Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is integral to driving digital traffic and engagement to your brand. With 68% of online activity driven by organic and paid search, SEO is the key to ensuring the right people find your content and, in turn, find you.
But if you’re not sure where to get started with SEO, we can help.
In this article, we’ll cover what you need to know about SEO, including what SEO is, how to use it, and how integral it is to content marketing.
As we’ve mentioned, SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation. It's the process of improving digital content marketing (such as websites, articles, or research) to grow organic search results and drive website traffic.
In other words, optimising your content helps you rank higher on search engines when people use relevant keywords. Rather than reaching people through paid advertising methods, you can grow a following just by posting optimised material online.
As search engines like Google collect published content, they “crawl” that information to index it and decide how to best serve it to internet users. SEO helps you show Google how to crawl your content intentionally so you can better control where it ends up and how it stands out.
Ultimately, SEO is a cost-effective, long-term solution to brand growth and success, which 66% of marketers rely on to enhance their strategy.
Digital marketing is integral to reaching and growing a steady audience for your brand, so it’s no surprise that 72% of marketing budgets go towards digital channels.
With strong SEO practices, you can stand out in the overcrowded digital space and reach the people that could benefit from your brand most.
Today, publishing digitally is essential to growing your brand awareness. But the content you release matters. The internet is overflowing with search results, so it’s easy for information to get lost at sea if you don’t know how to make it stand out.
What you need to know about SEO is that it helps you enhance and fine-tune your content, so you can offer high-quality material that appears in the right places and add value to your audience.
An essential part of what you need to know about SEO in content marketing is how you can implement it into your marketing strategy and make it work for you. Let’s look at some key components of how to use SEO.
To optimise your content properly, you must first understand who you want it to reach. Your target audience are those who would most likely find interest in or benefit from your offerings.
Consider what demographic you hope to target and create ideal customer profiles to better understand who is in this audience, how they might behave online, and what they might search for or enjoy.
Quick Tip: Look at what audiences comparable or competitor brands seem to target to gain insight into your ideal audience.
Keyword research is a major part of how to use SEO. If you want your content to rank on search engines, it's vital to include relevant keywords and phrases.
To identify good keywords, start by searching for relevant brands or topics that might relate to you.
Additionally, use an SEO tool such as Semrush or UberSuggest to search for relevant words and phrases. These tools show how often people search particular keywords (search volume) and how difficult they may be to rank on page one of search results (keyword difficulty).
As you create a list of keywords, you can use a few different types, including:
Once you’ve collected a list of potential keywords, you build your content strategy around them or incorporate these words into your copy.
Here are a few key rules to follow:
Formatting is another critical thing to know about SEO in content marketing. How you format your content affects how search engines can crawl and index that information. So, if you use proper and efficient SEO formatting, people can easily find and access your material.
There are a few components to SEO formatting, which include:
To connect digital publications to your other brand content, include internal links. For example, if you write one article about choosing the right house plants, you might link to another article on plant care.
As these internal links build, it can create a web for search engines to understand how your links relate.
Quick tip: Try to include 2-5 internal links in each publication, and add a “call to action” (CTA) link in the content. CTAs guide readers into taking action, such as downloading a guide, contacting the sales team or signing up for a webinar..
Creating quality content is another essential aspect of SEO.
No matter how well you use SEO tactics in your copy, the final result should effectively add value to the reader. The higher quality copy you create, the more luck you’ll have with reaching your audience.
Here are a few quick tips for enhancing your content:
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