If I asked for a show of hands to see who researches their keywords by highest search volume, I’d see a pretty unanimous answer.
If you’re a true nerd / geek / SEO’er, you might have even had dreams of climbing the search results to #1 by optimizing for those keywords.
(Kind of like a new pop artist who hopes to crack the Billboard Top 100 with their first single.)
When you pick a keyword, what do you go by?
Are you using the best metrics? Every business wants to show up at the top of the SERPs (search engine result pages).
But knowing how… that’s a skill that involves, at the core fundamental, knowing how to pick out a great keyword. And not everyone has that skill.
Keep reading for an in-depth guide on what matters most when you’re choosing best opportunity, high-ROI keywords. (The answer, surprisingly, is decidedly not keyword search volume.)
Keyword Search Volume: The Skinny
Everyone wants that coveted top organic #1, #2, or #3 hit in Google.
However, what you may not realize is top brands have already cornered those keywords. This includes multi-million-dollar corporations. These are brands you are not going to be able to compete with, especially if you’re a small business.
What do those top-ranking keywords look like?
Nine times out of 10, they’re broad keywords – short phrases that aren’t specific. For example: “cake,” “baking,” and “baking cakes.”
If you’re a small-town baker and you try to rank for these terms, you’ll be out of luck. Instead, you may find yourself competing with the likes of Cooking Light, Food Network, and Epicurious.
Let’s face it – you’re never going to win, here.
So, what can you do, instead? What’s the smarter strategy?
For good results for your particular business, you don’t need high traffic from high search volume keywords. Instead, you need the right traffic.
Forget Search Volume – Get the Right Traffic with High-Converting Keywords
Throw search volume out the window for now. Yes, it was once the be-all, end-all of keywords, but nothing in this world is static, right?
I’m not saying search volume is completely irrelevant. But, I am urging you to look at other avenues for driving people to your site.
Let’s start by defining what we mean when we talk about the “right” traffic.
You’ll have an easier time converting customers if they’re in an ideal state of the buying process. This is the “right” traffic – the people who are looking for you, but don’t yet realize you exist. If they knew you existed, they would be ready to jump on board and fish for their wallets.
Broad keywords do not drive this kind of traffic to your site.
What will?
Long tail keywords!
Long tail Keywords: Specificity and Relevancy for Search
Long tail keywords are just that: longer, more specific, and relevant to the customer’s needs.
For instance, a person who needs a specific type of cake will not search for “cake.” Instead, they might search for “wedding cake chocolate swirl Rhode Island.” Or, “birthday cake yellow with sprinkles.” A search string that is becoming even more common might look like this: “Where can I get a yellow birthday cake with chocolate frosting in Rhode Island?”
All of these have a few things in common, though they vary in subject matter. The people searching know what type of cake they want and where they want to get it. If you’re a baker and you optimize your site for long tail keywords like this, you’ll strike gold.
Why? Because long tail keywords have less competition than their broad counterparts. You have a far better chance of ranking for “wedding cake chocolate swirl Rhode Island” than “cake.”
Plus, customers use long tail keywords like this when they have a higher buying intent. They know what they’re looking for, what they need, or what they want. If you have it, there’s a very good chance you’ll close the deal.
Basically, these keywords fall right into your sweet spot for driving traffic.
Take a look at the brands who have successfully ranked for the above long tail keyword example. There’s only one multi-million-dollar corporation on this list (Ben & Jerry’s). The rest are small bakeries or boutique shops. That’s the power of the long tail keyword in action.
How Do You Choose the Right Long Tail Keywords?
According to Search Engine Journal (SEJ), one of the keys to driving conversions from search results is to engage people at the perfect time. It’s a two-way street. Their intent needs to match up with the keyword, and the keyword needs to be relative to their intent.
This is that sweet spot we mentioned earlier. Hit it, and you’ll see ROI.
Here are some other keys for choosing the best long tail keywords for you. They have to do with relevancy and uniqueness.
1. Relevancy, Relevancy, Relevancy
When a keyword is relevant to you, it ties back to your particular brand. This includes what you do, who you are, where you’re located, or what you sell.
The relevance of your keywords is the brunt of what makes long tail types work. If you’re not using relevant long tails, you won’t be taking advantage of their conversion power.
2. Use What Makes You Stand Out (Your Differentiation Factor)
A highly unique keyword could net you a buyer every time someone searches for it. Wow! That’s a BIG deal.
At the same time, that particular keyword could have next to no search volume because of its uniqueness.
Fact: this is common for keywords with good opportunities.
In other words, it’s not a problem because the conversion value is so high. The more unique your keyword, the more you’re targeting a specific buyer – the one looking to pull the trigger and make the purchase!
These types of keywords don’t work well for everyone – but they work great for you. The opportunity is personal, and that’s a big bonus.
