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You have surely heard the phrase: “SEO is dead”. This is not entirely accurate. In any case, the way of doing SEO has changed and it must now be broader, to guide content marketers toward a promotion focus and efficient content creation, a framework that doubles as OC / DC (optimizing content for discovery and conversion).
OC / DC is a more holistic approach, oriented to content marketing goals. A narrow SEO approach not only fails to address all the paths through which consumers now discover content, but its strong restrictions can also negatively affect the creation of the content itself.
Next we will talk about various strategies and guidelines that show how to optimize website content for SEO, discovery and conversion in the coming year.
Read First, Second Algorithms
Google has made it clear that it will always favor content that is valuable to people over content written mainly to rank on Google. They have not only emphasized this long y more on their blog; they have made dozens of changes to their search algorithm that reflect this decision.
There are certain SEOs (those who ignore Google’s warnings) who live in constant fear of the next Google algorithm change. The reason for their worry is that the content they produce and the SEO tactics they use are, for the most part, aimed at pleasing Google algorithm changes instead of really satisfying and serving real readers.
Creating quality content is hard, and these “bad” shortcuts can seem tempting for search engine ranking. However, constantly having to clean up these actions when Google penalizes you is more costly in the long run.
This is because creating quality content from the start may take more initial effort, but it all but guarantees that you will be immune to constant Google updates and may very well be helped by them. That is because your content will be the material Google expects to promote, rather than the keyword-stuffed spam its engineers look to punish.
Many of the best SEO practices are still very necessary to make sure your quality content gets discovered, but these optimization considerations are much better left for after focusing on creating high-quality content made to serve your target audience.
What is quality content?
Before explaining strategies on how to make quality content, it is important to know what constitutes high-quality content. This is a task that fortunately Google pointed out to us in a wonderful summary of what they consider quality content.
The format of the linked blog post is a series of questions, as seen above. The one question of special importance for this discussion is:
Are the topics on your site driven by genuine interests of the site’s readers, or does the site generate content by trying to guess what might rank well in search engines?
This question is so important because any rubric for judging content quality will be intimately tied to the readers and audience you are trying to reach and attract. The first stage of content planning and strategy should be to seriously consider your audience and their genuine interests.
Know your niche
Every business or product has something unique about it. Even if you are competing in a crowded space, if your company has enjoyed any kind of success it is because it has offered something nobody else has. Whether it is a focus on cost savings, a quirky sense of humor, or an emphasis on professionalism. Any of a variety of factors can be identified as part of your brand’s real story.
As a content marketer, your goal is to create content that attracts your audience in a way that reflects the appeal of the product this content marketing is drawing attention to. In fact, a smart content strategy can naturally lead to conversions if it is appropriate for the product.
The more you can narrow down the unique appeal of the product or service, the more likely the content is to appeal to and catch the reader’s interest. Considering these are the same words Google uses, any marketing content that does well on this goal is likely to be favored by Google’s current and future algorithms.
To develop a content strategy based on a unique set of customer interests, there are a few main ideas, and they are really simple:
- Find a niche that is specific enough to be unique, but broad enough to meet your business goals.
- Locate the ideal customer within that niche and find out which blogs they read, which social sites they use, which kind of events they attend, etc.
- Create a persona that reflects that average customer and try to gain an understanding of their demographics, as well as their psychology, beliefs, etc.
- Use that persona as a guide to focus the content marketing effortss.
What makes this approach so powerful is that it makes you discover and appeal to the genuine interests of the targeted customers. This aligns the content with the goals of Google and other search providers.
So, although it is not about “SEO” in the sense the term has come to be understood, creating a content plan that looks like this will certainly go a long way toward optimizing your content for discovery by search engines.
Semantic Search and Concepts over Keywords
Further reinforcing the importance of this type of content creation strategy, and the SEO benefits it can bring, it is important to understand Google’s recent focus on something called semantic search.
Semantic search often takes fragmented, non-specific search terms from people who use them naturally and tries to analyze them and extract a more solid meaning. In short, Google has started to focus on taking a series of general, basic keywords and ignoring them in favor of the basic concept they all belong to.
This is important for content marketers, since it lowers the overall importance of isolated keywords in determining search rankings.
As Google’s algorithms move in favor of concepts, this gives content creators more freedom to tailor content to the genuine interests of their audience, without worrying that this content is buried under results that rank highly for isolated keywords that searchers commonly use when looking for content.
Instead, they focus on covering a few key topics of importance to their audience with each piece of content they create.
The reason behind this is that Google is trying to work out the meaning of pages and favoring pages that answer several questions a person may have, said Murray Newlands.
The implication of this new approach is that, as a marketer, you need to produce content that answers several search queries, possible queries that include data points feeding Google’s desire to understand the details about the topic.
Since the arrival of Google+ and tailored search results, personally, a focus on keywords, links and anchor text has become less important than making sure that your site overall, and each piece of content on the site, addresses and has authority on certain concepts, especially several topics within your market niche.
Building authority and the 4 Vs
Now that I have highlighted the importance of defining your market niche for SEO and how to develop a quality content plan tailored to that niche, there is one important piece of the puzzle left. The goal of every piece of content, as well as the overall content strategy, should ultimately be to build your site’s authority on a given topic.
Authority has always been a component of Google search. Even in the most rudimentary iterations of Google’s PageRank algorithm, outbound and inbound links were used to gauge authority.
However, as Google has moved more toward personalization and semantic search, authority on a narrower topic has become not only more important, but has actually become much less difficult to achieve. Especially if you define a niche fairly well and choose a niche that suits your business.
There are four Vs to inform SEO and content marketing decisions, since Google’s search engine understanding is more than a big data problem.
The four Vs are:
- Volume. The amount of material you put out on the chosen topic will be a big sign to Google of authority on the subject.
- Velocity. The overall frequency of content will also give Google a hint about your expertise. Publishing once a week for a year probably looks better than publishing once a month over four years.
- Variety. While you don’t want to stray too far from your content topic, covering a variety of areas within your chosen niche will signal to Google that you have authority on the subject.
- Veracity. Having content well received by readers is perhaps Google’s strongest signal that it should serve your site’s content to readers interested in the concept you chose to focus on.
Focusing on making sure the broader content strategy meets the conditions of these four ideas will ensure that the individual pieces of quality content end up adding up to search benefits that are greater than the sum of their parts.
“Traditional” SEO as the final step
Once you make sure you have identified the audience, you understand what interests them, you are producing quality content for your niche, and you are doing it in a way that is building your site’s authority, then you can start thinking about “traditional” SEO considerations.
Traditional SEO is something like a rainbow. It improves the whole experience, and it can really give people extra value. But if you give someone just a pile of rainbows, giving everything they really want, it will probably leave a bad taste in the mouth.
In the same way, SEO best practices, such as linking to other relevant posts within your blog, providing precise keywords within headlines and anchor text, and properly tagging and categorizing content, can really offer a lot of extra value to readers.
If you follow these best practices, in addition to providing quality content people want to read, you not only improve the user experience, but great content will also be easier to find. However, if best practices are not built into a content strategy, Google’s changes to its algorithm are likely to affect it.
