When it comes to balancing your site’s SEO vs UX, newcomers may not be clear on what Google cares more about for site rankings.

On one hand, basic SEO knowledge tells us that prioritizing keywords and gearing content to search engine algorithms is ideal. However, this can easily get in the way of providing a better user experience for your visitors.

Google’s search algorithm continues to evolve significantly with each passing day. The divide between best SEO practices and a high-quality UX is no longer present. To understand why this is the case, let’s look at the components of good SEO vs UX so that we can determine without a doubt what Google cares about for your website.

Why Is SEO Important for a Website?

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality of a website to increase the amount of highly-qualified traffic it receives from organic search results.

A business website serves a number of purposes. It is a business card, a spokesperson, a salesperson, and much more. It is able to educate visitors, funnel new leads through a sales process, and drive your sales by matching your products and services with the right audience. However, it needs a powerful SEO strategy to achieve this.

How SEO Functioned in the Early Days of Digital Advertising?

An SEO specialist’s job is to understand Google’s search algorithm and optimize a website to satisfy key ranking factors for search engine results pages.

In the early days of digital advertising, search algorithms looked for and identified relevant website content by scanning for keywords. As a result, website owners everywhere made it a common practice to stuff one or more keywords as many times as possible on specific website pages. This proved effective as search engine crawlers matched the website’s keyword density to the user search query and rendered it as a top result.

However, the engineers at Google now understand that such a tactic is not an accurate or effective way of analyzing website content. By simply measuring keyword density, search engines ignore the human element behind the search and the true intention behind searching a keyword or phrase. More importantly, it neglected to measure the quality of the user experience.

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Search Engine Algorithms Evolve Daily

Today, the top-ranking websites integrate the best SEO practices in a more natural manner. Google’s algorithms no longer require keyword-stuffed content to effectively understand the true purpose of the webpage. They’re able to understand the structure and intention of a search query and direct users not only to matching keywords but to content that matches their true needs.

SEO is still important to Google. The same principles still apply, but our approach is now more user-focused. A quality website should still feature high-volume keywords so that your web pages remain highly visible to search engine crawlers. The big change here is that we can now focus on delivering content that serves visitors first in an effort to improve our site’s UX.

Why is Good UX Important?

As Google’s algorithm becomes more intelligent and sophisticated, its list of ranking factors grows. It’s widely understood by SEO professionals that Google potentially evaluates hundreds of factors that involve much more than keyword density. These include:

• Title and header tags
• Site layout and navigation
• Content length
• Primary keywords
• LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords
• Page update frequency
• Mobile-friendliness
• Domain age and history
• Page loading speed
• Internal links, outbound links, backlinks
• Content that adheres to EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)

These ranking factors simply scratch the surface of what Google’s algorithm is now capable of understanding and scoring for every website on the internet. What stands out here, however, is the fact that the bulk of these ranking signals describe the type of experience your website offers to its users.

Good UX is important as it allows your website to better fulfill the user’s need implied by their original search request. A quality UX not only provides relevant, informative content but makes that content highly accessible to all types of users.

Google’s algorithm no longer feeds on the SEO strategies of the past. Instead, it now places significant value on the user experience you provide to your audience. You can take steps to improve your site’s UX by adhering to the ranking factors listed above. Your team will also be able to test the quality of your website’s UX by analyzing positive or negative user signals.

What Are User Signals and What Do They Tell Us About UX?

User signals are a pattern of behaviors that Google tracks to better understand the quality of a webpage. If your user signals trend in a positive direction, it’s a strong indicator that your page is a strong search result and provides a high-quality user experience.

Here are the user signals you need to look out for when curating a proper website UX:

• Bounce Rate

In SEO, we use the term bounce to refer to any instance in which a user visits a website and leaves without taking any additional actions. A bounce generally occurs whenever the content on the page is unhelpful or does not adequately match the original search intention.

Therefore, your bounce rate refers to the frequency at which a bounce occurs on your website. If your website features a high bounce rate, it is almost certain that there are significant flaws in your UX. You must always be aware of a high bounce rate, as Google will take notice and penalize you for it in search rankings.

Tools for tracking bounce rate: Google Analytics

• Repeat Traffic

Every brand strives to attract new visitors. However, returning visitors act as a vote of confidence in the quality of your user experience. Users are only going to make the effort to return to a website if are able to adequately address all of their needs when interacting with your brand.

Keep an eye on your repeat traffic numbers. If you find this metric trending low, consider how you can improve your UX by looking at key ranking factors and determining how you can improve. We also recommend looking at the websites belonging to high-ranking competitors to see how their UX is superior to your own.

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Tools for tracking repeat traffic: Google Analytics

SEO vs UX – You Need Both to Conquer Google Search Results

Google’s search algorithm continues to evolve in such a way that it does not minimize the importance of either SEO or UX. Rather, it calls for superior website strategies that effectively incorporate both to satisfy the needs of users. What your visitors want and what Google’s search algorithm wants are now the same.

Old-school SEO tactics of mapping your site with keywords and utilizing the correct tags are still the best way for crawlers to discover a page. However, you no longer need to focus on stuffing your content or utilizing phrases in unnatural ways to satisfy some estimated quota. Instead, you can focus on curating high-quality content that answers questions, point users to the right destination, and helps them solve an identifiable problem.

In other words, your website’s SEO will improve as your user experience also improves. You can optimize your UX by focusing on key areas:

• Site navigation
• Content quality and length
• Page speeds
• Mobile-friendliness
• Use of relevant media
• Avoiding intrusive pop-ups or ads

You can learn more strategies on how to improve your SEO with user experience factors here.

SEO and content marketing are the two primary entities that drive all of digital marketing. However, average business owners often fail to understand what makes these two practices unique and what binds them together.

While both practices are distinct and require varying levels of expertise, they are inextricably bound together and cannot provide results without the other’s assistance.

If you’re unsure where you land in the discussion of content marketing vs SEO, you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to provide you with clear-cut definitions of each service, explain why they need to work together, and the steps you can take to get powerful results with SEO content marketing.

Content Marketing vs SEO – What’s the Difference?

Before we dive too deep, let’s establish our foundation by exploring what these digital marketing strategies are in isolation.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a digital advertising technique in which brands strategically create content to market their business and achieve specific goals. Content marketing can help fulfill a variety of purposes including promoting brand awareness, acquiring new leads, and driving sales.

It’s also a common mistake to assume that content marketing refers to blog writing only. In truth, any content, whether it be on your main website pages, landing pages, or paid ads is content marketing. What changes in each of these instances is the tone and objective of the content in order to meet your audience’s needs at specific stages in the buyer’s journey.

Examples of content marketing can include webpage text, articles, newsletters, email blasts, blogs, or social media posts. In each scenario, a content writer is looking to identify the best way to communicate with a segment of your audience to achieve a specific goal or conversion.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the act of optimizing a web page, so that search engine crawlers can easily interpret the type of content it contains. When the crawler is able to accurately identify a page, the search engine algorithm can successfully deliver it to the right audience on search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO not only increases the visibility of your website pages but will help you to connect with better-qualified leads. Without best SEO practices, it’s likely that algorithms can make mistakes in understanding your webpage and deliver it to less interested individuals browsing the internet. This results in fewer page clicks and increased bounce rates.

Low or nonexistent activity on a web page over the course of time will actually hurt your SEO and impair your brand’s discoverability.

What’s the Relationship Between SEO and Content Marketing?

With the definition of each subject clear in your mind, it becomes clear why the two are inseparable and are meant to operate in unison. Content marketing performs the heavy lifting when it comes to attracting and converting your website visitors, while SEO ensures that the right users can actually discover your new content at any given time.

It’s not a contest between which marketing strategy is more helpful for your brand. Rather, an SEO strategy without content marketing is incomplete and vice-versa. Utilizing SEO to attempt to make your pages visible will mean very little if there is no content. Furthermore, those efforts would be in vain because the structure of the content and what it contains is an integral part of making SEO work.

You can find an introduction to SEO and some recommended guidelines courtesy of Google here. While we recommend recruiting an SEO expert to improve your website and guide the content creation process, it is beneficial for all team members to grasp the basics of the best practices for SEO.

Effective SEO generally includes the following:

• High-quality, informative content
• Using high-volume keywords effectively within the content
• Structuring content with short paragraphs and engaging headlines
• Optimizing page URLs and website navigation
• Improving page load speeds
• Optimizing for all devices

This simply scratches the surface as technical SEO will take you from the content on the page to the HTML and JavaScript code that makes up your website. To learn more about how to create an SEO-friendly website, head here.

How to Implement SEO Content Marketing Effectively?

Next, we’re going to provide you with expert tips for combining both. By deploying these tactics, you and your team can benefit from effective SEO and content marketing that synergizes for maximum effect.

1. Create Content That Speaks to Both Users and Search Engines

Because SEO and content marketing are complementary, you need to create your content with SEO in mind from the ground up. Writing first and thinking of SEO as an afterthought is likely to result in an incoherent product that doesn’t excel as an informative product nor as an effective SEO tool. Instead, you’ll want to focus on some vital principles before you ever start typing your first words.

