It’s the time of year when we think about resolutions for the year ahead and how we can ‘do things better’. While many of your resolutions might be more personal, why not make one that will really make a difference to the effectiveness of your digital marketing: creating SEO optimized content.

In recent years the PR industry has had to adapt to incorporate SEO optimization into everyday practices to add value to client’s campaigns. Customers are increasingly looking for information online using non-branded search terms, so creating and seeing SEO optimized content can help drive customers to a website, build trust and reputation and improve search engine ranking.

The basics

SEO optimization should be considered for all of your online content including articles, press releases, blogs and website text. Before you even begin writing, it is important to consider what topics are of most interest to your target customers and what keywords they will be searching for online. These key words can be identified by using suggestions from Google, monitoring competitor materials and looking at the online behaviours of your customers via analytics. Remember also to get input not just from the marketing team but also from product and sales teams who will have a good insight into customer challenges and hot topics.

The next stage is to take all of the keywords or phrases you have identified and run a search using a keyword tool (such as Google Adwords Keyword Planner) to see what volume of searches each keyword or phrase currently receives.  Selecting your priority keywords, depends on your objectives, sector and target audience. A guiding principle is to be aware that the keywords with the largest search volumes will be difficult to rank highly for. In scientific and technical sectors, choosing very specific keywords or longer phrases (long tail keywords) is likely to bear more fruit. Also remember that the way people search online differs by region, country and demographic.

SEO top tips

Now it’s time to get writing and we’ve listed some handy tips below:

  • Incorporate keywords and phrases naturally rather than shoe-horning them in
  • Include backlinks to relevant external sites and internal links within your website to other content
  • Continually review your analytics to see what resonates best with your target audience and adapt your content accordingly
  • Have a schedule of content to be posted on a regular basis
  • Include your chosen keywords and phrases in the meta data of your website

One of the most important things to remember is that SEO content will only be effective if you write it for people, not just Google. Writing content that is useful and valuable to your customers will make them want to read it and share it on social channels with their own networks, helping to build outbound links that help improve your website’s SEO ranking even further.

Our infographic provides a simple and easy to follow guide on SEO content. We have first-hand experience of creating SEO optimized content for our clients to drive traffic to their website and increase awareness of their brand and you can see an example at www.chromnews.com.  If you would like to learn more about SEO optimization and how we can help to create optimized content, contact us at [email protected] or give us a call on 01477 539 539.

By Dinah Harrison, Account Executive at The Scott Partnership