Content marketing that is designed to improve SEO ranking is a top priority for marketers at all types of companies. It makes sense – think about it. When was the last time you searched for anything online without going to Google?
When 62% of content marketers measure success, they look at their website traffic. Furthermore, 39% of people surveyed believe that SEO rankings for content marketing are important.
SEO is still a difficult topic for content marketers to understand. SEO experts have to be very careful when trying to improve their clients’ ranking on Google, because Google’s guidelines are always changing. They have to look at the goal of ranking high from a lot of different perspectives. There is no one sure way to create successful content marketing campaigns; instead, marketers have to try a variety of methods and hope for the best results.
If you want your website to rank high in search engine results, you need to make sure it meets Google’s standards and see what strategies other successful websites have used.
Improve Your Content Marketing SEO Ranking
Create original, high quality content
Google looks for the best content to match the terms that people are searching for. Google looks at websites to see how often certain words appear on them. The more a word appears, the more relevant that website is considered to be.
The search engine determines whether a website is high-quality based on how many other high-quality websites link to it. It also takes into account how engaging your website is for users, and how unique your site’s content is. This refers to how engaged someone is with your content. If they click on your content in a search engine and then quickly return to their search, this means they were not engaged with your content. Do they leave your site quickly, or do they stay and look at more content?
Leibowitz states that content should be a marketers focus in order to produce quality. ” Many people want to create and share a lot of content. In 2012, people were more concerned with quantity rather than quality.
Leibowitz begins by suggesting that content should be written for the reader’s benefit instead of fixating on SEO. Your content’s title should include a relevant keyword to help draw attention, but avoid using clickbait tactics that could turn readers away. Instead of thinking about how you can cram in keywords, think about how you can answer a question that is relevant to your target consumer base. This way, you can organically work in keywords that are relevant to your brand.
Content that is heavy on word count is more effective than content that is light on word count.
Ghergich A.J. Ghergich claims that multiple studies show thatGoogle and audiences favor long-form content. Ghergich is the founder of Ghergich & Co., a content marketing agency. I advise new bloggers to focus on writing long-form content.
Ghergich recommends writing blog posts that are 1,500 to 3,000 words long and include visual assets. This includes adding images and videos throughout the content to help readers understand and engage with the material.
Images and videos are important because they help to keep people engaged on your page. If someone goes to your site and doesn’t spend much time there before leaving, this might mean you have a high bounce rate. Text that is easy to read and contains visual elements will be more appealing to readers. Breaking up your text with headers, bullet points, and images will make it more visually appealing and easy to read.
Modify your URLs
In addition to including keywords in the titles of your website content, Rand Fishkin from Moz recommends including them in the URLs as well.
Anchor text is the text that someone sees when they hover over a website link. People can see that the website is relevant based upon the URL that is anchor text. If there is no anchor text, the reader will be able to tell if the text is relevant.
In addition, your website’s URL will appear on Google, which will help potential visitors determine whether or not to click on your site. If the title of your website matches the URL, people will trust it and be more likely to visit your site.
The ideal URL is 50 to 60 characters or less, and as readable as possible. Your URLs should only contain words and dashes. A lot of people are discouraged from clicking when they see a bunch of numbers, symbols, and random letters. Even if the title of your content has words like “the,” “and,” or “a” in it, you can leave them out of the URL and it will still make sense. It’s not a good idea to use a lot of folders (slashes) in your URL.
Utilize SEO keywords
Your keywords need to appear in both the title and body of your content. Although SEO used to focus only on keywords, it now encompasses a wider range of topics. Still, keywords are very important.
To use keywords effectively, you must first do your research and find ones that are relevant to your content. This is not something that you can do just once, it must be an ongoing practice. You need to keep up with keyword popularity in order to maintain a high ranking.
Brands can use Keyword Tool to generate a list of keywords for free. The graph allows you to see which keywords are being searched for the most so that you can use them in your content. The website WordStream is useful for finding ideas for keywords related to a given keyword. Some other popular keywords related to content marketing are “original marketing content services” and “how big is content marketing agency.”
If you use keywords too often, Google will think your content is spam, and your readers will too. If you don’t use Google products frequently enough, they won’t be able to accurately determine what your website is about. The SEO firm, Bruce Clay, recommends not forcing keywords into content, but rather using them where they fit best naturally.
In general, it’s a good idea to use your keywords early on in your content, and also in the first part of your meta description. Your images should be optimized and contain keywords. According to Content Marketer Jayson DeMers, you should incorporate your keywords into your logo, header images, buttons, and graphics on your site, as well as in the alt image text.
Use Google Analytics To Track Metrics
Before you do anything else, start tracking your website’s activity with Google Analytics.