2. Perform Extensive Keyword Research and Focus on Keyword Intent

Keywords are the bedrock of how users communicate with search engines to discover new content. These can consist of a single word, short phrases, or long-form questions, otherwise known as long-tail keywords. When a user enters a keyword into the search field, the search algorithm automatically locates indexed content from web pages and displays the most relevant results that contain that keyword.

This means that to create effective SEO content, you need to investigate the keywords your audience is using to discover brands such as yours. However, you want to focus on additional factors other than search volume such as keyword difficulty and average cost-per-click. This will help you determine how difficult it will be to outrank competitors for that keyword and whether or not the estimated ROI will be worthwhile.

Secondly, don’t make the rookie mistake of ignoring the intent behind the keyword. If you were looking to rank for keywords related to “SEO content,” for example, you might find keywords such as “what is SEO content” or “best SEO content.”

These two examples may have entirely different intentions. The first is unquestionably an informational keyword, meaning that the user wants to gain knowledge and is not immediately looking to buy a product or service. The latter example is a little more ambiguous. Terms like “best,” “worst,” or “affordable” are typically transactional keywords, which express an immediate intent to buy. But, it can also be informational in that the user wants to learn how to create the best SEO content.

Understanding the intention behind using a keyword is key to creating effective SEO content for your readers. When you use a keyword effectively as the basis for your content marketing, search engines will have an easier time knowing how to rank your content and serve it to the ideal audience.

3. Optimize Metadata

Every web page on the internet possesses metadata. Metadata is information that describes other data. Examples of this include a page’s meta description, which summarizes all of the content on a webpage in roughly 160 characters. Other examples include the page title, the author, alternative text for images, and the date of publishing.

Optimizing a page’s metadata for SEO further assists search engine crawlers in determining what your web page contains. Not only does it add clear descriptors for parts of the webpage, but it can also serve as additional opportunities to sell your content and further your keyword usage.

For example, the best practices for a meta description are to include your primary keyword and advertise your content in a succinct 150-160 characters. Your search will feature any keywords in your description in bold for increased visibility. You also have full control over your messaging, meaning you can create intrigue and sell users on the value of your webpage over others. Just be sure to keep your information and accurate and avoid misleading the user.

4. Link Relevant Content Pages Together for Improved SEO

A core aspect of an SEO strategy is link building. Link building is the practice of linking two pieces of related content together in an effort to drive additional traffic to those pages. As the number of quality inbound links pointing to a page increases, so too will its search rankings. This consists of two types of links: internal links and backlinks.

Internal links are links between two pages on the same domain. These are easier to implement as you have full control over your own content and how you choose to incorporate these links. You’ll want to seek out natural opportunities to reference your other content whenever it becomes relevant. You do not want to stuff internal links onto a page just for the sake of doing so. Providing irrelevant links can confuse crawlers or even prompt them to flag your content as misleading or intrusive advertising.

Backlinks are links that a page on your site receives from an external domain. When it comes to backlinks, SEOs typically use the analogy of viewing connected websites like neighborhoods. If you receive backlinks from websites with poor reputations and SEO, it can hurt your site’s SEO even if you are utilizing best practices. Conversely, a healthy number of quality backlinks can significantly improve your SEO and search rankings.

Acquiring backlinks takes more effort and will require you to connect with others online through social outreach. However, the benefits of obtaining healthy backlinks are worthwhile in helping you to increase the visibility of your content. You should also regularly examine your backlinks profile and look for any toxic domains you want to disavow.

In both examples, search engines utilize these links as yet another way to understand your website’s content and how it relates to other content online. These links help to define relationships, which then creates a clear picture of your entire brand and what you have to offer to users discovering your brand through a search engine.

5. Create and Upload an XML Sitemap

You can further help your SEO content by speeding up the indexing process. Webmasters can do this by creating an XML sitemap. A sitemap details all of your website’s most important pages and which are available for crawling. Your sitemap can also list exclusions of any URLs you might wish to exclude from crawling for specific SEO purposes.

Faster indexing means that your positive SEO updates get indexed faster, meaning improved site quality for search rankings. It can also help you to avoid penalties toward your SEO regarding known issues that your team is already working to address. You can learn how to build and submit a sitemap with Google here.

6. Consistently Update Your Site with New and Accurate Content

Search engines not only check content for structure and quality but also take note of how often you publish and update pages on your domain. If you allow your website to grow stagnant, search engine crawlers will take notice and begin to view your content as old or outdated.

Limiting the content on your website not only allows you to look dated, but it ultimately limits how many gateways that users have to access your content. When you regularly create new pages that target new topics and keywords, you’re essentially creating alternative avenues for users to discover your brand. Planting more seeds and watering them regularly is more likely to produce a strong harvest than letting your plot run dry.

One of the most popular and effective ways to do this is to add a blog to your website. Every business online can benefit from adding one for the reasons described above. It also gives you more freedom to discuss industry-relevant topics that don’t necessarily fit on any of your core website pages. Quality, informational blogs are also prime bait for encouraging users to share your SEO content on their own site or through social media.

However, it’s important to avoid cannibalizing your existing content by producing repeat topics or overusing targeted keywords. You can avoid this by creating and utilizing a company-wide content calendar to plan out your posts ahead of time and avoid any gaps in publishing. Even as your number of website pages grows, you’ll always have an outline available to help inform future keyword research.

Content Marketing vs SEO: It’s No Longer a Competition

Before search algorithms advanced to where they are today, webmasters often focused on content for SEO instead of content marketing for the customer. What resulted was a lot of poorly-written content that existed just so the owner could stuff high volume keywords. Luckily, those days are long behind us.

Instead, content marketing is now a vital component of any SEO strategy worth it’s salt. Businesses can now create more high-quality content that serves the needs of their customers while also helping search engines interpret all of the data that exists on the page. Both must be present, however. Without SEO, your content won’t be focused enough on user needs to be seen. Without content, your SEO is working to deliver nothing of value to the user.

If you’d like to learn more tips on how to create better, SEO-friendly content, you can do so here. For more tips on how to make your overall site SEO-friendly and improve your search rankings, click here. If you lack the ability or team resources to implement your own SEO and content, check out DashClicks expert fulfillment services to help get your website running.

Final note – While SEO and content marketing can produce powerful results when combined effectively, it requires time and commitment. Stick to the best practices, update regularly, and stay the course. Don’t miss out on the powerful benefits of both by disrupting your strategy prematurely.

SEO-friendly content is the number one marketing tactic for driving organic traffic to your website.

The issue that companies face is that creating content and optimizing it for SEO can be a time-consuming venture both in development and payoff. Furthermore, you may not know how to use SEO in a blog effectively.

In this article, we'll explore the meaning of SEO content writing and provide you with 13 tips to help you create SEO-friendly content starting today.

What is SEO Content Writing?

SEO content writing refers to the act of creating content for a page that is effectively optimized to communicate with search engine algorithms. There are many strategies you can implement to optimize your blog content, many of which we will explore further down in this article.

The broad strokes include implementing popular keywords in your main headlines and throughout the body of the text. It also includes properly structuring your URLs, correcting on-page UX errors, and even optimizing images for quality and appropriate loading speeds. The problem for many users comes with the belief that you cannot speak effectively to an algorithm and write for a user simultaneously.

The truth is that Google's algorithm is rapidly improving every day and prefers that you write in a way that's natural and valuable to your actual readers. As long as you put your audience first and do your best to fall in line with best SEO practices, you can expect your content to boost your website ranking. The better your content performs, the more traffic you will receive, which then increases your site's SEO value overall in the long term.

Now you're likely asking, how do I use SEO in my blog? Below, we're going to give you thirteen powerful tips to help you create SEO-friendly content like a marketing professional.

Tips for Creating SEO-Friendly Content

Content is the soul of digital marketing and SEO, and your success lies in creating content that is helpful for the users and optimized for the search engines. To rank your content better in search engines, follow these tips:-

1. Research Keywords and Match Content to Keyword Intent

All blog writing generally begins with the act of researching popular keywords that are relevant to the topics you want to discuss on your website. You want to look for keywords that not only have a high search volume but are directly relevant to your brand and feature an appropriate level of competitive difficulty.

You can search for keywords and generate topics in several ways. The primary way is to utilize popular SEO tools such as SEMRush. This will not only reveal popular keywords, but provide important analytics such as the competitiveness, cost-per-click, and average search volume. You can also generate a list of popular keywords that are similar or related for additional inspiration.

Another popular method is to get more involved with the discussion among your target audience. Many blog writers turn to sites like Quora, which features an enormous list of popular questions and answers regarding any number of topics. For example, if someone asks Quora, How do I create better content for my blog,ā  and that page sees a lot of activity, you can extrapolate that there's a need for content regarding that question. You can also source ideas like this from community groups on social media sites or forums such as Reddit.

We also strongly recommend examining popular blog content that your direct competitors produce. If a particular brand ranks in the top five on Google SERPs, you know that their content is something you want to emulate. Rather than copying content and running into issues with plagiarism, think about how you can uniquely approach similar topics and create content that is better than theirs.

