Skip to main content

What Is Content SEO and Why Do You Need It?

Most business owners are familiar with SEO (search engine optimization) as a general concept, but only recently has content SEO started to come into its own right in terms of recognition and the value it offers. For many years managers have been hung up on traditional SEO strategies that for the large part have completely ignored content. Even now, in meeting rooms across the world, there are undoubtedly people still clinging to the belief that to get the best results, you need a basement full of geeky programmers who can write magic lines of clever code that none of your competitors can top, and hey presto - your rankings rocket and your marketing goals are achieved! Well, sorry to disappoint you, but that’s not how it works! Don’t get us wrong, getting everything in order on the technical side is important, but the system just isn’t that easy to trick, and there is so much more you can do from a front end perspective, that if you are not considering content as a valuable part of your overall marketing strategy, you are definitely missing out!

To make an analogy based on our own logo, think of your overall marketing strategy being the palm tree, with each frond representing a different sector within that. Content marketing is one frond, whereas traditional SEO will be another. Other fronds may comprise of email marketing, affiliate marketing, advertising, and any other methods that are relevant and effective in reaching your intended audience. You can’t have a healthy palm tree with just one frond, in the same way that you can’t have a healthy octopus with only one tentacle. The palm tree is healthiest when it has many fronds, all working together for the overall health of the tree.

So...What Exactly Is Content SEO?

It’s a combination of many processes, and the best way to guarantee results is to use a specialist (like us!) to make sure it is done properly, following all the most up to date principles and algorithms. But the main steps in the content SEO cycle are:

  1. Research - Do some keyword research and design your keyword strategy. There are various analytics tools that can help you do this, and you should also be doing some competitor analysis.
  2. Website Structure - The content on your site should be organised in a logical way, using H tags to best effect based on your chosen keywords, having the right keywords set for the right pages to maximise impact, and ensuring keyword densities are correct.
  3. On-Site Content SEO - Ensuring SEO titles, meta descriptions and alt tags etc are all present and conform to best practices for length, keyword inclusion, and readability etc.
  4. Link Building - Include hyperlinks to other main pages and the home page of your site. External links are helpful too but can be more difficult to include organically.
  5. Wait! - this is a very important part of the process. Remember that search engine bots won’t pick up on the changes you’ve made overnight. So don’t get frustrated and abandon your plan before you’ve taken the time to see what the results are.
  6. Analyse - Look at your general rankings, keywords rankings, and competitor rankings. Then skip right back to step one and repeat to ensure your hard work pays off and that you can continue to improve further over time. Your website needs a constant SEO focus, and while going through the cycle once and ‘ticking the box’ on improved results may be a great short term gain, it’s not a long term solution.

What Are the Best Types of SEO Content?

Content SEO principles apply to every type of content marketing, which as a general term covers the creation and sharing of any online material such as videos, blogs, social media posts, guides, infographics etc. Depending on your industry, the ones that are best for you will vary. However, in our opinion, your top priorities should be:

Your main product pages - this is where you want the most traffic to be, and the pages that you’ll use to (hopefully) convert site visitors to customers. So they must be well written and content optimised.

Blogs - Adding blogs is one of the easiest ways to continually add new content - and more importantly, SEO optimised content - to your site. We find many people dismiss blogs as being outdated, but if you want to stay relevant, grow your customer base, and stand out among your competitors, your website needs a blog section.

Any kind of copywriting for SEO is a skill, where you are essentially writing for three different audiences:
1. Yourself - selling your products and services to full effect.
2. Your potential customers - fitting in all your unique selling points, benefits and some calls to action to help transition them from site visitor to customer.
3. The Google machine

So to save time, energy, costs, and increase efficiency, it can often be advantageous to outsource copywriting for your web copy and blogs, and to give your content SEO strategy an overhaul in general. If you need any help with any of this, please feel free to get in touch for more information.