As a small business owner, you are juggling too many balls to waste time on fruitless marketing efforts. Not only is it frustrating, but it’s also a waste of money. Whether you are promoting your company yourself or paying a marketer, if your content marketing strategy does not include implementing SEO best practices, your marketing efforts are a waste of time.
Awesome content written without an SEO strategy is equal to that of a blindfolded juggler tossing objects into the air, hoping they are caught by the next juggler without missing a beat.
While that may seem like an exaggeration, it’s important to remember that Google algorithms do not play favorites. At face value, every piece of content has an equal opportunity to be found in a search query. But even relevant content optimized for your target audience has to compete with a lot of organic traffic.
- As of June 2021, Hubspot reports that Google estimates processing approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. The average person conducts between three and four searches each day. Source: Hubspot
- 89% of URLs and 37% of URLs in positions 1-20 rank differently on mobile and desktop. Source: SEMRush
- 65% of successful brands conduct a content audit two times a year. 55% of content audits focused on improving content, and 46% made SEO their priority Source: SEMRush
Table of Contents
Why You Need an SEO Content Strategy
There are currently close to 2 billion websites competing for reader’s attention every day. The great news is that Google understands that people searching for information don’t want to scroll through millions of website links.
People want the most helpful information to answer their questions as quickly as possible. And this is key for small businesses implementing SEO best practices into their content strategy.
Every SEO action you incorporate into your SEO content strategy helps Google understand the context of your content. Whether you are structuring your blog article to include headers, adding alt text to an image or making sure you include keywords in your title and meta description, the better Google understands your website, the higher your chances of ranking for keywords your ideal buyers use to find the products and services your company sells.
So now that we’re clear as to why SEO is vital to the success of your marketing efforts, let’s break down how to include best practices into your SEO content marketing strategy.
Here’s How to Incorporate SEO into your Content Strategy
Blog Articles
Consistently publishing blog articles is an excellent opportunity for companies to increase their opportunities to be found on Google. Populating websites with blog content puts your website in the group of companies with 434% more search engine-indexed pages than other business sites that don’t publish content. Every page Google crawls is an additional opportunity for your customers to find you.
Blog posts developed for your company add an additional layer of information you have to incorporate into your sales process, educational efforts, and promotional opportunities. By repurposing content into multiple formats, you stretch your marketing dollars even further.
You can use blog posts to control the narrative around your company. Some ways businesses commonly do this by highlighting the ways their products and services are different than their competitors and by answering customers’ frequently asked questions.
In 2021, Orbit Media Studios reported that over 7.5 million blog posts are published on the Internet every single day. Without SEO strategies like internal linking and writing for keyword intent, your blog content will have little to no chance of reaching your buyer persona while battling the ever-changing algorithms of search engines.
With a few steps, you reduce your search competition by the millions! In our blog post Optimize Your Blog Posts Using an SEO Checklist, we cover all the key strategies to implement blog post best practices.
Blog Post SEO Best Practices Include:
- Keyword research
- Strategic keyword placement
- Internal and external linking
- Headers
- Incorporating the keywords in your meta descriptions
- Optimizing images
Each of these steps takes a few minutes to incorporate into your writing and publishing process but is worth the extra time.
Still on the fence about dedicating time and resources to blog writing? Check out these stats:
- High-quality content is vital. “Quality of content” is rated as the most important success factor among all bloggers. (GrowthBadger).
- Blog posts are more likely to gain backlinks from competitors than your service pages, and according to an Ahrefs study, the more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google (Ahrefs).
- 6.7 million people publish posts on a blogging website regularly, with 12 million posting blogs to their social media.
- 81% of online consumers trust information found on blogs. In fact, 61% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog.
- 75% of people never scroll past the first page in search results and 80% of people ignore Google ads, despite the jump Google ads are expected to see this upcoming year.
Consistently publishing blog posts for user intent is one of the best ways you can get new information in front your potential and current customers when the types of content you create have relevant keywords that allow you to publish informational intent-focused content. Remember, eighty percent of search engine traffic ignores paid ads and instead looks for blog posts to help them make purchasing decisions.
Case Studies and Special Offers
Case studies are an excellent way to highlight the way your products have helped customers succeed. They also help prospective clients gather ideas about how they will utilize your services. Additionally, case studies are a great resource for your sales team to incorporate in conversations with potential customers.
By providing helpful and educational content in the form of special offers, you create opportunities to extend the relationship with your potential customers and add value to their research process.
You can also develop offers that will help clients further incorporate using your products into their routines.
The best way to incorporate SEO into a holistic content strategy that includes case studies and special offers is by reviewing your Google analytics.
What are the blog articles or social media posts that resonate most with your readers? Take note of the content with keywords and create ways to expand on them using keyword research tools.
When you create a special offer, you will want to add a dedicated webpage called a landing page to allow customers to easily access your offer. This page will also allow you to include a space to collect email addresses from potential clients and track them as well as current customers through their buyer’s journeys.
You will want to include the same keywords you use in your offer on the landing page, as well as an optimized image. Include a brief summary of what the offer contains and why it is beneficial to download. Make sure your URL and Meta Description include the same keywords as well.
Social Media
It’s also important to take time to optimize social posts. Each platform is slightly different, but one consistent aspect is that you will increase your opportunities to be found by incorporating keywords and long-tail keyword phrases in your posts.
There are over close to 2 billion daily active Facebook users in 2022, according to DataPortal.com, many of who are searching for local businesses and asking for recommendations from friends regarding products. Additionally, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn all offer users the opportunity to search for information by hashtags.
When you optimize your social posts, you help social media platforms curate your content for your ideal customers.
An SEO content strategy is all about taking action to help search engines connect your content with your ideal buyers and to earn search authority for relevant keywords. Each action helps you stand out among the millions of blog posts published daily. More importantly, when you incorporate SEO best practices, you reduce the number of web pages you are competing against from 4 million to only those within the context of your content.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated.