Why Broad, Short Tail Keywords Are on the Way Out
Short tail keywords do have their uses. They haven’t gone the way of VCRs and rotary phones – they aren’t relics quite yet.
They’re good for optimizing basic pages on your site. Your “about us” page is a fine example. Over time, your long tail keyword content can help improve your rankings for those general terms. Your content will build authority, and that can give your general pages a boost.
Time, however, is the clincher here. For keywords with tough competition, it may take years for you to crack the top 100, let alone the top 50.
Ranking shouldn’t be your main concern, anyway.
Ranking for broad terms may drive traffic, but it won’t drive traffic that converts.
Instead, you’ll get a mix of people at all different stages of the buying cycle. Some, if not most, will not need what you’re offering. Neil Patel has an excellent chart that shows the difference:
As the chart shows, people who are looking to browse will use the broadest keywords of all: “Las Vegas,” “spyware,” and “television.”
Meanwhile, the people looking to buy tend to use the most specific terms possible: “Panasonic 43’ Plasma TV HVD3002 best price.” That’s one hefty long tail. You can tell this buyer is locked and loaded.
Draw the Locked and Loaded Buyer – Not the “Just Browsing” Variety
According to Forbes, a few years ago, most businesses online attempted to target small numbers of “sort-of” relevant keywords. These were traffic-drivers alone, and it worked well enough.
Now things have changed. There are millions more people online, and close to a billion websites. The competition to rank for broad keywords is more cut-throat than ever. In fact, it’s nearly impossible unless you’re a huge corporation or you pay.
You can rank well, and organically, for long tail keywords. These aren’t searched as often, but the people who do are far more likely to buy from you.
Who would you rather guide to your site – the casual browser, or that buyer who’s locked, loaded, and ready to whip out their credit card, because you’ve got what they need?
So, when it comes to keywords, redirect your focus.
Switch your tactics – shake things up.
The times, they are a-changin’, as Bob Dylan so eloquently put it. Pretty soon, short tail keywords may be thrown out with the bathwater. The long tail is the future of keywords.
Are you ready?
To start building your path towards more high rankings with long tail keyword-optimized content, Express Writers can help. Take a peek at our custom blog plans or content planning to see what we can do.
Creating great content that gets results can seem like an insurmountable challenge.
As Moz shows, most people follow similar principles when they use a search engine.
First and foremost, they’re there to find an answer, solution, or piece of information. They then formulate that need into a string of words (keywords) and type it into the search engine.
As he reads through the article, he begins to see that he isn’t alone in his lack of motivation and that there are solutions to his problem.
So he’s now in the solution aware stage.
The author understands this and, once the reader has finished the article, offers up an email opt-in that promises to help the unmotivated user even more.
The man enters his email, receives the ebooks, and is now in the product aware stage as he knows that the author has also published books that he can purchase to help him even further.
Since the initial content, and the ebooks, provided the solution he was looking for, he doesn’t return to Google to check out other potential solutions.
The author begins sending content through emails that slowly works him into the most aware stage where he is ready to make a purchase.
This example shows the power of understanding how users interact with search engines based on their stage of awareness.
Use it to your advantage and optimize your content to work users to the most aware stage.
3. Your Users Want Landing Pages
We know that users search based on their stage of awareness.
But, if this is the case, why isn’t all of the content we create based on walking visitors through to the next stage of awareness?
This is a great question, and one that many content marketers can’t answer.
To solve this problem, Search Engine Land puts it in the most simple terms possible: businesses need to look at every page as a landing page.
They advise that you ask yourself three questions when creating content. These are:
As you answer these questions, you arm yourself with the necessary information to create content that gets visitors to say, “This is exactly what I need right now!”
By doing this, your content doubles as a landing page and can directly contribute to conversions for your business.
And isn’t the goal of content marketing to serve as an avenue to generate revenue?
[clickToTweet tweet=”Wondering what attracts readers to your content? @ExpWriters is sharing seven facts on user intent you should know!” quote=”Wondering what attracts readers to your content? @ExpWriters is sharing seven facts on user intent you should know!”]
4. Long-Tail Keywords are Used in Searches More Often
The data shows that about 70% of search traffic is through long-tail keywords.
And, if you’ve been following along so far, this makes sense.
After all, if a user is typically looking for an answer, solution, or information when they use a search engine, they’re generally not going to find what they’re looking for by using a single word.
Let’s go back to the example of the unmotivated 40-year-old man. His search was “how to get motivated.”
Had he just typed in “motivation,” he would have seen this:
I’m guessing he already has a pretty firm grasp of the definition of motivation.
And, because this isn’t what he was looking for, the principles of user search interaction tell us that his next step would be to go back and reframe his search to something more specific.
But not only is the utilization of long-tail keywords important because of how users search, they also make a huge difference when it comes to search rankings and conversion.