Focus on the Intent Behind Keyword Usage

Something that is often overlooked is the true intent behind using a particular keyword. If you simply choose a popular keyword and start writing, you might miss the mark entirely. Instead, you want to select a topic that matches the reason for the search, so that your content meets the needs of your audience.

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To better understand keyword intent, know that there are three types of keywords. Navigational keywords are terms or phrases that direct users to a specific location. If someone searches “Netflix,” then they are simply trying to go to that brand’s homepage.

Informational keywords help users find content that educates or informs them. These often come in the form of a question that asks what, how, or why. The user wants to educate themselves and isn’t necessarily looking to make a transaction.

Transactional keywords more directly indicate the intent to purchase a product or service. They may search “buy” or use product qualifiers such as “cheap” or “best.”

Understanding this intent will guide you in the process of matching your content to reflect the person’s actual needs. If you select informational keywords, make sure your content provides helpful knowledge and avoids overt advertising. If you want to push sales on a particular product, highlight transactional keywords on that page, instead.

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2. Develop an Outline First Before You Begin Writing

Classrooms around the world should feature this in every Writing 101 course. While it’s technically possible to write a content piece from start to finish, creating an outline or a skeleton of the piece first will allow you to stay much more organized. The outline becomes especially vital for SEO as you can plan out your keyword usage and headlines well in advance.

You’re already aware of the basic article structure through previous reading experience. Every piece will have an introduction to the topic, the body that contains the bulk of the information, and closing thoughts that summarize or link users to further reading.

With SEO content, you’ll want to plan out how to structure those segments to organize information for users, while also catering to SEO best practices. Planning your headlines will also help you to keep your content paragraphs short for easier, more fluid reading. It will also optimize the research process as you’ll know exactly which details you need to focus on as opposed to filtering through which data to keep and which to eliminate.

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3. Make Your Paragraphs Concise

This tip follows suit with the previous tip regarding structure. To get the best SEO benefits, the general rule is that more content is better. However, your average user is generally unwilling to give the attention required to absorb 3,000 words through continuous reading.

Instead, your SEO content writing should read differently than your latest novel draft. You’ll want to segment your ideas into smaller paragraphs that allow for quick skimming, while still allowing users to retain the key points. Even if you need to convey additional data under the same subheading, look for opportunities to break your thoughts into smaller paragraphs.

Creating an outline and keeping your paragraphs short will also assist you in keeping your writing on task. As soon as your language becomes overly drawn out, your reader will also begin to tune out. Understand that you only have a limited time to grab your audience. Otherwise, your bounce rate will increase, which negatively impacts your website SEO over time.

However, some may find it difficult to remain concise and informative. For them, tools like Paragraph Writer can help streamline their writing process, making it easier to create clear and impactful paragraphs while maintaining brevity.

4. Your Content Must be a Minimum of 500 Words but Shoot for More

Content length is a tricky topic when it comes to search engine optimization. For a long time, it was widely accepted that 300-500 words were the expected amount of content required for a webpage. Anything less than this will prompt Google's algorithm to mark your page as having thin or meaningless content. The idea is that fewer words cannot possibly say anything substantial or worthwhile regarding a particular topic.

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While short-form blogging is a thing, it’s incredibly difficult if not possible to do if you’re just starting. Search engine algorithms look through the content and constantly examine it to determine what it’s talking about and whether or not the material is valuable to readers. The less content a page has, the less information the algorithm has to make its determination. We would also argue that it’s seldom possible to address your audience’s needs in 300 words only, either.

For this reason, long-form content inarguably works best when attempting to improve your SEO and search engine rankings. Different sources will argue for different lengths, but we generally recommend aiming for 2-3,000 words of high-quality information. The trick is that this can vary greatly depending on the subject matter at hand.

In other words, a 3,000-word article that’s stretched not to provide better information, but to meet a quota, is not working in the service of your readers. If you’re confident that your content delivers powerful information with fewer words, then feel free to post with confidence. You can analyze the performance and make adjustments later.

5. Always Optimize Your Meta Descriptions

A meta description is a short snippet that appears directly beneath the website and page name listed within search engine results pages. Text will always appear here regardless of whether or not you manually optimize the text or not. However, implementing the best SEO practices here can drastically improve your content’s clickthrough rate.

Here is an example of a strong meta description for a result when using the keywords “SEO Content service”:

There are several things to note here. First, the meta description utilizes the keywords appropriately within the limited number of characters. Google bolds the words and phrases that match your query, making your result stand out better than descriptions that lack them.

Second, the entire meta description fits on screen. The writer or SEO specialist managed to capture the essence of the page’s content without running over the character limit. You want to aim to keep your descriptions between 150-160 characters. Otherwise, it will cut off and feature ellipses at the end.

Third, the actual meta description content attempts to intrigue us and sell us on the click. It understands that when we search for “SEO content service,” we are looking to potentially purchase such a service for ourselves. It uses transactional qualifiers such as “best SEO content” and “quality SEO content.” The prospect of getting the best SEO content service available is appealing and is likely to draw traffic.

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Finally, it includes multiple call-to-actions. It encourages the user to connect and sign up now to benefit from their offerings. All of these factors create the right blend of a clean look, effective keyword highlighting, solid information, and a sense of urgency. This is exactly what you want to achieve when creating a meta description for your blog content.

6. Add Images to Your Blog Content and Optimize Them

Our society feeds on visual media. For this reason, you can drastically improve the performance of your blog content by enhancing the experience with high-quality, relevant imagery.

Specifically, we recommend that brands create and upload their custom images to add a sense of personalization and authenticity to their articles. Not only are unique and personal images more attractive to consumers, but they can also positively impact your SEO as no other blogs will have access to these assets.

Compare this to the use of stock imagery. While having a licensed image is superior to having no images at all, consumers that make the blog rounds will likely see the same types of stock photographs time and again. It has the opposite effect of implementing custom images as it can make your content feel recycled and too similar to competitors.

Your images can include shots of your company, your products, or your services so long as they are relevant to the topic you’re writing about. Custom infographics also perform well and are prime material for social sharing and acquiring new backlinks. Be sure to include some form of branding in any custom images that you own to avoid having your content stolen without receiving any credit.

Remember to Update the Image Alt Text

Regardless of the image you use, be sure to set your alt text before publishing your SEO content. Alternative text is an HTML attribute that prompts descriptive text to appear on the page whenever it is not possible to view the image. You can boost the SEO value of your page by adding this easy-to-implement accessibility feature for your readers.

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If possible, you should claim this opportunity to utilize your primary keyword once more. Because your image immediately relates to the article topic, you should have very little issue achieving this.

7. Integrate Internal Links Throughout the Body

A key component of an effective SEO-friendly content strategy is to utilize internal links throughout the body of your article. This serves three primary purposes that can boost your SEO.

The first is that you enhance the value of the content by providing additional resources for customers to learn about related subjects. For example, an article providing general SEO tips typically won’t provide a deep dive into alternative text. But, the user may want to learn more about the subject, and providing an internal link to another article on your site is the best way to satisfy this need.

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Secondly, by linking to related articles on your site, you’re maximizing the benefits you can obtain from a single visitor. Instead of reading your article and leaving, they’re more likely to click around to new pages. This increases your number of daily page clicks and the average duration of a session. More time spent on your site means more opportunities to turn a casual reader into a repeat visitor.

Finally, utilizing internal linking appropriately assists search algorithms in better understanding the content on your entire website. Not only do search engines look at headlines, keywords, and text, they can understand the relationship two pages have with one another through direct links. The easier it is to understand your website’s content, the more valuable it will be to search engines.

8. Optimize Your URL for SEO

In our continuing efforts to optimize content for search engines, the next item to visit is the page URL. If you do not manually edit your URL, your website will automatically generate one that does little to describe the page to readers.

An example of a poor URL might look something like this:

www.dashclicks.com/884321/show.html

This does not define what type of content you can expect to find on the page. We can see that the pathway is taking us from the home page, to services, and to a specific service page. However, this automated number is created by the website as an identifier, but it doesn’t help readers or your SEO.

Instead, we optimized our page URL to make it much more accessible to readers and search engine algorithms:

www.dashclicks.com/white-label-seo

This optimized URL removes the arbitrary numbers and instead defines the subject of the page. It accomplishes this by using as few keywords as possible. It is not necessary nor is it recommended to include articles such as “the” or “a.” Additionally, when defining the page title, you want to communicate the relationship between words by using the dash symbol as illustrated in the example above. It’s also much easier to remember this URL if you want to navigate there directly.

Finally, though some sites utilize dates in their URL, we recommend against it. The reasoning behind this is that dated content will appear old and irrelevant to users who discover it at a later date. Instead, you want to uphold the value of your content and allow it to be evergreen. For example, if you’re writing an article about SEO tips, the chances are that the information will still be relevant at a later date regardless of the posting date.

9. Optimize the Page for Mobile Viewing

Did you know that 54.8% of web traffic comes primarily from mobile devices? Because of this fact, you need to make mobile optimization of your site a priority if you want your content to perform well.

In addition to this, Google promises to rank mobile-ready websites higher than those that are not. You can review their recommended guidelines for your website here. This is part of an effort to make the internet’s content more accessible to users around the globe regardless of internet connectivity or browsing device.

