Before we get into how you can optimize your content for SEO and digital marketing, let’s clear something up first.
Looking at the title, you could get the impression that both SEO and digital marketing are different and contrasting concepts. It’s actually not like that at all.
SEO can be thought of as a subset or branch of digital marketing. It is a technique that is used to boost the effectiveness of any digital marketing strategy.
Now that that’s all cleared up, let’s look at how you can actually do it.
Refining and Enhancing the Quality of the Content
The quality of your written content is more or less the deciding factor of its potential as a marketing element.
Content that has zero grammatical errors, easy readability, and no plagiarism will be SEO friendly.
To make sure that your content fits this standard, you have to use different types of tools.
You can use grammar checking apps to remove grammatical errors from the writing.
Similarly, you can use online plagiarism checker tool to make sure that the content is unique and original.
Basically, once you are done writing out your content, you should run it through a series of tests and checks; the purpose of which will be to remove all sorts of imperfections from it.
The key takeaways from the above are:
- Make sure your content is grammatically impeccable
- There should be no plagiarism. You should use a checking tool to see if you have accidentally copied from a source or not
- The content should be readable and easy to understand
Keywords
Keywords are the lifeblood of SEO. SEO content has to include keywords since the latter is what it is being optimized for.
But, at the same time, the content should not be littered with focus words and phrases. Anyone can use keywords in their writing. The art is to use them properly.
The search engine is going to flag your content if it has too many keywords in it. The trick is to add them sparsely and naturally scatter them around.
Your keyword usage should be measured and calculated to please both: the search engine and the audience.
It should be so properly blended in the content that the reader shouldn’t even realize that they have just read anything unusual or out of place.
If your reader realizes that the purpose of the content is not to engage and educate them (but is to boost SEO), they won’t remain very friendly or warm towards the author.
Research and value
When a reader visits your website/blog to read something, they don’t want to hear conjectures or guesses. That much they can do as well.
When writing your content, you should do the research properly. Your purpose should be to educate your readers and build their trust in your recommendations and opinions.
That is the same reason why you should never use terms like ‘We think’ or ‘Probably’ in your content. Words like these make it look like you have no idea what you are talking about.
You should mention statistics, percentages, reports, study results, etc. to make your content valuable and succinct.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO essentially includes all types of techniques and activities that are done from within the webpage.
This can be better understood in contrast to off-page SEO; which includes all the steps taken on other websites such as guest posting and backlinks.
A few things that should be in your on-page SEO checklist are:
- Using alt tags for the images
- Using ‘h1’, ‘h2’ and ‘h3’ tags for the headings
- Using the keyword in the first paragraph
- Including the keyword in your title
As we mentioned at the start, optimizing content for SEO means optimizing it for digital marketing.
That is why it is necessary to pay attention to all the aspects of SEO, and to make your content search engine (and reader) friendly
Link building
Links are to SEO like salt is to food. When planning your SEO strategy, link building should be one of your top priorities.
If your site is linked to other popular and reliable websites, it will become more authoritative, and it will get in the good books of Google’s ranking algorithm.
Like with keywords, the number of links should be calculated and measured. Adding too many links in the text, apart from looking ugly and unsightly, will reduce their effectiveness.
Ideally, you should add 1 or 2 outbound links in a 500-word blog post. Taking this ratio as a standard, you basically get one outbound link in every 250 words.
Images and visual representations
People like to see images. A picture is better than a thousand words, after all…
Think about it.
A wall of text that goes on and on without any sort of images or visual representation will be boring to read.
Compared to that, an article or post that has some photos periodically placed after every couple of paragraphs will be far more engaging.
Even if we forget what images do for SEO from a technical perspective, adding them to your content can make it more readable and entertaining.
And from what we have discussed above, we know that readable and easy-to-understand content is automatically a plus for search engine optimization.
Conclusion
Optimizing any type of content for SEO and digital marketing isn’t easy and simple.
There are a lot of factors and aspects that you have to consider and keep in mind when coming up with your strategy.
If you aren’t very experienced or familiar in this field, you could be a bit confused about where to begin. For starters, you can take the steps that we discussed in this list.
Although there is a lot more to SEO and optimizing content for digital marketing, we did cover some of the essential basics that can help you get started.
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by Eilla Watso