As you can see, attempting to rank for a one-word phrase comes with a whole lot of competition and high costs. Not to mention the low probability of conversion.
Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are low cost, have little competition, and have a much higher probability of conversion because the user is almost always in the problem aware stage when they’re searching for them.
If your goal is to satisfy the needs of your users (which it should be), then utilizing long-tail keywords is clearly the way to go.
5. User Search Queries Are Becoming More Conversational
Another important reason that long tail keywords work so well with user search intent is because searches are becoming more conversational.
In mid 2016, Google CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned that voice searches now account for about 20% of all mobile searches.
Think about what you say when you use voice search. If you own an iPhone and want to find out how to cook boiled eggs, you’d likely say, “Siri, how do I boil eggs?”
You see the digital assistant as someone you can have a conversation with, and therefore ask them the same way you would ask an expert on the topic.
And with the continued improvement of digital assistants like Siri, Cortana, Google Voice, Amazon Alexa, and others, the number of people using digital assistants is expected to continue to rise.
The shift to conversational search queries is also causing a change in how people are creating content.
Content creators are beginning to avoid the journalistic approach and are instead using their content as a way to have a conversation with readers.
Think about mega influencers like Neil Patel and Seth Godin.
They emphasize the need to speak directly to their readers within their blogs. And, judging by their success, their readers appreciate and trust them for it.
6. Users Make the Decision to Click Based on the Headline
But just how important are they when a user is performing a search?
According to UpWorthy co-founder Peter Koechley, “The difference between a good headline and a bad headline can be just massive…When we test headlines, we see a 20%, 50%, or even 500% difference.”
500% difference?!? That’s huge.
Let’s take a look at an example of the impact of intriguing headlines.
If you were to search for “how to make money blogging,” your search results would look like this:
As you look at these four results, How to Make Money Blogging: How This Blog Makes $100K per Month clearly sticks out.
Why? Well, for one, because it’s specific. The user is searching for how to make money blogging, so they obviously want to generate income.
Smart Blogger’s headline is telling the user that, if they click on the link, they’ll learn how to make $100K per month. The other three headlines, on the other hand, fail to be specific enough to intrigue users.
While this is a simple example, it shows that taking the time to create great headlines is absolutely crucial if you want to stand out.
7. Users Process Visuals Faster
By now, you’ve probably read and heard plenty about how important it is to include visuals in your content.
But as search engines are getting more sophisticated, images are providing a way for websites to stand out there as well.
Because of this, having an image alongside your headline, URL, and meta description sets you up to be the first thing a user sees when they browse search results.
Take a look at this example when we search for “how to boil eggs”:
If you’re like most people, your eyes were immediately guided to the two pictures of the boiled eggs.
And, because of this, you’ve become more likely to click on one of those links.
Now unfortunately, Google doesn’t actually let you upload an image directly into search results.
Instead, you have to first put yourself in a position to have your image picked up by Google’s images index.
Here’s how you can do that:
While it’s a bit annoying that this is a “wait and hope” scenario, the power of having an image featured makes the process well worth it.
Using These Facts to Inspire Better Content
Armed with these facts, you now have the ammunition you need to start creating content that is made for users.
Focus on your audience, understand what stage of awareness they are in, and hone in on long-tail keywords.
And, if you want to skyrocket your conversion rates from search results, optimize that headline.
Do these things and you’ll be well on your way to creating content that ranks at the top of search engines and generates clicks from intrigued users.
While PageRank was a huge thing in SEO for years, it’s recently been laid to rest.
This happened in March of 2016, when Google killed off its Toolbar PageRank feature.
While PageRank didn’t have a huge user base before it was axed, there were a small handful of marketers and SEOs still using it, and those people will now need to find something to fill its place. The good news is that the death of PageRank is just another indicator of Google’s ongoing commitment to a “quality over quantity” model, wherein amazing content is rewarded.
The other piece of great news is that the post-PageRank world is anything but a desolate wasteland. Quite the opposite, in fact!
While PageRank had its devotees, most experts agree that it was an outdated and inefficient tool that wasn’t keeping up with the trajectory of online content and user experience. As such, it’s actually a good thing that it’s fallen by the wayside and made room for newer, more intuitive tools to take its place. Alexa Ranking and Topical Trust Flow are two modern quality gauges that are the perfect candidates to restore reliable trust metrics and help both marketers and consumers interact with more reliable content.
We’re here today to talk about both. Ready?
The Slow Death of PageRank
If you’re sad to hear about PageRank heading out, you’re not the only one. Google had been slowly killing the tool for years, though.
Here’s a brief history:
PageRank was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Founders of Google, at Stanford University in 1996. Originally, the tool was part of a larger research product relating to search and how it could be improved. At the time of its development, PageRank was revolutionary and heralded a whole new era, when web pages would be judged by the quality of their content rather than the concentration of their keywords.