Regarding mobile optimization, you’ll want to ensure that your entire article is clear and easy to view within most mobile viewports. Most drag-and-drop website editors allow you to customize your mobile page view and preview it before publishing. You may also need to update the mobile version of the page to accommodate for increased loading times caused by images or videos.

You can utilize Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to see how your site fares. It's free to use and will reveal a list of errors that are present on your site. It also will recommend optimizations to improve mobile performance. You can also look into creating AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) versions of your existing website pages.

10. Classify Your Articles Using Schema Markup

Schema markup (commonly referred to as structured data) is an HTML language that classifies and categorizes elements on a webpage. It’s also referred to as the language of search engines and is a primary way to help algorithms better understand the content on your website.

Without schema markup, search engine algorithms are left to interpret the content itself without any guidance. Even as Google’s algorithm rapidly improves, it still can misunderstand your content and present it to the wrong audiences. This is the opposite of what you want to happen and it can negatively impact your search engine optimization efforts.

For SEO blog content, you’ll want to mark each new page as an article. There are more elements of a page you can markup, and you can utilize Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to simplify the process. Simply enter your URL, select the page type, and start tagging the attributes that are relevant to your data type.

It will then automatically create the HTML markup code for you to add to the web page’s existing code.

11. Integrate Social Sharing Links on Every Post

You can boost the amount of traffic visiting your blog by making it effortless to share your content. We recommend embedding social sharing links to as many social media platforms as possible. More pathways to your website not only makes your SEO content more accessible, but your enhanced backlink profile will improve your overall SEO.

Backlinks are direct links to your domain from an external source. When you receive a backlink from a trusted domain with high SEO value, some of that confidence gets shared with your website in the eyes of search algorithms. To improve your SEO, you want to build a backlink profile to be reckoned with, and you can boost your efforts by making your content easily shareable across social media.

12. Update Your Blog Consistently

SEO content marketing is not something you can pick up and run with whenever you’re up to it. It requires your team to consistently create new, exciting content on a predictable schedule. If you allow your blog and website to grow stagnant, search algorithms will begin to view your content as outdated and less valuable due to low activity.

You can ensure that your blog continuously maintains its SEO value by posting new content and updating existing content whenever applicable. When updating content, focus on identifying vague information and making it clear and engaging for your audience. A paraphrasing tool can help with this process. Using an AI-powered paraphraser, you can enhance your text by replacing words with suitable synonyms and restructuring sentences. This not only brings clarity but also gives your content a fresh, polished look. To get the most benefits possible, you’ll want to strive for 4-5 new posts per week. However, it’s understandable that not every business has the resources to accomplish this. It’s better to emphasize quality over quantity and ensure that you deliver valuable content on a schedule that readers can count on.

Finally, keep track of the content you post and be mindful of how information can change. If an article you wrote on SEO previously performed well, but now contains outdated data, it can begin to negatively impact your website's SEO. Instead of creating a brand-new article from scratch, you can modify the article's content to feature discoveries and updates. Be sure to tag older article updates as Newā  or Updateā  for better discoverability.

13. Use Machine Learning Tools to Improve Content quality

Our final tip for producing SEO-friendly content is to lean heavily on machine learning and analytical tools to create and improve your content. There are a variety of free and paid tools you can use to find keywords, select topics, write content drafts, correct content errors, and much more.

You should also look to Google Analytics to keep track of how your content performs with audiences. This platform allows you to create custom goals to help you drive conversions that are most relevant to your immediate business needs. You can also A/B test your content to try out new headlines, swap images, or view how different writing styles play with readers. You’ll be able to track your results in real-time and use the data to improve your content creation process.

For assistance in creating content – Articoolo

To quickly correct content errors – Grammarly

To create custom images or infographics – Canva

Finally, you can easily acquire SEO-friendly content for your website by purchasing a content marketing fulfillment service through DashClicks. Our team of SEO specialists and content writers can deliver ready-to-go content on your schedule and handle the posting on your behalf.

Conclusion

Creating SEO-friendly content is not necessarily difficult in technique, but requires time and dedication to perform properly. Taking your foot off the pedal even for a short duration can negatively impact your ROI from content marketing. This is the reason why more brands are planning to invest more resources toward SEO and content marketing in 2022 and beyond.

However, utilizing these tips to guide you in creating SEO-friendly content will prove a worthwhile venture. It is the best way to generate organic traffic and acquire new sales for the lowest cost possible. If you invest in SEO-friendly content for the long-term, your web traffic will improve and you’ll see more inbound sales than ever before.

Google heavily considers the overall user experience for your website ranking. You can produce the best content, utilize an excellent inbound marketing strategy, but it will mean very little if the act of using your site is an absolute nightmare.

The information your website contains only matters if your average user can benefit from it in a reasonable, efficient manner. For that reason, we're here to show you how to improve SEO with user experience factors in mind.

What is User Experience Design?

User experience design determines the type of encounter a person will have when interacting with a website or piece of software.

The goal of all UX design is to create your software or a website in a way that makes that experience simple, intuitive, and enjoyable for the user. It should be simple to navigate, easy to access key information, and be pleasant for the user to interact with and look upon.

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How Does the User Experience and SEO Interact?

To answer this question, we first must understand that SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving a website's content and appearance to increase its visibility within search engine results pages (SERPs).

While Google's search algorithm is not fully understood by the public, we do know that it uses hundreds of ranking factors when determining the overall quality of a site's SEO. Among these are positive user signals that it uses to determine whether or not users are satisfied and benefit from the site's user experience.

If a website does not feature a quality user experience, then the likelihood of that user using or staying on the site drops dramatically. Google's algorithm notices these trends, understands that the UX is poor, and then reflects this by significantly lowering the site's search ranking. If the site is not proving to be useful to users, there's no reason for Google to continue suggesting it to users over superior websites.

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With this in mind, let's explore the positive user signals that Google looks for when determining the quality of a site's UX. Then, we'll walk you through the UX SEO best practices and show you how to improve website UX like a professional.

Positive User Signals for a Healthy UX

If you want to improve your site's UX in the eyes of your audience, you need to understand which metrics are valuable for feedback and analysis. When designing and testing new layouts or website content, keep an eye on these user signals to determine if your UX trends are n a positive or negative direction.

1. Repeat Traffic

New visitors are important for growth, but repeat traffic is a strong indicator that your website offers something worth revisiting. If your repeat traffic is low, consider that the content on your website might be interesting or helpful to your audience. There may be aspects of your UX that make browsing the information on your website less than enjoyable.

2. Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate refers to how often a new visitor quickly exits your domain. Users generally “bounce” away for the following reasons:

• The website does not offer information that is relevant to the search query
• The content is uninteresting or unhelpful
• It’s too difficult to find any relevant information
• The website design is unappealing
• It’s difficult to navigate the website
• The site contains intrusive or invasive advertisements

Tracking this metric can go hand-in-hand with your repeat traffic. If your repeat traffic is low and your bounce rate is high, then it's time to investigate and remedy the errors that are present in your site's UX.

3. Organic CTR

Organic CTR, or organic clickthrough rate refers to the rate at which users access your domain through an organic search. This is as opposed to discovering your website by clicking on paid advertisements.

A high organic CTR can be an indicator that your site provides a pleasant UX and is worthy of a higher search ranking. Sites with strong organic CTR tend to appear on the first page of Google search results.

4. Healthy Backlinks Profile

A backlink refers to any link that exists on an external domain and directs the user to your website. Acquiring backlinks is an important part of building your SEO, but only if those backlinks come from high-quality, trustworthy domains.

Think of using backlinks as identifying which websites you would like to be in your neighborhood. If the sites backlinking to yours are from a trusted neighborhood, then Google will have greater confidence that your site offers a high-quality experience. Conversely, if your backlinks are from low-quality or toxicā  domains, it can negatively impact your SEO.

How to Improve Website UX and SEO?

Now that you understand UX and the ranking signals, let's dive into the strategies you can implement to start improving your user experience today.

1. Keep Your Site Navigation Simple and Convenient

Improving your user experience should often prove intuitive. As someone who browses the internet yourself, you already know the features that you enjoy on your favorite websites. Among these is a simple and elegant approach to site navigation.

Regardless of how many web pages your website contains, users should be able to easily keep track of the navigation. At any point, it should be convenient for a user to quickly trace their steps back to a page that contains the information that's most relevant to them. There are a few key ways to improve this process.

First, the header of your website should contain a navigational map that points users to your primary pages. Notice the navigation menu at the top of our website as an example:-

This menu clearly segments all of the pages on our website by using the most relevant category names. When you hover over a particular area, you can then preview the subcategories that apply to that main category only. Additionally, every category contains a brief description to help direct you to your ideal location. However, there are additional ways you can help improve your navigation.

If you click on our brand logo, you will always navigate back to the home page. This is a common tactic for every webmaster to help users quickly get back to their initial starting point. In addition to this, we segment two call-to-actions that are relevant to new and returning visitors. Login allows our users to quickly access their accounts. The “Try Now” provides a convenient way for new users to test out our platform and learn more.

Finally, the navigation menu is always present on top of the page regardless of where you scroll. This provides a better user experience by ensuring that users do not get lost and the next page is always within reach.

