3 SEO Tactics for Content Marketers

There’s a classic saying that’s been floating around for the last half decade or more. “Content is King.” It’s trite and over used, it’s not without merit, but it’s created a lot of lazy content marketers. There are a lot of content and inbound marketers that just create content without any strategy or thoughts of SEO at all.

So to help your business, we’ve created 3 SEO tactics for content marketers. A few simple things that content marketing folks can do to help the performance of all that content that we all keep creating.

Strategy First – Content Second

You wouldn’t head out on to a journey without a map, would you? But yet every day content marketers create content without having a strategy. Do you know who this content piece serves? What product or service is it serving? Finally, is there an ultimate goal or page you want the reader or the search engine to land on? Feeding those pages with natural internal linking will help Google rank these pages higher.

While great content is still the most important factor, not having a strategy for that content isn’t using it to it’s fullest extent. The content doesn’t necessarily have to link directly to it, but as search engines crawl your internal linking, it needs to link there within one or two additional pages.

Keyword and Competitor Research

Just like having a strategy not knowing the value that your content brings is equally embarking on a journey without knowing what obstacles may be in your way. If you know what key phrase you want your content to rank for, doing a little bit of research on who ranks for it, and what they did will go a long way.

From there you can make content decisions that will help search engines know that you have a better piece of content. If your competition is a big and renowned content provider, remember that you can always focus on your local area that you serve with your phrasing. This won’t have a high search volume, but it will be targeted at your audience better than those larger companies.

Trim the Fat

In content marketing and even in SEO there is a common misconception of more is more. But the reality is that there’s only so many pages that Google crawls in a day. While more pages of high quality content are helpful, not every page is your best work. Doing the occasional content culling so that you are only putting your best work forward can go a long way.

The number one reason for this is, it keeps the confusion for search engines down. Search engines have smart algorithms, but they’re algorithms nonetheless. If they don’t know what the page is for, it can confuse what they rank the site for overall.

Conclusion

You don’t have to be an expert in technical SEO to have your inbound marketing be more impactful to search engines. Taking a few extra steps than just creating blogs, videos, or whatever other content you create will take you to the next level of rankings and if done right, leads and sales.