The service eventually launched, with Google as its only user. Over time, though, other search engines saw that PageRank was improving accuracy and authority, and they started adopting the system into their algorithms. The program was short-lived, though, and soon started to come under fire. Search Engine Roundtable reports that, in 2007, Google asked its webmasters to provide some feedback about the idea of axing PageRank. In 2009, Google stopped showing data from PageRank in its Webmaster Tools section.
In 2013, Matt Cutts officially alluded to the death of PR:
By 2016, PageRank was on its way out, and SEOs and marketers everywhere were turning to the next reliable quality metric. Although some were sad about the end of PageRank, most people realized that, as good as PageRank had been, it had its drawbacks.
Namely: quality could be faked, and even spammy web pages and websites could have PageRank if they knew how to game the system.
These shortcomings set the stage perfectly for the next big thing, lurking just over the horizon.
Topical Trust Flow: What You Need to Know
The thing that first stepped up to take PageRank’s place is known as Topical Trust Flow, a tool created by Majestic SEO. Essentially, Topical Trust Flow determines how trustworthy and authoritative a URL or domain is within its niche while also determining what the topic of the content is all about. It does this by determining a site’s topical relevance based on the links it enjoys with other relevant sites.
Unlike PageRank, the quality metrics within Trust Flow are difficult to fake, since it’s actually the content that links to a page that determines its Topical Trust Flow.
Topical Trust Flow came at just the right time: with more than fifty million content shares every day, and 58% of consumers reporting they trust editorial content, (according to Nielsen), the web was in dire need of a more reliable trust metric than PageRank.
How Does Trust Flow Work?
Trust Flow is one of Majestic’s most useful tools for SEO practitioners. Flow is calculated using a set of authoritative seed websites as a base. The further away your domain lies from those seed sites, the lower the Trust Flow is.
The set of authority sites measured link out to other great sites, which link out to yet more sites. The whole system works like an underground root system, relying on a complex network of connections and inbound messages to determine stability and reliability. Here’s a diagram from seoworx.net.au to demonstrate how it works:
If you’re still struggling to understand Trust Flow, think of it like this:
Topical Trust Flow measures the quality of inbound links based on the quality of the links pointing to the site your links come from.
If every one of your inbound links come from sites that already have high Trust Flow, your domain is also going to have a high Trust Flow.
This is because the sites your links come from are seen as reputable and reliable, thanks to the inbound links they’ve received.
Trust Flow can be a tough metric to manipulate, making it almost impossible to fake or inflate. As such, it’s a much more reliable trust metric than PageRank, which relied on data that could easily be faked.
3 Facts to Know About Topical Trust Flow
Here are three key truths about Trust Flow and how it operates in the complex online world:
1. Trust Flow Relies on Relevance
A topically-matched trust flow that is high means the sites your links are coming from also have links that are topically relevant.
2. Trust Flow Rewards Trustworthy Links
A high trust flow means your inbound links come from sites that have trustworthy links.
3. Trust Flow Looks for Topical Similarities
A domain’s ability to rank increases when it has topically matched links that come from websites that have topically matched links, too.
To help you further understand how these truths play out in the Trust Flow algorithm, here’s a diagram from Majestic SEO:
How Trust Flow Supports 5 Crucial Foundations of SEO
While it might be easy to write Trust Flow off as just another reliability metric, it’s actually a tool that takes into account the changing climate of the online world.
When Trust Flow was developed, Google’s evaluation process for websites was shifting away from simple variables, like keyword inclusion, and toward more complex metrics, like quality, relevance, and user-experience.
The Trust Flow metric understands this (since it was born alongside it) and allows site rankings based on value, which is, after all, the most important metric of the modern world. What’s more, Trust Flow supports the five main SEO trends of today. These are:
1. Inbound Links
For years, search engines have been shifting toward prioritizing sites that earn lots of high-quality inbound links. Not only is this is a sign of relevance, but it’s also an indicator that a site is high-quality, especially if the sites linking to it are high-quality. Trust Flow is built on this, and it will continue to reward sites that earn inbound links in the coming years.
2. User Experience
While the old PageRank model didn’t think much about a user’s experience on a given page, Trust Flow takes user behavior and mobile optimization into account, rewarding sites that are easy to navigate and mobile-friendly.
3. Valuable Content
The very name “Trust Flow” indicates that valuable, relevant, trustworthy content is what search engines now want to rank. Create more of this, and the Trust Flow gods will smile on you.
4. Social Media
As social media becomes an ever-more influential ranking metric, companies are starting to see that the human signals produced on sites like Facebook are having large impacts on their content strategies.
