Publishing SEO-Friendly Content

This is an edited extract from Search Marketing.

In the world of marketing, content is the backbone of messaging and communication. Without thought leadership and content, businesses lose credibility and individuals risk reputations. Content marketing is a valuable and strategic asset for businesses and individuals to create and distribute relevant information to attract and retain customers. Companies across the world of various sizes and industries invest heavily in the practice of content marketing as an opportunity to connect with customers and demonstrate the knowledge and expertise they bring to their industries.

Although content is a significant component in the SEO three-pronged approach, it is also a vital part of the user experience with a brand. Most importantly, content should provide value. It should also softly promote the brand, products and services when applicable. It should directly connect with the audience, and it should move them along through the customer decision journey. The very best content will promote engagement and advocacy through liking, commenting and—most importantly—sharing.

Create a killer content workflow

What is a content workflow? Content marketing is a team sport, meaning that it crosses over the organization and can include many teams and individuals. Consider involving not just writers and editors to create content but also members of cross-functional teams like product, sales, marketing, executives, technology and other thought leaders in or outside of the organization. To coordinate the tasks involved in content, we need a content workflow. This is a series of tasks that are performed by the team to take content from the idea phase all the way through to publishing in an efficient process.

Content workflow involves the people, tools and resources needed for creating meaningful and SEO-friendly content. While it can be adapted based on each organization’s internal processes, it ultimately serves the purpose of organizing the team, promoting collaboration, increasing productivity and creating efficiency. Projects will stay on track and on schedule when everyone knows what the plan is and what their role is within that plan. The workflow will also increase the quantity of content while reducing duplication of efforts.

Step by step: Content Workflow

1. Strategize content: What is the content topic, type, angle and who is responsible?
2. Develop a content plan: Create a content calendar that tracks the process
3. Create content: Writers, creatives, thought leaders and software
4. Edit and QA the content: Proofread and review for quality assurance
5. Optimize it: Check for keywords, structure, calls to action, URLs, etc.
6. Publish it: Approve and publish the content
7. Share it: Share and/or repurpose content across channels, platforms, media
8. Measure it: Analyze and measure content performance and future planning

SEO-friendly content

Creating content with SEO best practices in mind will result in a greater likelihood of crawling, indexing and ranking by search engines. Approaching content creation with users at the centre while incorporating SEO best practices helps focus on achieving organic search traffic, consistent messaging and building trust with your audience. Some experts find that pages that rank well are at least 1,800-2,000 words, but there are no specific guidelines. Posts that are written well for users will typically be the right length for SEO purposes as well.

There are a few significant ways to keep SEO at the forefront when creating content for websites.

Remember the keyword universe

Keywords should be incorporated within the content as well as in meta descriptions, URLs, page titles, headings and anywhere else that makes sense. In SEO content it is a good idea to select a primary keyword which denotes the main focus of the content. Selecting secondary keywords can help build out the use of the keyword universe within the content piece. Keywords should be used naturally and not overused. Also, keeping the audience in mind, modification to keywords is fine. Content should be organic and should not sound redundant or superfluous.

This is achieved by monitoring keyword density, or the ratio between the number of words in the content and the number of keywords. For example, if five keywords are used in a post that is 100 words in total, the keyword density is 5%. The ratio is a loose guide, but it’s important to be purposeful about keyword usage in content. Some SEO experts believe that keyword density should be, on average, around 3%. Each organization and team will identify the right usage of keywords in their content.

Match search intent

Search engine algorithms evaluate search intent as a leading indicator. This encourages content publishers to identify and answer questions from their audience or target customers. Understanding search intent will help create content in a more SEO-focused way.

There are four types of search intent which should be considered when creating content. When researching content topics and building the keyword universe, think about how you can speak to the user and their search intent through your content. Here are the four types of search intent:

1. Informational: User is searching for information on a topic.
2. Navigational: User is looking for a specific website.
3. Commercial: User is researching options for a product or service.
4. Transactional: User is searching for a specific product or brand.

Create User-friendly Content Structure

If users don’t like content, search engines won’t either. A simple way to increase readability is to break text into digestible chunks. This can be done in several ways, such as the use of bullet points or numbered lists, and including visuals such as images, graphs and charts whenever possible. Also, headlines should be short and to the point; use subheadings to go into more depth or detail. Establishing user-friendliness content guidelines plus an SEO template for all content creators to follow will deliver consistency and efficiency.

Guidelines should indicate the overall structure of the content. This points to aspects such as word count, use of images and formatting.

An SEO template helps by providing recommendations for content topics, analysing competitors, optimizing content and suggesting SEO-friendly elements to include. Other important metrics for SEO templates include readability, word count, keywords, title, tone, paragraph length and tags.