Improving Your Website Content

2. Create Content That Serves Users, Not Search Engines

In previous times, it was the strategy of SEO specialists and content writers to create content that heavily features target keywords. While using keywords is by no means an issue, the resulting content was often stilted and existed to help boost search rankings. With improvements in technology, particularly Natural Language Processing, this is no longer the case.

Google realizes that the way we previously tried speaking to machines is not entirely compatible with human ideas or conversation. For this reason, their algorithm is now able to better understand the true intention behind a search query and provide real answers as results, not just content that contains the keyword.

For this reason, you are highly encouraged to create content that effectively answers the questions and concerns of your target audience. Your words should reflect the way you would speak to your customers, both in syntax and tone. Researching and utilizing keywords is still the best way to connect your content with audiences, but they should be used in a way that is natural and services the user first.

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Similarly, you should not necessarily mandate a content maximum length for your web pages. While it is true that longer articles perform better, this is because those longer content pieces contain greater information that goes further in-depth than your typical blog post. Writing 3,000 words is not an excuse to stuff keywords as much as possible.

3. Clearly Outline Your Content with Well-Defined Headlines

A healthy way to boost your SEO and improve your UX is to create a clear outline of the page's content. Unless a person is sitting down to read a novel, they're unlikely to dedicate their full attention to reading a high volume of content. They're even less likely to do so if they cannot be sure what the content discusses.

For this reason, you should utilize the header attribute when defining what your content discusses for new visitors. If you check out the most popular, top-ranking search results, you'll find that virtually every page features this design.

Content creators should utilize the primary or H1 header for titles. Not only does it explain the content in large text to users, but it's also the first thing search engine crawlers see when exploring new pages. Secondary and tertiary topics should feature H2 and H3 tags respectively to help segment new ideas, but illustrate the lesser importance compared to the H1.

Users will be able to quickly comb through a page of content and quickly identify the information that's most interesting to them by the headline. Empowering your users this way is exactly what you want to achieve to provide a better user experience for SEO.

4. Summarize Key Data Points

Even if the content length is not an issue for some visitors, they may face issues with information retention. For this reason, you can further improve the UX and enhance your content by effectively summarizing key data points.

Authors often do this by distilling their ideas into bulleted or numbered lists for users to review. You can either do this at the end of a dense or lengthy section or feature it within your conclusions at the end of the article. Again, improving your user experience is about finding ways to make your content as user-friendly and accessible as possible.

5. Empower Your Content with Visual Media

Not every user absorbs information the same way, and your website should attempt to address this if you want to improve your UX. We highly recommend improving the content on your various web pages by implementing visual media such as images, GIFs, or videos when applicable.

These supplemental forms of information provide alternative ways for users to quickly grab onto and absorb information about your brand. If a person is unwilling or unable to read through a heavy amount of text, they may be able to grab the bullet points from an effective infographic or a catchy video.

Providing unique ways for your users to interact with and engage with your website will help to drive all of the positive user signals discussed above. Because you are providing a better user experience to a wider variety of visitors, your SEO will improve and so will your search engine rankings.

Improving the Web Page Experience

6. Optimize Your Load Times ASAP

The speed at which a webpage loads is critical to providing a quality user experience. Pingdom suggests that the average page loading time is roughly 3.21 seconds. Furthermore, pages that take longer than this load see a dramatic increase in their bounce rate. In the same study, a page taking merely five seconds to load sees an average bounce rate of approximately 38%.

What this tells us is that users highly value their time and equate poor load times to a poor user experience. Your website might feature the best design and the greatest content the world has ever seen, but it matters little if it takes too long to deliver. That sharp increase in your bounce rate will impair your SEO and tell search engines to stop providing your site as a result to its users.

You can utilize Google's PageSpeed Insights tool to gain critical feedback on how your website performs. It will also include recommendations for optimizations based on the severity of the issue.

For broad strokes as to what you can do to improve your loading times, follow these tips:

• Use lightweight images and optimize them for faster loading
• Host any video content on an external server
• Minify your website’s code to improve request times
• Eliminate dead or outdated code
• Use simple, lightweight page templates
• Enable browser caching to assist returning visitors

You can learn more about how to improve your website speed by checking out our in-depth article on the subject here.

7. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Using the desktop PC as a primary browsing device is a relic of the past. While they still have their uses and are critical for work environments, casual audiences are turning to their mobile phones for their internet experiences. It's estimated by studies that as much as 55% of all worldwide web traffic occurs through mobile devices.

Why does this matter when it comes to your user experience?

The technological limitations of a mobile device will greatly impact both the performance and appearance of your web pages. First, the viewport of a mobile device drastically reduces the amount of content that can effectively appear on a page. If you do not design your website with this in mind, you're alienating more than half of your potential audience.

You can account for this segment of your audience in one of two ways. The first is to keep your webpage design simple and utilize a layout that allows for quality viewing on both desktop and mobile. However, this can often handcuff you regarding your options when you want to take advantage of a more powerful device.

The second option is to design a mobile version of your site that's more lightweight. You can utilize AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to ensure that these versions of your web pages can benefit from accelerated mobile load times. You'll want to avoid incorporating large files on the page and defer the loading of any content that does not need to be in the immediate view of the user.

To ensure mobile responsiveness:

• Customize the page layout for smaller viewport
• Resize important page elements such as buttons and CTAs
• Use a font size that is easily readable, but doesn’t overwhelm the page
• Use themes designed to be mobile-ready
• Use a lightweight CSS
• Do not implement intrusive pop-ups

8. Utilize 301 Redirects

A 301 redirect helps your website by directing users that are trying to access non-existent pages to the new, updated page. Redirects are a natural part of the internet and Google will not penalize you for broken links pointing to your site from external domains. It is, however, your responsibility to improve your UX by getting traffic to the correct destination.

You can implement both permanent redirects and temporary redirects depending on your business needs. A redirect does add a minuscule amount of time to the loading process, but it is far better to ensure that a potential lead can access your brand’s content reliably. Failure to utilize redirects won’t harm you, but all of that potential traffic goes to waste and does not benefit you as a positive user signal.

Google provides help with SEO documentation on how to implement the various types of redirects here.

9. Make Your 404 Error Pages Informative

A 404 error is another type of common page error that every user encounters online. A 404 occurs when a web browser is unsuccessful in obtaining website data from a server request. This can occur for several reasons including:

• The page is down for maintenance
• The page no longer exists
• You changed the page URL
• User error in entering the correct URL

A default 404 page provides no details and will usually suggest reloading the browser. The problem is, a 404 usually means that the page doesn't exist and the browser will simply yield a 404 in perpetuity. Instead, you can create custom 404 pages and utilize them to inform your audience and improve your site's user experience.

Creating a custom 404 page is a simple process and involves creating a new, simplistic page that's excluded from Google search results. This will allow you to have full control over the design including images, appearance, and further navigation options. Most importantly, it can educate the user on why the 404 occurred. It can then provide similar benefits to 301 redirects by getting users to a more ideal location.

When designing a custom 404 page, keep it simple. Only advise the user on what they need to know including why the error occurred and where they can go to access the information they want.

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A popular CMS such as WordPress will provide you with plugins that can simplify the process of using a custom 404 redirect with no coding expertise required. For other custom websites, you’ll need to get a bit more involved:

1. After creating your 404 page, save it as an HTML file. Remember to name the file something that you and your team can easily remember for future access.
2. Locate your website’s root directory and upload the HTML file.
3. Next, locate the website’s .htaccess file. This is a file that Apache web servers use to help in customizing a site’s directory. Open the file. (Note: If your directory lacks this file, you can create a basic one using a text editor on your PC. Remember to name it “.htaccess”.
4. Within the file, enter “ErrorDocument 404 / “YourFileNameHere”. “YourFileNameHere” will contain the actual name of your HTML file. Save your changes. (If you created a new .htaccess file, you will need to also upload this to the root directory).

As with any website design changes, test that your new 404 page works correctly before republishing your website.

User Experience and SEO - Improve Both to Improve Your Rankings!

Not only does Google look for the best information possible, but it also seeks to deliver that information reliably and effectively to its users. When looking to improve your SEO and search rankings, you need to ensure that you provide a user experience that satisfies the visitor's needs and is worthy of Google's recommendation.

Consumers are savvy and simply want to receive direct answers to their questions effectively. A simple website that provides concise content, a clean layout, and lightning-fast load speeds are certain to gain more traction online than a cumbersome, bloated mess. A site that earns organic clicks, shares, and repeat traffic is the type of site that conquers search engine results pages.

You can't have a site with strong SEO without providing a top-tier user experience. Utilizing these tips will help to drive the positive user signals that Google looks for including low bounce rate, high CTR, repeat traffic, backlinks, and higher session duration. You earn these by catering to users first so that search engines can perform their job more effectively.

Content marketing is the indisputable king of driving organic and paid sales. If you don't emphasize content, you're doomed to failure.

SEO-driven content marketing is the key to helping Google recognize you and improving your search rankings. SEO acts as the blueprint to determine how we should create our content so that search engines can deliver the message to the right audience. The more efficient we are with targeting users, the more likely we are to improve our sales.

