Driving traffic to your website is what every business wants, but it’s not always easy to achieve on your own. Successful marketing strategies employ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get the engagement you want on your content as simply and efficiently as possible.
Simply put, SEO is a strategy used to make your website and content easy to find. Search engines like Google will rank your website based on the credibility of your brand and information, keywords in your content that consumers are searching for and the relevance of your content to specific audiences to decide if it’s strong enough to land on the first page of search. For brands, this is extremely important, since page one of Google receives 71% of consumer clicks. In other words, landing on the first page of Google will drive more traffic to your website.
Before you create your next piece of content, you may want to apply some elements of SEO to improve its performance. Use this checklist below as a guide to help you create successful, SEO-friendly content.
Audience and Keyword Research
- Find out who your audience is. What are they searching for? What types of content interests them the most?
- For example, if you are a dog food company and your audience is dog owners, they may be searching the internet for tips about dog food ingredients, diets and information about dogs in general.
- In this case, creating content that dog owners would be interested in, such as “How to Find the Right Food for Your Dog Breed,” will help you reach your target audience directly and provide them with relevant information that they were searching for
- Find keywords to use in your content that your audience is searching for using online analytical tools, such as SEMrush. This platform will help you identify which search terms are trending, the number of people searching for them and how many other websites are using each specific keyword
Developing Content that Search Engines Will Find
- Formulate content across topics that are relevant to your audience and include your keywords. Does your content answer questions that your audience is searching for?
- Is your content easy for search engines to discover? Make sure your website is easy to navigate so that search engines can match it with customer Google searches
- Build credibility for your content through backlinks, or other websites linking back to your page. This will give your website authority and allow search bots to rank your content higher on Google
- Authority directly impacts ranking strength. Improve authority by getting customers to share your content on social media, link back to it in other articles and cite it in other works
Strategic Blogging
- Make it easy for customers to read more of your content by linking your blog posts to one another
- Optimize your old blog posts to grow their organic engagement. Refreshed, up-to-date blog posts will rank higher in search results
- Consider guest blogging for other websites with higher domain authority to get your name associated with a credible source. This will drive traffic back to your website and help build your own domain authority
Want to learn more about how Quinlan can help you create SEO-friendly content? Contact us today.