Google Analytics can not tell you how well your website is ranking, but it can give you data about the traffic that arrives from Google. Or any search engine your visitors use.
You can find this information under Acquisition > Source/Medium.
What you want to note is that most of your visitors are coming from organic search results rather than paid advertisements. Additionally, these visitors are highly engaged with your content. So, that means:
- Longer times on site;
- Multiple pages visited;
- Lower bounce rates.
If you set up Google Analytics to measure different types of conversions on your website, you can see how many of the organic visits result in conversions.
Obviously, there’s a lot more you can track here. You will be able to tell if your SEO efforts are working by looking at the results.
Improve Mobile Page Speed
Google started using mobile loading speed as a ranking signal in July 2018.
We’ve seen this coming for a while now, ever since smartphones became the primary way people access the internet instead of desktop computers. Mobile page speed is no longer an optional extra, it has become a necessity.
Google’s most recent algorithm update, Core Web Vitals, takes into account your site’s mobile loading speeds when determining its ranking.
There are things you can do to make your site load quickly:
- Use well-coded themes and plugins;
- Remove unused themes, plugins, media, pages, comments, backups, and so on from your database and server;
- Install a caching plugin that’ll minify, compress, and otherwise make your site lightweight and fast.
You may want to consider reviewing your web hosting plan. If you don’t have enough server power or resources, you may not be able to keep up with your current activity.
Make Your Site Accessible
Accessibility has been a hot topic in the SEO community recently, thanks to the release of Core Web Vitals.
The tool will tell you if there are any inaccessibility issues that Google will mention. But that doesn’t make your site completely accessible.
With the recent increase in legal action being taken against websites for not being accessible, it is important to take this issue seriously.
If you have a bad experience on your website due to inaccessibility, it will not only cost you visitors and a lower search ranking, but also a lot of money.
Improve Your Internal Link Strategy
We’re now moving into SEO strategies that, while Google may not explicitly state that they care about, can still have a significant impact on your site’s ranking.
Internal links are especially useful because they help create a interconnected structure for your site.
Let’s say these are the pages on your website. Both can be accessed from the home page and main navigation. Each page on the website is related to the company’s message and mission, but they are not directly related to each other. And that doesn’t make sense, right?
When you are telling visitors about your web design services, you will also mention that you are good at WordPress and eCommerce design. This means that the internal links should be placed on the Web Design page. And vice versa.
Your Portfolio and Contact Us pages are likely the most common pages visitors will want to see on your site. Your potential customers should not be forced to go back to the home page or scroll up to the navigation bar to take action. Including internal links or buttons within the content of the services pages allows users to quickly and easily access the next steps.
The more you simplify the user journey, the more likely users will be to convert.
One reason websites that have strong internal linking structures perform well in search results is because it helps search engines understand the website’s hierarchy. Internal links are important because they help Google’s bots find all of the content on your site and understand how it is all related.
Use Only Trustworthy External Links
Why are business owners obsessed with getting backlinks? Because they provide link juice! We’ll get to that shortly.
The quality of the external links on your site is also important.
A dofollow link is a link that passes authority from one site to another. If you include links to trustworthy and authoritative sources on your website, it may help your website rank higher on search engines.
However, it works both ways. You can damage your website’s reputation by linking to external sites that contain misinformation or are considered untrustworthy.
This means that you should only use external links that are both necessary and reliable. If not, get rid of it.
Get High-Quality Backlinks
Google looks at how many other websites are linking to your website as an indicator of how share-worthy and authoritative your site is.
You can’t get a lot of backlinks by cheating. The sources need to be authoritative and the information needs to be relevant. Paying for or bartering for backlinks is often not effective. If the backlink to your web page does not fit in well with the other content on the site where it is located, visitors are not likely to click on it.
There are lots of ways to go about building up a repository of backlinks that do generate authority for you and improve your SEO ranking in the process:
It is generally agreed upon that 80% of your posts on social media should not be promotional. If you share content that is relevant to your audience from a variety of sources, you will receive more significant engagement. And this will also help promote your content and get more people to share it on social media.
Regularly Monitor Google Search Console
Lastly, you should keep an eye on Google Search Console.
The following text provides reasons why your site might not be ranking as well as it could be. You’ll find issues related to:
- Indexing
- Mobile usability
- Security
- Core Web Vitals
In addition to finding data about your specific website, you can also access general information about how well your site is ranking. You’ll find this under the Performance tab.
Start ranking high on Google
Although SEO can be difficult to understand, these methods have been verified to assist with improving your ranking. If you use them, you will have a better chance of reaching your audience, making connections with potential customers, and getting them started in your purchase process.
