How good content can get ahead with strong SEO
By Charlie Britten
10 May 2019
With the updating of algorithms from around 2011 onwards, the old blight of irrelevant content with rankings artificially boosted by a mention of a famous celebrity in the first sentence was consigned to the dustbin of history. Few wept for it, least of all those actually using search to try to find content that was useful for them.
How can SEO improve marketing for companies in the UK?
Now, SEO can be part of a much wider, more sophisticated content marketing strategy, one that takes into account the four stages of the buyer journey:
- Attraction
- Consideration
- Purchase
- Delight
The first of these means providing optimised content that keeps the reader coming back. Indeed, based on the so-called rule of seven that a potential customer needs to read this many pieces of content before they commit, the importance of relevance and quality has never been more evident.
SEO can also play its part in the final part of the stage, where good content can continue to please consumers, helping to encourage customer loyalty and make them advocates who recommend the services they have used to their family and friends.
What role does long-tail keywords play?
The production of relevant content can be aided by the use of long-tail keywords, lengthy search terms that can help drive traffic to more specific destinations. This will help make it more relevant. For instance, someone looking for legal help may look under single, one-word terms like ‘contracts’, ‘divorce’ or ‘wills’, but by being able to add more details in their search they could find content that speaks more directly into their particular situations.
It is not just words that have a part to play. Images can also help with optimisation as well. However, it is important to note the rule of relevance is as applicable here as it is with keywords.
Why do you need to take care of your technical SEO?
Your SEO strategy also needs to be supported by a good understanding of technical SEO, the part that exists entirely apart from your actual content. There are enough spiders crawling the web to give an arachnophobe nightmares, but they may not give your site a high ranking, however good your content is, if some other elements fall short.
This is why you should always check that your Robot is functioning well, by steering the spiders to the content you want to see appearing high in the search rankings.
It also needs to be calibrated so it isn’t blocking something it should be making available, while at the same time not inviting the crawlers into everything. The last of these scenarios can place more pressure on a server and slow down web traffic. That is the last thing you want, as a slow site will lead to a high bounce rate.
Technical SEO has many other sides to it to:
- Ensuring the ‘off page’ element is taken care of through having good links that are fully functional.
- You need to make sure your domain name is fully registered and you avoid having alternative domain names, such as HTTPS and WWW.
- If this did happen, a crawler might regard them as two separate sites, thus diluting your ranking.
While none of this is to do with content, it is essential to have a full understanding of it to avoid undermining the impact of well-written, optimised content. Nothing could be much worse than writing some great articles or blogs, only to find the technical side lets them down.
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