In this article, we're going to dive into the types of content marketing that exist along with their unique purposes for existing. Then, we'll deliver an SEO content marketing strategy to drive leads and sales to your business like never before.

What Are the Types of SEO Content Marketing?

When we discuss content marketing and sales, we can be speaking about several different types of content marketing that are deployed for different purposes. Examples of these are as follows:

1. Blog Content

Blogs provide many open-ended opportunities for content creation. These are articles that you will use to drive organic traffic to your site by creating topics based on popular keywords or focusing on trending news. Blogs are meant to provide informational content. However, they can naturally present opportunities to highlight your products and services and explain how they fit in with the topic of the article.

2. Social Media Content

Social media is also a multipurpose content creation tool that allows for shorter, less informal conversations with your audience. You can highlight products or promotions, provide quick takes on trending topics, promote blog content, or tell stories with images or videos. With this, you'll want to take advantage of platform-specific content creation tools to fit in better with your target audience.

3. PPC Ads and Landing Pages

This type of content is meant to highly target your audience to push conversions. We typically use these marketing tools to gather and segment leads or to drive sales on a specific item or promotion. The content is still key here as it educates customers, alleviates pressing concerns, and creates a sense of FOMO that helps capture important marketing data.

4. Videos

Videos can include content from all of the above but differ greatly in how it is presented and received. A Social Media Week study suggests that 78% of people watch videos every week and 55% watch them every day. Seeing and hearing information is much more dynamic, and videos allow audiences to associate your material with a friendly face. You can use videos for social proof, to provide visual education, or to create short snippets that are primed for widespread sharing and viewing.

5. Podcasts

Podcasts are still young as a medium but are growing at a rapid pace. Insider Intelligence claims that by the end of 2021, monthly US podcast listeners will reach 117.8 million. This form of talk radio allows brands to discuss long-form content in a way that allows listeners to feel like they are a part of the conversation. It's also widely accessible as users can consume the content from their mobile devices wherever they are at any time.

The SEO-Driven Content Marketing Strategy to Drive Leads and Sales

With all the types of content marketing and their purposes fresh in your mind, let's dive into our SEO marketing strategy example. This step-by-step process will help you establish your goals, create engaging topics, and track your key performance indicators for marketing success.

1. Realize Your Brand's Ideal Customer

A common problem, especially for newer companies, is that they make the mistake of attempting to appeal to the largest audience possible. After all, it makes sense that more clicks would lead to more sales. However, what happens is that your content tends to be incredibly vague, neutral in personality, and doesn't offer strong appeal to anyone. You're left with a lukewarm audience and will look for alternative brands that manage to light their fire.

Instead, you need to think about the particular type of customer that's most likely to benefit greatly from your offerings. You will think about why this person needs your product, the type of problems they face, the questions they may have, and the concerns that will need alleviating. By tapping into this buyer persona and walking a mile in their shoes, you're better prepared to create content that would appeal specifically to them.

Creating relevant and engaging content that feels highly personalized is the true key to building visitor retention. When your content feels personal to them and empowers them to solve a particular issue, it establishes trust and rapport between them and your brand. This type of confidence converts one-time visitors into repeat visitors and window-shopping leads into customers.

2. Determine Your Immediate Goals and Select Your KPIs

It's always an excellent business strategy to clearly define your goals and expectations for any marketing campaign you pursue. SEO content marketing can serve a variety of purposes and you want to ensure that yours is working properly toward your goals.

While our ultimate goal is to generate more sales with our content, it may not be the immediate goal we need to achieve. For example, a newer brand with little online presence will greatly benefit from using content to build brand awareness. While it's possible to gain some sales from cold customers, it's not a reliable or healthy way to do business in the long term. Instead, you'll want to set expectations that your content will serve to increase traffic and improve awareness for the first few months.

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On the other hand, your goals may be defined by setting micro-conversions along your organic traffic pipeline. Some may utilize a series of blog posts to push attention to specific product pages and aim to see an increase in clicks from the blog to that page. If our content strategy helps us achieve this goal, we then know we are one step closer to converting an everyday reader into a customer.

Our goals serve to define how we want to structure our content and the types of things we need to emphasize within it. Once you establish your immediate goals, you'll want to select the key performance indicators that are most important to you. If you primarily want to improve your readership, you'll want to focus on key performance indicators such as website traffic, page clicks, average session duration, or subscriber count.

Analytics is the key to getting the most out of any type of digital marketing strategy. But, it's easy to get lost in all the data if you don't have a plan. Make defining your goals and KPIs an early part of your SEO content marketing strategy to avoid future analysis issues.

3. Dig Deep for Your Topic and Keyword Research

You defined your perfect customer, clearly outlined your business goals, and determined the scale you will use to gauge your performance. Now, it’s time to determine what you need to write about and how to compose it. This is where the “SEO” part of “SEO Content Marketing” comes into play.

4. Researching Keywords

Your keyword research will lay the foundation for the topics you will select. Not only will keyword research reveal the volume of search traffic that each receives, but the nature of the keyword itself can also expose the user's intent. Popular SEO tools such as SEMRush and Moz Keyword Explorer can not only help you analyze keywords relevant to your industry but can also suggest topics based on the terms that you select.

However, don't just pick high-volume keywords and run. It's essential to know that three primary keyword types describe user intent: navigational, informational, and transactional.

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Navigational keywords are words or phrases that users enter to navigate to a specific destination on the web. Examples of these are “DashClicks” or “Amazon.”

Informational keywords express the user’s desire to learn about a particular subject. These generally come in the form of questions with words such as “how,” “what,” or “why.”

Finally, transactional keywords express an intent to buy a product. These might include words or phrases such as “where to buy,” “cheapest” as in cheapest product, or “best” as in best product.

Understanding the intention behind using a keyword will better help you determine two things: the type of content you should create with the keyword and whether or not the keyword can help you find the right audience to meet your goals. Furthermore, because we identified our ideal buyer persona first, we understand which types of keywords will best help us serve our audience to drive leads and sales.

5. Generating Engaging Topics

While researching keywords is the ideal place to start, there are also other ways to generate high-quality topics. Our first recommendation is to get involved and active on forums and Q&A websites. Sites such as Quora can help you target popular informational keywords as users already pose their thoughts in the form of questions. Finding questions with a high amount of traffic can clue you in on the fact that people need expert help with the subject.

Industry-relevant forums or subreddits are also an excellent way to keep an eye on what your audience is discussing on the internet. It’s ideal for you to stay active and look for opportunities to help your audience and correct misinformation. Furthermore, you can build awareness of your content by actually posting responses and sharing a link to your content directly within the forum. Not only does it help you to send that traffic to your site, but it can build rapport and trust by meeting users on their level.

Google Trends can also be a handy tool for keeping an eye on the most widely searched keywords in a particular geographic region. You simply enter a keyword and allow the tool to generate data such as interest over time. However, you want to focus on the “Related Topics” and “Related Queries” at the bottom of the page. In our example search for “Content Marketing,” we see possible bases for topics such as “content marketing startups” and “content marketing analytics.”

6. Identify What Works for Competitors

Our final tip for content generation strategies is to closely examine competitors that currently implement a great content strategy. Rather than worrying about who's ahead in the content game, think of this as an advantage that can tell you what performs well with the audience you also want to target.

Pay attention to the type of content they create, the typical article length, and their headline structure. Also, look into where and how often they implement their target keywords. If you find that your content creation efforts are failing to generate traffic, then look at what works and stop trying to reinvent the wheel. In many cases, creating better content than your competitor is simply attacking the same topics they doing it in an improved manner that's unique to your brand.

7. Implement a Company-Wide Content Calendar

If you want your content to consistently generate leads and sales, you need to implement a content calendar as soon as possible.

This serves a variety of purposes, but the primary benefit is that your team will always have a visual of all of your scheduled content months ahead of time. This helps your team to plan their efforts accordingly to avoid missing deadlines or to avoid gaps in posting. Being consistent is essential for every type of content creator. This study from Marcom suggests that a fragmented content schedule can lower revenue by as much as 11%.

An easily accessible content calendar also helps drive creativity and coordination between otherwise separate teams. While content marketing is important, it's one piece to your overall marketing puzzle. You ultimately want all of your marketing materials for your brand to synergize and support one another. Allowing your employees to keep track of planned content simplifies this process.

Finally, planning a calendar will allow you to coordinate key team members for specific types of content throughout the year. When and how you publish content can be just as important as what it is. Rather than expecting team members to drop tasks and prioritize sudden ideas, you can ensure optimal efficiency by planning as much as you can ahead. Efficiency also allows you to generate high-quality content at a higher output.

8. Build Content with SEO Best Practices in Mind

SEO and content are two vital parts of the overall puzzle. Prioritizing one and leaving the other as an afterthought will not get you the results you are looking for. Instead of writing and posting just any idea, you want to build your content from the ground up with best SEO practices first. This will ensure that your content reads as natural and clean without awkward keyword phrases or headlines that plague so much of the internet's content.