5. Increased Importance of Earned Links
There will always be people who take the shortest route possible and buy links. It’s getting harder and harder to rank with that approach, though, especially since algorithms like Trust Flow reward links that are earned rather than purchased. This means things like guest blogging, referrals, and organic mentions are the most valuable forms of links out there.
5 Valuable Ways to Start Capitalizing on Trust Flow Today
While the introduction of Trust Flow shook up the SEO world, most professionals have found that the system actually provides many more benefits than PageRank. With that in mind, here are 5 smart ways SEOs can start capitalizing on the Trust Flow system today:
1. Use Trust Flow to Locate Top Influencers
Social signals from platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Facebook are starting to play an increased role in search results, according to a Search Metrics Ranking Factor. This is making it easier to track down and connect with authority figures and top brands in your industry.
2. Use Trust Flow to Increase Conversions on Social Ads
If you’ve been having a tough time boosting the conversion rates on your social ads, you’ll love Trust Flow. Google’s display network handles more than 1 trillion impressions each month, and managed placements will now allow you to hand-select the sites where you want to display ads.
3. Optimize Your Content for Inbound Links
Remember that Trust Flow places priority on trustworthy, topically-related links. With this in mind, focus on optimizing your content. For what it’s worth, content with more than 3,000 words earns twice as many shares as shorter content!
4. Play on the Strength of Backlinks
Backlinks play a major role in Trust Flow, so make sure you’re making the most of your networking and connections to earn as many backlinks as possible to your site.
5. Use Trust Flow as Inspiration to Become an Authority in Your Niche
Trust Flow places massive importance on topical relevance, so use expert writing to showcase your knowledge in your industry. The more authoritative and relevant your content is, the more likely your pages will be to earn a high Trust Flow ranking.
Diving Into Alexa Ranking: A 101
At the risk of sounding a little overwhelming, Trust Flow isn’t the only player in this game. There’s also Alexa Rank – a relatively new trust metric, my team here at Express Writers started using Alexa in place of the MozBar to learn about a page’s authority.
Unfortunately, the MozBar, like PageRank, had a few issues. It almost never worked, froze up constantly, plus there were rumors about inaccuracy in the actual numbers – inflation by spammy sites.
While Moz has made a very public effort to address the issues with the MozBar, we’ve found Alexa Ranking to be a much more reliable and valuable trust metric.
Here’s some background:
Alexa is an Amazon subsidiary founded in 1996. Thought of as a pioneer in analytical insight, Alexa combines information from the browsing behavior of people in the Alexa global data panel to offer information about traffic estimates and PageRank. To put it simply, Alexa serves as a representation of all the people using the web. It’s basically a census for the online world!
Daily updates. Unlike some other trust metric tools, Alexa’s Traffic Ranks look back at data collected over the prior three-month period, and are updated daily.
This makes them highly comprehensive and, even better, incredibly accurate. Alexa does have a funny quirk, though: it’s the complete opposite of Google’s PageRank.
In Alexa, the lower a site’s score, the better it’s doing in terms of traffic and authority.
How Alexa Ranks Sites
Alexa uses a combination of pageviews and unique visitor numbers to rank a site.
“Unique Visitors” is the number of Alexa users who navigate to a site on any given day and “pageviews” indicates how many Alexa users put in URL requests for a given site. The ranking from there on out is pretty simple: the site with the most visitors and pageviews is ranked #1 on a worldwide and country-specific basis.
While Alexa provides intensely accurate rankings, it does only rank domains, which means you won’t find rankings for sub-domains or pages on a site.
How to Locate Your Alexa Rank
Know what else I love about Alexa?
It’s dead simple.
The easiest way to use it is to head to the ranking site, which you can find at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo. Once you get to the site’s homepage, you can enter the URL you’d like to evaluate.
For example, here’s what Express Writers looks like (not too shabby as of March, 2017):
As another example of a site climbing close to the 1 (best ever) ranking, here’s Inc.com:
From there, Alexa will give you information on the site’s popularity in a given country and, if you pay for the premium version, insights about daily and monthly site visits and more.
Another Tool to Find Alexa: Use SEOquake
If you prefer not to visit the Alexa ranking site every time you need to evaluate a URL, download SEOquake.
SEOquake is a free tool that downloads right into your web browser and sets up in a matter of seconds.
When you Google URLs, SEOquake will give you their Alexa rank, as well as other valuable authority metrics. While SEOquake can look a bit intimidating at first, it’s a simple tool to use and can integrate with other tools, like SEMrush to provide even deeper trust metrics.
Establishing Site Authority: The Methods Have Changed but the Practice Remains Critical
While many people wonder why it’s so important to gauge a page’s quality before linking to it, content that draws on valuable, relevant content is deemed by both users and search engines as more valuable. While PageRank laid the foundation for this type of evaluation, it’s since fallen out of vogue.
