“Content is king.”
Likely, as a marketer, you’ve heard this phrase more than once. It’s likely that you’ve heard it even if you’re not a marketer. There’s a simple reason for that: the adage is true. Content is still a key component of successful Google search marketing. However, today the expression comes with a small caveat: good, fresh content is still king.
Autumn Consulting, a Google search marketing firm in Chicago, Naples, and Charlotte focuses on helping our clients — from B2B companies to non-profits — create quality content to deliver organic search marketing results and drive traffic to their websites.
Quality content will answer questions your potential customers are asking themselves or provide solutions for problems they’re looking to solve. This can range from how a business can leverage technology to drive fulfillment for omnichannel to a victim of a car accident wondering what to expect in the first meeting with a personal injury attorney.
Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Content
Getting started creating SEO-friendly content can feel like a daunting task. To help, we’ve compiled 6 tips on how to write and publish great content that will boost your organic SEO over time.
1) Update your website with fresh content twice per month.
This is the cadence that Autumn Consulting recommends to its clients in order successfully improve their organic SEO rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). Fresh content will lead to more frequent indexing. This can mean publishing new content or updating older content. However, frequent updates are not enough. Quality matters.
2) Conduct keyword research.
The importance of keywords in your organic search marketing is emphasized frequently for good reason. Doing proper research to understand how prospects are currently finding your business, or what keywords you could aim to rank for to reach more prospects, is key to growing your online presence. Keywords are integral to optimizing your web content for maximum impact.
3) Balance SEO keyword usage with storytelling.
Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs. According to Google, keyword stuffing is “the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results”. While it’s important to incorporate keywords to tell Google what your website and content are about, your content should be for human prospects, first and foremost.
4) Don’t neglect on-page SEO.
Strong copy is only one component of truly great content. On-page SEO — items such as meta descriptions, images, and alt-tags — can be extremely beneficial to users. These items help readers quickly find answers that solve the problem that triggered the search, to begin with. Taking care of on-page SEO will also help your website attain ADA compliance, which is also helpful for organic SEO.
5) Use descriptive headers and subheaders.
Use Google’s algorithms to guide content structure. Google uses these to index, organize, and rank websites worldwide. Search engine crawlers will take note of things such as page headings, title and description tags, multi-phrase keyword hyperlinks, and more. As a leading Google search marketing firm, paying attention to these details is an integral part of what Autumn offers our clients as we create WOW moments for them.
6) Create SEO-friendly URLs and disseminate via link-building.
When it comes to URL structure, less is more. Keep URLs as succinct as possible by eliminating filler words and including a keyword within them. Choose your anchor text to align with the keyword highlighted. As you build out your content repertoire, start link-building. This is an easy way to update content, show crawlers your content is interrelated, and help establish your site authority. Once a new URL is live, be sure to request indexing immediately via the Google search console.
Now more than ever, content is key to boosting your organic SEO. Autumn Consulting recommends using this checklist to truly capitalize on content marketing. Regularly publishing quality content will lead to better search engine rankings. Increased rankings mean a larger reach for your brand and more traffic to your website.
Ready to leverage content to improve your business’ reach? Contact Autumn Consulting today, for the best-rated search marketing in Chicago, Naples, and Charlotte. We’ll help build a winning content strategy for you.
