Link building is now a fairly difficult activity in SEO. Obtaining natural links through press articles or high quality blogger outreach is not something everyone can achieve. As a result, small to medium sized businesses will suffer the most because of limited resources and marketing budgets. So what’s the alternative you might ask ? Content marketing is your answer.
Creating on-site content
The strategy is simple. Create enough content around your primary keywords and start ranking for long tail keywords. But, there is a method to creating such content. It needs to be comprehensive and written to inform, educate and provide expertise in your subject area.
An example of this could be a website that sells market research services. The content that needs to be created should cover all aspects of market research from creating a market research survey to analysing market research responses. The more topics you cover with in-depth knowledge, the better your chances of ranking for long tail keywords.
How to create the perfectly optimised content
- Topic of the content – As stated above, the content should be around your primary keywords. You need to cover all different aspects of your primary keywords. This involves answering questions around your keywords, educating others about your subject area and sharing expert knowledge. This will help build relevancy for your website and help improve rankings. By writing such content, you should be able to cover all related keywords (look up Latent Semantic Indexing) for e,g. if your primary keyword is ‘social media’, then related keywords will be ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’ and ‘hashtags’.
- Content structure – It should be easy to read and follow a post. Content that is broken down into digestible paragraphs works best. Make use of bullet points and interactive elements like accordions, tabs or hover over text to display content in a cleaner format. For mobile SEO, it is important to follow such guidelines for a good user experience on mobiles.
- Outbound & internal links – There are varying opinions on how useful outbound links are. Some consider outbound links to be an important factor in indicating relevancy to search engines while others don’t see much value in them. I think they are useful and the quality of the outbound links is the most important aspect. The same applies to internal links which helps search engines find relevant content on your own website. Use keyword rich anchor text naturally in content to create such links.
- Length of content – In a recent study conducted by BuzzSumo for Moz, it was found that content between the range of 1,100 to 1,300 achieved top ranking on search engines. Neil Patel from KissMetrics follows this content strategy, and has achieved significant success.
Sharing knowledge is important and what could be better then covering your subject area in-depth for marketing purposes. It will help increase traffic and generate leads/conversions for your website. Further, if you write enough content and share it amongst a relevant audience on social media, your reputation will grow online. With SEO becoming even more competitive, following such tactics will help you achieve your SEO goals.