Fortunately, newer and more advanced tools have stepped up to take its place.
Trust Flow has helped the web shift toward a “quality over quantity” model and made it more difficult for sites to fake quality.
Alexa Ranking, on the other hand, has provided a unique and up-to-date way for marketers, writers, and SEOs to immediately gauge a page’s relevance with the web as a whole.
These tools, along with the shifting attitude toward quality content, have made it easier than ever before to create reputable material that links into the wealth of helpful, relevant, trustworthy content on the web.
When writers and SEOs rely on quality content, the entire online atmosphere as a whole benefits from it.
Looking for help managing and improving your online content? Browse our Content Shop today to find the perfect package for your company!
Most of us have. There’s a deep sense of satisfaction watching the image slowly come together through tedious effort and clever tactics.
But for some, putting the puzzle can be frustrating. There might be one piece, just ONE piece, that’s missing from a section, and it can drive you mad looking for it.
Here’s the thing — content marketing can be a lot like a puzzle, with many pieces coming together to make something amazing.
Unfortunately, content marketers often get fixated on a single piece, leaving the rest of the puzzle unassembled. That piece is, very often, “Search Engine Optimization (SEO).”
SEO and content marketing are becoming two pieces to a puzzle in today’s friendly online marketing era. Yet, SEO as a separate piece has still earned more than its fair share of attention.
Frankly, it’s not hard to understand why.
Getting to the front page of a search engine like Google can seem like the make-or-break gauge of success for a piece of content.
But there’s a lot more to what makes a fantastic SEO and content marketing strategy, where you win with both Google and readers; and ignoring it will simply leave you with an incomplete puzzle.
A holistic approach to it all is what you need today in order to win.
A Holistic Approach: How SEO and Content Marketing Fit Together
Thankfully, there are definitive steps you can take to ensure a holistic approach to your SEO and content marketing strategy.
Here’s how:
1. Learn the Difference Between Advertising and Marketing
One major mistake marketers tend to make with their content is making it overly advertorial or salesy.
Sure, potential customers might stumble across your blog through a referral, or a backlink, or a search engine.
But if they’re looking for helpful information or a solution to their problem and all they find is an advertisement for your latest product or service, they’ll feel alienated right off the bat.
In fact, 28% of Americans actively seek to avoid advertisements online, according to Hubspot. And advertisers are the second most hated group online, only falling behind criminals and hackers. Yup.
If your content becomes perceived as a sneaky advertisement, you might quickly find your brand being seen in a light you never intended.
It doesn’t matter how great your SEO is if you’re creating content that is entirely self-serving. Truly great content will help to inform and assist the reader, rather than cajole them into a conversion.
The positive impression a reader engaging with your content will have a far greater impact than merely a sales pitch alone.
Customers who feel serviced and satisfied will willfully engage with more of your content, explore your brand in greater depth, and even recommend you to others.
And here’s the best part — all these efforts to ensure your content benefits a potential customer will pay dividends in SEO.
It’s Not Just About Keywords Anymore
It’s not just about keywords anymore. There’s a lot more to building a comprehensive SEO strategy.
Among the most effective methods to increase search engine visibility is generating quality backlinks from other sites.
And, simply put, no one is going to link back to an advertisement.
People link back to valuable, easy-to-understand, hyper-relevant content. If you break out of the mindset of needing to convert every reader with a sales pitch tucked in every piece of content, you’ll find your SEO improving in tandem with your conversions.
2. Write Exceptional, Meaty, Evergreen Content for Your SEO and Content Marketing Campaigns
How long does it take to put together a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle?
No matter how good you are, it’s a time consuming process — and effective content creation is no different.
Anyone can whip up a stubby blog a couple hundred words long stuffed with the requisite keywords.
As a matter of fact, many are already doing it. It’s a super bad habit, and a perfect example of a strategy focused purely on SEO and not on content.
There’s evidence to back this up, too. Neil Patel of Quicksprout found that posts he made over 1500 words received 68% more tweets and 22% more Facebook likes than shorter posts. That’s a massive boost for a more thorough article.
Even if you have good intentions about informing your audience, if it’s not well-researched and relevant, it won’t appeal to readers. In content marketing, it’s not the thought that counts — it’s the product.
With that said, it’s important to dig deep into your subject matter to create content that’s so thorough, readers will frequently return to you for their information.
Speaking of information, that’s the other thing you’re going to have to consider.
What kind of information do you intend to share? It can seem daunting to break new ground, especially in fields that are written about with extreme frequency (here’s looking at you, content marketing.)
Thus, it can be a bit tempting to jump on current events and tie your content to that. Trending hashtag? Next blog post. Viral challenge? Gotta upload a branded video.
There’s just one problem — this type of content has a short shelf-life and won’t have the long-term impact it could.