9. Create a Content Style Guide

You can ensure that all of your content is built for SEO by creating a style guide that all of your content writers must use. This will dictate the standardized writing style you want to use, the tone of voice you want to express, and address other issues such as crediting sources or using profanity. This will promote uniformity in your brand's content regardless of who is writing.

For each content piece, we recommend creating guidelines before you begin. This SEO skeleton will dictate important parts of the content such as headlines, where and how often to implement keywords, and present opportunities for internal linking. The more specific these guidelines are the better as it creates a clearly defined image of the product, which leads to more efficient work.

10. Content Length

The content length may vary depending on the nature of the subject and where you are posting it. For blog content, more is generally better for SEO and you should aim for 2-3,000 words. You can produce quality content with less, but fewer words present fewer opportunities for search engines to pick up keywords.

Rather than necessarily worrying about the length, focus instead on whether or not the content fully meets every possible user need or expectation. A bulk of internet content tends to be thin or surface level, and, therefore, gets very little traction online. Give yourself enough time to create quality and you'll find that even simple topics can raise many questions and concerns that your readers will want to be answered. How well you answer those concerns will directly impact how likely they are to convert.

11. Break It Up with Subheaders

Modern writers and SEOs typically outline all content with keyword-rich headlines. These primary headlines, known as H1s, not only help your readers but also help search engines to understand what the content is trying to express.

There are additional subheaders (H2-H4) that can further segment portions of your content for easier reading. The reality is that most readers typically will not read an entire long-form article in one sitting. If you present a wall of text with no images or headers to provide a pause, you're likely to see your bounce rate increase.

Instead, you can help readers get the most out of your article by clearly defining each section with the appropriate subheader. This way, readers are free to skim through and focus on the sections that are most interesting to them. The subheader also provides a necessary break to absorb what you've already read and an easy way to remember where you left off for continued reading.

12. Internal Linking

Link building is a powerful SEO strategy that can improve your website metrics and SEO across the board. When writing content, be mindful of how the topic can relate to other content on your website. For example, in an introductory article about SEO, you won't have time or room to get too in-depth on backlink strategies. However, you can include an internal link naturally when broaching the subject to another blog post that discusses the subject in greater detail.

The benefit of this is that it ensures your content meets the needs of every type of reader. The internal link is not disruptive or intrusive and simply allows the user to learn more if they desire. When the user moves from one piece of content to the next, it increases the average duration of that session. The longer time a user spends on your website, the more time you have to convince the lead to become a customer.

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You're not limited to internally linking from blog to blog. If the opportunity presents itself naturally, you can clue customers into the products or services you offer. However, ensure that you only do this in a non-disruptive way so that it does not betray the original purpose of the article. Otherwise, Google will recognize this and penalize your site for misleading content.

13. Properly Credit External Sources

Don't be afraid to utilize widely accepted information from other sources within your content. However, you must always credit the source, typically by linking to the site where you obtained the information. Not only will this help you to avoid plagiarization, but it shows the reader that your brand is trustworthy and willing to give credit where credit is due.

The external source will generally be happy to let you use their data as they get a backlink in return. Ideally, you'll also want to create content that's worthy of quoting and linking back to other sources online. Those backlinks to your site create new access points for audiences to discover your brand. It's another way of demonstrating how content creation can be worthwhile and drive the number of potential leads and sales you can obtain organically.

14. Promote Your Content Like You Want Leads and Sales

One of the worst things you can do is put a strong effort into a content piece only to post it and never look at it again. While you will get some clicks from organic search, it's a waste to let your content stagnate when you can use other platforms and strategies to promote it.

A popular method of getting more eyes on your content is by integrating an email list for your website. Those who are interested in the latest updates and offers from your brand can simply enter their email. With this address in hand, you can send regular notifications to your subscribers about new content that might help them or be of interest. You can increase the effectiveness of this strategy by further segmenting your audience by interest, age, and demographics.

Social media is also prime real estate for sharing all of your content. This is another way that the content calendar we explored above can prove vital. Not only can your social media team curate unique types of content based on the content you create elsewhere, but they can also plan ahead to fill content gaps by promoting new blog posts or news blasts that you publish on your website.

Finally, paid ads can be an effective way to promote important website content. While PPC ads are commonly used for things like sales funnels, they can also be a low-cost way to gain additional impressions and build brand awareness with new audiences. While paid ads will take from your marketing budget upfront, the idea is that you will attract new users that will visit your website organically moving forward.

15. If It's Not Performing, Analyze and Refine

With how in-depth and precise marketing analytics can be in 2021, there's very little reason why you should settle for poor-performing content. This step calls back to earlier in the article when we expressed the importance of having clearly-defined goals and key performance indicators. If your SEO content marketing strategy is proving effective, you should see these metrics gradually improve with time.

If months go by and you are not seeing improvements to website traffic or retention, the error most assuredly lies within the content. You can approximate the exact issues with your strategy by implementing A/B tests or utilizing heatmaps within Google Analytics. If you notice that users are spending time at the start of the page and bouncing away in a similar area, you can start experimenting with content changes. When tests reveal which performs better, you'll gain valuable insights into how you need to formulate future content.

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When it comes to generating sales from your new leads, we also recommend setting up micro-conversions that are specific to your organic traffic pipeline. The buyer journey does not go from a blog post to checkout but demonstrates several steps in between. You may want to set smaller tracked goals like page-to-page clicks, adding items to the cart, entering payment, and completing checkout. The goals with the lowest conversion rates will reveal the aspects of your content that require additional work.

To summarize, you’ll generally want to keep a close eye on these KPIs:

• Organic web traffic
• Email list signups
• Impressions on social media
• Average session duration
• Bounce rate
• Goal conversion rates (especially for custom goals)
• Overall search ranking
• Newly acquired backlinks from high-quality sites

Conclusion

SEO content marketing is a long-term strategy that is proven to boost lead growth for small businesses over time. While your initial growth may be small, remember that the cost of a comprehensive content marketing strategy is very little when compared to paid alternatives. SERPWatch tells us that content creation costs 62% less and happens to generate 3x as many leads as outbound marketing.

To summarize, you can drive leads and sales by doing content marketing the right way. You should spare no effort when performing topic and keyword research. Always look to compare to competitor strategies that are regularly taking up the top slots on search engine results pages. Look to the content they create as a template and aim to do it better. Analyze, test, and refine, and your KPIs will improve with a commitment to consistency.

Increasing your organic traffic is the most cost-effective way to improve your brand reputation and drive your conversion rates. However, you won’t be able to compete with the top-ranking websites on Google without a comprehensive SEO strategy that can connect you with interested audiences.

The good news is that even small, local businesses can improve their organic clicks by consistently following several key steps. Below, we’ll explore how you can start building a successful organic traffic pipeline in five steps that can improve your ROI for years to come.

What are the Advantages of Getting Organic Traffic?

Every business benefits from organic traffic as it is the best way to drastically increase your ROI. Users can discover your website, gather information, and purchase products or services without ever clicking on a paid advertisement or promotion. In other words, these are sales that come to you at a minimal cost-per-click.

Furthermore, your ability to qualify your customers will drastically improve as your organic traffic pipeline improves with time. All of your traffic accesses your website with the use of keywords. When you design content to target certain keywords, you will also be able to understand the true intent behind using those keywords.

If someone uses informational keywords, you understand that they are very early in the sales pipeline and need to be nurtured before attempting to close a sale. Likewise, users searching for transactional keywords are already primed to buy. This natural insight into your audience will allow you to better refine your pipeline and get better results out of the traffic your receive.

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Finally, a strong organic traffic strategy can potentially drive competing websites out of the equation. As you consistently serve your audience’s needs, you’ll gain even more traffic, drive conversions, and earn customer loyalty. All of this is a formula to drive your website to the top of search rankings, making you the prime choice over the competitor websites ranked beneath you.

If you want these benefits for your brand, continue reading to learn our five steps for building a successful organic traffic pipeline.

1. Spy on Your Competitor’s Strategy

It’s not devious to spy on a competitor’s strategy, it’s simply smart business. If another business in your industry has cracked the code on how to earn one of the top spots on search engine results pages, you need to pay close attention to what they’re doing.

Google does not favor websites by happenstance. Every result on the first page is utilizing a comprehensive and effective SEO strategy that is consistently driving organic traffic to their domain. Beyond the volume of daily traffic, Google is also closely examining the quality of content to retrieve the best matching answer to a user’s search query.

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While we’ve made very obvious efforts to illustrate the power of content and SEO in our past articles, it bears reiterating here. Your competitors attract more organic traffic than you because their content, both on their main pages and their blog, contains elements that are clearly working with your shared audience. If you’ve been implementing a content strategy for an ample of time with no real results, you’ll want to discern what is different or unique about the content your competitor creates.

Websites that receive high amounts of organic traffic typically can target an audience’s most pressing questions or concerns. In addition to observing the type of content and the quality, consider how they choose to implement their target keywords throughout the article. By taking note of what is indisputably working, you can plan to make changes when it comes to your own content creation methods.

However, you don’t simply want to imitate what your competitor creates verbatim. Doing so is what is known as content scraping, which means that it’s primarily derivative of other content on the web that’s of higher value and quality. Instead, you’ll want to use your knowledge of your customer base and the industry to determine the potential flaws in their content strategy that you can exploit. In other words, what can you help your audience with or answer in a better way than the competitor has on their website?

