content Length
Many business leaders wonder how long their articles need to be. Google generally prefers articles of a modest length, at least 500 words, that aren’t too long. Cramming as much information as possible into your articles isn’t necessarily better, though: It’s unlikely that your visitors will want to read thousands of words that can be written more succinctly. Rather, focus on keeping content all around the same length to appeal to SEO algorithms as well to your audience.
Include the following attributes:
• Semantically related words.
• Readability.
• Backlinks to your website.
Ideally, include this information in the style guides you create for your writers as well.
Check For Duplicate Content
When we think of plagiarism, we often imagine a person copying and pasting someone else’s work. While this is definitely a more obvious form of duplicated content, Google’s standards for web content include those that have any significant matches, even if they were made unknowingly. Commonly used phrases and other unexpected matches could come up in a plagiarism check, and Google doesn’t differentiate between deliberately and unintentionally copied content.
Considering the penalties of having duplicate content on your website, you’ll want to check your content for plagiarism before posting it. There are a few online tools that provide these services, including Grammarly and Copyscape, letting you take charge and maximize your content’s quality. Utilize these tools to your advantage.
Include All SEO Information
If you’ve successfully completed your content, congratulations! You’re one step closer to improved website visibility. In order to ensure your content is in line with SEO strategies, however, go the extra step by refining the back end where your content is posted. There are several key attributes to optimize, including:
• Page titles: Keep titles concise and include a keyword. For ideas, use topics provided by Google’s “People Also Ask” section.
• Meta descriptions: Add a keyword and location combo to promote visibility.
• URLs: Match the page’s title, and create subdirectories for optimal organization.
• H1 tags and primary keywords: The main heading, or the H1 tag, needs the primary keyword you wish to target.
• H2 tags (secondary keywords): Include secondary targets in the subheadings.
Be sure to create relevant categories to assign your articles to so Google can recognize your site’s hierarchy.
The More You Invest In Content, The Better The Outcome
While they may sound small, these efforts add up in the long run and contribute to your overall SEO efforts. With quality, engaging content, your company can increase its brand communication and appeal to a wider client base. Don’t underestimate the power of content.
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Author: Hannah Trivette, Forbes Councils Member