That’s why you need to build a foundation of “evergreen” content for your marketing strategy.
Evergreen content involves creating pieces that are relevant for as long as possible (ideally forever, but things do change and need to be updated.)
When you develop a marketing strategy, consider developing content that won’t become outdated anytime soon. This means it can continue to draw views, shares and backlinks well after its publication, giving you a long-term SEO boost as a consequence.
In the long run, your dedication to creating long-lasting and meaningful content will result in a wealth of engaging and relevant material that will drive readership years after it is written.
This doesn’t mean you have to completely ignore current events — quite the opposite. Making your content relevant to the experiences of your viewers is essential.
It’s just important to remember that this can’t be the keystone of your strategy. With a careful application of topical material on a foundation of evergreen content, you’ll remain relevant now and far down the line.
3. Engage With Your Community
Have you ever tried putting together a whole puzzle on your own? Like many activities, it is one that’s faster, easier and more fun with friends.
With all your energy focused on attracting readers to your website, you may forget that good content marketing is more than a one-way conversation.
Sure, you have an amazing product that you know everyone will love if they would only give you the time of day, but with so many companies out there competing for customer attention, your message could easily be drowned out by all the noise.
Waiting for Google to rank your content well may be one way to get people to come to your site and share your message, but actually encouraging your community to engage with your brand adds the personal touch that keeps them coming back.
The best way to determine if you’re striking a chord among your audience is to talk to them yourself. You can do this by leveraging social media to gather their feedback on a new product or idea.
Even more important than seeking validation from Google by chasing high page ranks, is the confirmation from your customers that your content is fulfilling their needs.
By listening to and engaging with your readers, not only will you demonstrate that you truly care about their opinions, but their feedback could also help you continually improve your product.
Your community can also be used for cross-promoting great content. It is a common practice for content writers to reach out to other writers to help promote their material.
Proactively reaching out to others allows you to share content to people who may not have viewed it otherwise. Even better, if they like what you’ve written, they will often add it as a link on their website — driving even more traffic to your content (and benefiting that ever important SEO.)
You can return the favor by linking to others’ content that is relevant to your readers. Your readers will thank you for introducing them to helpful information.
Even in the digital age, it is still important to foster an authentic connection with your community.
This way, not only will readers come to your website, they’ll also stay.
4. Words Are Good, Rich Media is Even Better
There’s another part of the content marketing puzzle you may have not considered — especially if you’ve been extremely focused on SEO.
Rich media like images, slideshares, videos and infographics all have amazing potential to engage and inform your audience.
But what does this SlideShare have to do with “SEO?”
Again, think holistic…
Remember why you create content in the first place.
It’s about more than a series of tricks and gimmicks to get you to rank well on Google, it actually exists to provide a service — or at the very least entertainment.
With media-rich content like videos and infographics, your audience will be able to have a diverse, multi-sense engagement with your brand, elevating their experience beyond just reading another blog.
Here’s some fast facts about user engagement with videos, courtesy of Hubspot:
After watching a video, 64% of viewers are more likely to buy a product online
92% of mobile video viewers share videos they’ve seen with others
Video in an email leads to a 200-300% increase in click through rate
And because of this, over 87% of companies are including video in their content strategy. It’s clearly striking a chord.
“But what about the SEO?!” a frazzled marketer might reply. “Great visual content is all well and good, but what use is it if no one sees it?”
A valid question, and here’s the answer — media rich content is the most shared, receives the best backlinks and is the easiest to promote. That means it’s great for SEO, just without all the hassle.
Are you beginning to see a trend here?
Great Content Means Great SEO
If you’ve made it to this point, you’ve probably begun to realize the point I’m getting at.
The puzzle you’re trying to put together is one that attempts to drive engagement with your online brand. SEO is an important piece of that.
But when it’s conceptualized as something other than just a piece and becomes the main focus of content marketers, it becomes less effective. Because great content, by its very nature, means great SEO.
It’s tough breaking out of the old mindset, one which placed an enormous importance on keywords (which no longer have nearly the impact they used to.)
How best to rank on search engines is a dynamic and ever-changing process, and to keep up, you have to be able to adapt.
There’s this idea that you have to futz around with code, and tags, and text with every piece of content you create in order for it to rank.
While that certainly won’t hurt, simply creating content your audience wants to engage with will work much more effectively.
Conclusion: Content is Powerful
Content has the amazing potential to build a trusting, engaged audience.
By being informative without being advertorial, by making deep, well-researched content, and incorporating media-rich content into your strategy you’ll be putting together a far more comprehensive puzzle than just focusing on SEO alone.
And in today’s search-engine climate, that’s what works.
If you’re a writer, online publisher, or marketer, it’s likely that you know a thing or two about meta descriptions and titles.