You never want to remain static when it comes to content creation. Constantly analyzing your content performance with Google Analytics can alert you to when articles or posts simply aren’t performing. If your article is based on a topic that’s commonly written about, observe how other content is unique and why it is outperforming yours. Latch on to the tactics that appeal to your niche and then use them in a way that highlights your unique perspective and insight into your industry.

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2. Attack User Questions with Your Content

Using user questions as a basis for your content serves a very specific purpose in that it has a much stronger opportunity to match user intent. If a person asks Google, “how can I acquire more backlinks?”, then you can precisely curate your target to aid that user in their very specific request.

Compare this to a general search such as “SEO tips”, which leaves it very open-ended as to what you could potentially write about. While writing an article on meta descriptions technically qualifies as an SEO tip, it doesn’t help the user in the example above and therefore won’t earn you the click as it doesn’t match the user’s true intent behind their search.

Basing your articles off of popular user questions not only helps you to better serve your audience, but they often boast much higher conversion rates. This is because the long-tail keyword typically demonstrates that the customer is further along in their buyer journey and showing interest in making a purchase. Compare this to our example “SEO tips” keyword that is more about general information in nature.

Be aware that when you research your long-tail keywords, you’ll likely see a much lower search volume than those shorter, informational keywords. However, don’t make the common mistake and ignore this step in your organic traffic pipeline strategy. Lower competition provides an opportunity to exploit this niche. Because you now have the knowledge to match your content to this strong buyer intent, the quality of your organic traffic will be substantially higher even if the overall volume is initially lower.

Where to Find Popular User Questions?

If you’re unsure of where to start, you won’t have to look far to get questions to utilize as topics. You can start by entering industry-relevant keywords into a Google search and looking at what appears in the “People Also Ask” section of most search engine results pages. There are also sites like Quora that exist to provide answers to popular user questions regarding any topic.

You can also reverse engineer topics from popular keywords that might not take the form of a question. For example, if users are searching for information about a specific GPU error, you can infer that they are effectively asking questions about what the error is or how they can fix it. With that in mind, you can begin to formulate topics that directly address the user’s need for information on the topic.

Finally, you should take note of the issues that come up in your everyday customer interactions. We produce countless articles for the DashClicks blog that directly address the questions individuals have when it comes to the marketing services fulfilled for their site. By answering these questions in detail with our content, our audience can educate and empower themselves without needing to ask for additional assistance.

Remember that gaining lots of clicks and traffic will matter very little if it’s not improving your ROI and simply increasing your bounce rate. By focusing on improving the quality of your traffic, your site’s overall SEO will improve. Maintain consistency with this strategy and your organic traffic and ranking will increase naturally with time.

3. Create More Access Points to Your Website

Your primary focus for improving organic traffic is carefully curating the content on your website. However, regardless of your efforts, the user will ultimately only be able to discover your brand by accessing your domain either through a direct URL or from SERPs. If you’re having difficulty cracking the first page on Google, you’ll find it difficult to improve your organic traffic. Because of this, you’ll want to focus on creating new ways for users to access your domain through external sources. Several SEO strategies allow you to do this.

• Content Aggregator Sites

The first is to sign your website up for every website aggregator that applies to your business or blog. These are excellent ways to gain additional circulation of your content by leveraging the traffic that the aggregator website organically receives. For example, Google News aggregates the best news-related content for users all in one place. While it won’t guarantee the click, it provides additional visibility off-page that you wouldn’t normally receive.

Other popular websites can serve as blog content aggregators, but you’ll need to research what’s available by industry niche. More general content aggregators exist such as Mix, Digg, or Reddit. These sites exist to serve the consumer by helping them cut through the noise and discover material that serves their interests. Sharing your posts in the appropriate sections of these sites can boost your visibility and potentially attract additional shares.

• Get Connected on Social Media

You’ll also want to get your content circulating to the social media websites that are most relevant to your brand. Certain platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram cater to the consumer whereas a site like LinkedIn primarily serves B2B businesses. In either case, these platforms provide a unique way for communities to connect.

You will not only be able to communicate with and learn from your target audience, but you can connect with influencers and like-minded content creators that can eventually aid in promoting content on your website. In this way, you’ll gain access to new audiences and potentially forge longstanding partnerships that can earn you valuable backlinks. Each share of your content on social media platforms creates a new way for organic traffic to access your domain.

• Guest Blogging

Finally, creating unique, high-quality blog content for websites other than your own is an excellent way to acquire backlinks and attract more organic traffic. With a little bit of outreach, you can discover opportunities to partner up with other websites that serve content that is relevant to your area of expertise. This provides mutual benefits for the website owner and your brand.

Guest blogging benefits the other website owner by giving them access to a unique voice and perspective that they otherwise cannot provide on their own. Your unique content comes with a built-in perceived value due to your experience, licenses, education, and other qualifying factors. It also adds variety to their content selection, which can attract more organic traffic.

On the opposite side, you get to plug your name, your brand, and your domain on another website. Think of it as performing your act in front of an entirely new audience at a new venue. The audience is already qualified as interested in your content and is therefore likely to engage with anything you create. Along with that content, you get to link back to your website and gain some of that organic traffic for yourself. This not only has the potential to boost your search rankings but can potentially blog or email list subscribers, as well.

4. Repurpose Your Best Blog Content in Video Form

No matter how excellent your website content is, there are always going to be audiences that simply won’t read long-form posts. However, that doesn’t mean that these individuals are not interested in what you have to offer. You simply need to create new ways to convey your message to those who consume content differently.

This is why some of the best content creators on the internet have a strategy to make all of their content go the distance. While a giant company may have the resources to have a dedicated video content team, most operate a bit more efficiently. You can utilize a lengthy blog post and convert the information into a script. Grab the person that you want to be the face of your brand and let them present the information to your audience in a new way. You get to interact with different sections of your audience in a new way without too much additional work.

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We also recommend breaking up lengthier posts into several smaller videos that can serve as excellent, bite-sized content for social media sharing. A quick video on a timeline is one of the most effective ways to attract the attention of new audiences without asking too much of their time. As long as the content quality is there, users will be happy to like and share, creating additional entry points for organic traffic to access your company website.

5. Be Aggressively Consistent with Your Content

Finally, one of the best ways to increase organic traffic is to simply be consistent with how you post and share content online. Too often, website owners start experimenting with SEO and blogging only to be inconsistent with their posting and give up on everything prematurely. Even a great SEO strategy will take months to produce results for a website that has no prior basis for search ranking results.

If you only have the resources to write one blog post a week, then choose a day and deliver the content on that day without fail. Audience retention relies heavily on scheduling and patterns. When you promise to deliver something, but are typically late or don’t come through at all, it will annoy and put off users from visiting your website again. After all, why should they give you their time if you won’t give them yours?

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Regarding how often you should post, the general rule is that more is better. A popular HubSpot study indicates that blogs with 16 posts or more a month generate 3.5x as much traffic as those who post less. More posts mean more opportunities to appeal to different topical interests, which is how you get more organic traffic on your site.

However, the type of content and the length will also play a factor. If you’re keen to share important industry updates or news that your consumers care about, you should post daily to appear as an authority instead of being behind the times. However, if you’re posting lengthy, dense informational pieces, you may want to scale back to give your audience more time to consume the material you post. In other words, you’ll need to make a judgment call on what plays best with your audience’s needs.

We also recommend getting your audience involved and polling your active readers about how much new content they would like to see every week or every month. Ultimately, you’ll want to stick to a formula that allows your team to make the best content possible with the resources you have. Should your business scale and allow for more content creation, you can scale up your content strategy to gain more organic traffic when your budget allows.

Start Building a Successful Organic Traffic Pipeline Today!

While these steps are straightforward to understand, the process of deploying them typically is not. The time and dedication that a strong organic traffic strategy requires is an understandable concern for smaller businesses that need to start turning a profit as soon as possible. For these reasons, marketing strategies such as PPC campaigns or email campaigns will always be valuable.

However, the overarching goal for every business should be to improve your organic traffic and your ROI. This will never be possible without a dedicated content creation strategy that serves customer needs and fulfills a void left by your competitors. With the way the ranking algorithm goes, there are no real shortcuts around implementing best SEO practices and posting on a consistent schedule.

As long as you implement these steps when creating your content, you can expect to see a steady increase in your website’s organic traffic in time. Particularly, emphasizing questions and looking for long-tail, transactional keywords will ensure that those organic clicks result in better conversion rates.

Additionally, never produce content in a vacuum. Every marketing strategy worth its salt is driven by analytical feedback. Ensure that your team is utilizing tools like Google Analytics to keep an eye on how your content is performing. Increases in page traffic, average session duration, and even additional pages visited can be strong indicators that your content is performing well. If you aren’t getting results, double back and observe what your competitors are doing and what you can improve before abandoning your work altogether.

Don’t lose heart if your organic traffic pipeline isn’t earning the ideal results just yet. Every great online brand starts where you are. Do your research, formulate a plan that incorporates these steps, and happy writing!