The beauty of sustainable content marketing is the ability to eliminate guesswork throughout your content creation process. Having a focused direction for your content is made possible with search engine optimization (SEO).
Optimizing your blog and social media channels will make your creative process more enjoyable and effective for reaching your ideal audience.
You don’t consider yourself a creative person or a good writer? Well, no worries!
The key to coming up with awesome content ideas is this: paying attention to what search engines want.
How do I know what search engines want?
Luckily, there are 99 thousand Google searches being conducted every second. So there are plenty of human inputs to paint a picture of what people want to watch or read.
Keyword research tools gather these inputs and turn them into valuable information that you can check in with before creating random content.
This is all about search intent:
“What’s the purpose of my audience’s search terms? How can I answer those questions or meet those needs?”
By creating content that matches search intent, you’ll make it easier for Google (and other search engines) to index your various web pages.
A significant part of getting indexed is writing engaging blog posts based on keyword research, which helps Google push your website closer to page one.
Why do I care about making it to page one?
When was the last time you typed a question into Google and proceeded to click on page 10 to find your answer? Exactly.
Almost no one does this, especially if they’re pressed for time. Google search users automatically trust the results on page one because of convenience, as well as the assumption of authority. Existing closer to page one tells Google search users that your information, products, or services are important.
How do I work on SEO?
Let’s look at three main types of SEO that will help your business grow online: on-page SEO, technical SEO, and link-building.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is about carefully curating your message, as well as the delivery or appearance of that message. If you already have a blog, you’ll want to start optimizing your titles, headers, paragraphs, meta descriptions, tags, and categories.
You’ll want to take a look at your spelling and grammar, as well as how readable (and skimmable) your sentences and key points are.
Technical SEO
As opposed to on-page SEO, which applies to the content that shows up on a given web page, technical SEO takes place behind the scenes.
Technical SEO is concerned with the responsiveness of your website, no matter which device is being used (computers, tablets, or smartphones). You don’t want behind-the-scenes errors to get in between your audience and your valuable content. So take a look at the words, images, videos, and overall user experience (UX) design that might be slowing down your page loading time.
Link-Building
Link-building is about building relationships between different web pages from other websites and your website. If Google’s robots, which move you closer to page one, see you mingling with related websites in your niche, then they’ll be more trusting of your authority.
In other words, when your website shows up in other people’s website links, you’re bound to pop up in more searches.
How do you show up on other websites?
- You write high-quality bog content, that has a nicely organized content architecture.
2. You initiate conversations with website owners who share a similar audience as you.
In this sense, some of your search engine optimization will depend on the cooperation of other website owners. But most of your SEO tasks are totally in your hands. It’s just a matter of staying up-to-date with SEO best practices, and placing time on your calendar for the not-so-glamorous technical SEO tweaks.
There’s a lot to this sustainable content marketing journey! Ready for more? Let’s move onto blogging for business.