Used to improve SEO and help web pages earn more prominent Google rankings, meta titles and descriptions are short blurbs that help readers and search engines decide what content is about. While meta content may not be as exciting as Google algorithm updates or copywriting secrets, there’s been some big news in the world of meta content recently.
Earlier this month, Google announced some major changes to their meta title and description standards, and these changes will influence how SEOs everywhere regard meta content.
Read on to learn more.
Google’s Changes to Meta Content Standards
Google seldom releases news like this through loudspeakers and blow horns, so it’s not surprising that change was spotted on Twitter by a guy named Ross Hudgens. We heard about it through The SEM Post and Search Engine Journal, who reported on it later.
Long title tags being tested again in the SERPs. Seeing 69 and 70 character results today. pic.twitter.com/esiKTctV96
As it stands right now, Google’s character limits for title tags had increased by about ten characters: from 50-60 characters to 70-71 characters, which allows for longer and more in-depth descriptions and the inclusion of additional keywords.
What’s more, meta descriptions have increased to 100 characters per line and now allow for three lines in a description. Keep in mind, however, that this change is on a per-line basis and Google is still cutting off anything that runs over 160 characters, so it’s smart to stick to that limit for now.
Title Tag Changes
Currently, Google is allowing title tag lengths to be 70 characters. While it’s possible to push that limit to 71 characters by using small letters like “i,” Google generally truncates anything that runs over the limit. The new 70-character cap represents an increase of between 10-15 characters, which is huge news for savvy SEOs everywhere since the extra space can be used to include additional keywords or make a title tag more longer or more descriptive. While the specific length of this increase will vary depending upon the words used, many SEOs are managing to include 2-4 extra words in their title tags.
While the desktop changes are big news, the mobile title tag increase is what’s causing most SEOs to do a happy dance. As you probably know, mobile search is exploding right now, and it’s clear that the mobile character limit increase is Google’s effort to make mobile search more relevant and detailed than ever.
According to The SEM Post, Google bumped its mobile tag lengths up to 78 characters, which is a whopping 8 characters more than even the desktop limit. This longer mobile tag allows marketers to input additional keywords and reap the click-through benefits that the extended tag has to offer. What’s more, longer title tags on both mobile and desktop allow a search engine result to take up a larger space in the all-important SERPs, which makes it more visible and attractive to Google users.
Meta Description Changes
While many SEOs are jumping up and down at the prospect of longer descriptions (about 16-20 characters longer, to be exact, to a cap of 100 characters per line), it’s wise to remember that Google is still truncating descriptions after about two lines or 160 characters.
Because of this, it’s wise to ensure that you’re sticking to the 16- character limit, at least until it becomes clear that these changes are here to stay.
Should You Get Excited?
Yes! This is big news for SEOs, copywriters, and marketers. Meta content has always been important, but it’s also always been tough to create. While we still aren’t entirely sure whether these changes are A/B testing that Google will reverse in the near-future or long-lasting improvements that are here to stay, the prospect of larger meta content character limits is exciting in a few different ways.
Here are some of the main reasons we’re excited about the character limit increase:
Meta content will be easier to write. Brevity is hard. Anyone who has ever tried to craft a super-insightful tweet knows that getting the point across in just over 100 characters is tough. While the character limit increases aren’t massive, they offer just enough room to provide additional value and meaning in meta content.
Additional keyword inclusion. Right now, most SEOs are managing to add 2-4 words to title tags. This increase allows for additional keyword inclusion and more SEO-focused content. Just remember, never stuff your keywords in; a natural meta description is far better than a stuffed one, since you need a conversational, well-written meta in order to get more click-throughs on your piece from Google results.
Increased visibility. Longer meta content means more targeted results and increased visibility for all online material. This is good for marketers, search engines, and Google users.
What To Do Now
Since nobody is quite sure whether or not the character limit is here to stay, SEO experts are recommending that marketers measure their click-through-rates (CTRs) beginning before May 4th (the day that the change to the meta lengths took place). While it’s risky to alter your SEO efforts to fit the increased character limits before we know that they’re permanent, searching for any recent positive or negative changes will give you an idea of how and if your site has been affected.
In addition to monitoring your CTRs, you should also optimize your mobile and desktop title tags separately in order to ensure that they’re both adhering to their respective character limits. This helps ensure that your readers are getting the value they need from your content and that you’re getting the real estate you deserve in the SERPs.
The Future of the New Meta Title & Description Length
While there’s no telling whether or not Google will reverse the character limit increase, there’s also no doubt that this new change has the potential to help SEOs create more detailed and exciting meta content for readers and search engines alike. Because of this, the character limit increase has the potential to be a great revelation for the SEO community, and one that positively alters the way we think about meta content forever. To learn more about breaking SEO, copywriting, and content marketing news, join our new Twitter Chat.
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