9 Ways to Improve Your SEO Ranking in Content Marketing

Marketers across all brands should prioritize content marketing to improve their SEO rankings. It's logical. What is the last time you searched online for any information, such as hotel reviews or business insights, without using Google?

According to the Content Marketing Institute's B2C Content Marketing Budgets and Trends, 62% content marketers consider their website traffic as a measure of success. 39% also believe that SEO rankings in content marketing are important.

Content marketers are still struggling to master SEO, despite its importance. They have to navigate Google's constantly changing guidelines and try to rank high from many angles. There is no one method that works; content marketers must try a lot of different approaches to see if they can make it work.

You can only rank high if you keep up with Google's standards. Also, learn from others what works.

Increase your Content Marketing SEO Ranking

1. High quality, original content

Google's algorithms look for high-quality content based on the search terms being entered by users. Google crawls websites and determines relevance based on keywords found.

Search engines determine whether a website has high quality content based on the number of links to it from other high-quality websites. It also looks at how many people are engaging with your site and what content is unique. What does engagement mean? Are they clicking on your website in a search engine, and then returning to their original search? Are they spending a specific amount of time on your site and pursuing additional content?

Brandon Leibowitz, SEO Optimizers, says quality is the key to content marketing. “Many people want to produce as much content possible. Quantity is the 2012 SEO strategy.

Leibowitz recommends that you write content for the reader's benefit, not SEO. While you should include a keyword relevant to your content in the title, don't try to grab people's attention using clickbait. Instead, consider how you can answer a specific question for your target audience, and include keywords that are relevant to your brand.

Long-form content is better than short-form content especially when you are trying to rank high.

Study A study after another has shown that long-form contents perform well with Google and audiences,” states A.J. Ghergich is the founder of Ghergich & Co. a content marketing agency. I encourage people to begin with long-form content when they first start content marketing on their blogs.

Ghergich suggests 1,500-3,000 word posts with visual assets. These are images and videos that can be helpful for the readers.

Video and images are very important as they reduce the chance of someone leaving your site quickly. A high bounce rate is a site where a visitor visits your site but leaves after browsing for only 30 seconds. This could indicate that they are not returning to your site often. Your prospects will be attracted to long-form content that is broken down with visuals, headers and bullet points.

These cute puppies are here for you.

2. Change your URLs

Rand Fishkin, Moz's SEO specialist, recommends that keywords be included in the titles of website content.

If a person hovers above anchor text, they will be able to see if the website is relevant based on the URL. If no anchor text is present, the user will be able to recognize the relevance within the text.

Plus URLs appear on Google and can help people decide whether to click on your site or not. If the title matches the URL they will trust it and visit your website.

The URL should be as short as possible (between 50 and 60 characters) and as easy to read as possible. Your URLs should contain no more than words and dashes. People won't click if there are too many numbers, symbols, or random letters. To keep your URL coherent, it doesn't matter if the title contains words such as “the”, “and”, or “a”. Don't include too many folders or slashes in your URL.

3. Utilize SEO keywords

Keywords should appear in both the title and body of your content. SEO was once all about keywords. However, it has expanded to include more areas. Keywords are still very important.

You must do your research to find keywords that will apply to your content in order to effectively use them. You must do this regularly and not just once. You must keep up with the changing popularity of keywords to rank well.

Keyword Tool allows brands to run free searches when deciding which keywords to use. It allows you to view the most popular keywords so you can incorporate them into your content. WordStream is another useful tool that provides suggestions for keywords related to any keyword you enter. If you type “content marketing”, other keywords that might be useful are “original marketing content services” or “how big is the content marketing agency”.

Keywords should not be used too often in your content. Google and your readers will see you as spammy. Google won't be able to find out the purpose of your website if you don't use keywords enough. Bruce Clay, an SEO consultant, recommends that keywords be naturally used in your content.

A good rule of thumb is to include keywords within the first 200 words of content and once in the first 160 characters meta description. Keywords should not only be included in your written content but also within your optimized images. Jayson DeMers, Content Marketer, says that keywords should be integrated into your logo, header images, and buttons on your website in the alt text.

4. Design for the user

You want your users to engage with you website. Make sure it is easy to use and navigate. Your site should have:

• Good color contrast
• It should be arranged in a sensible and logical manner, i.e. Navigation at the top, content below, calls for action at the bottom of content, and attractive visuals
• Larger fonts
• Different sections contain different content
• A search bar apparent
• White space

Also, your site must be responsive to different devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. It must adjust to the device it is being viewed on and resize accordingly. Mobile friendliness is important because many consumers use mobile devices to decide whether they will make purchases.

You should make it easy for users-on the-go to click your link on Google and spend some time looking through it.

• Your business should appear in the local search section. It appears at the top of Google and can be clicked easily. Include your website, address and hours when you are creating or editing your online business listing.
• Your site should load quickly enough. A study found that 64% of users expect pages to load in under four seconds. People are impatient especially when browsing on mobile devices and will go to another website if it loads faster. Optimize your images for mobile, and minimize your website's file sizes by optimizing CSS and HTML. Minify removes redundant or duplicate data, code that is not used, and comments. You also use shorter function names and variable names.

5. Duplicate pages can be deleted

Your ranking can be affected if you have duplicate pages. Google may index the wrong page and split the link metrics so that Google does not attribute it to only one page.

There are many reasons why duplicate pages may occur. You might use them to track clicks or provide a printable version of your webpage on your website. You can fix this problem by redirecting to the correct page with a 301 redirect. This tag can be placed within your HTML code (“rel=”canonical”)

Write more content for pages that are similar to your website if they are. This will make your pages stand out to Google and increase traffic to your website.

6. Use these helpful tools

There are many tools available online that will help you in the search engine optimization process. These are some of the most popular:

• Buzzsumo shows you the top influencers in your niche. You can simply type in a keyword to find out who is creating content popular with that keyword. You can contact these influential people with high-quality pages in order to get them to link back.
• Google Search Console is an all-in one platform that will tell you if your content has Google Ready and Friendly.
• BrowserStack is a website that allows you to see how your site looks in different browsers. You can modify your website if it does not look right across all browsers.
• Google Trends allows you to see the most popular topics and stories. If you find a news story that is relevant to your company, take advantage of the opportunity to include the keywords in your content.
• Alexa allows you to see the most visited sites on the internet. You can narrow your search by using the category section. You can target links to popular sites once you have identified them.
• Seoptimer will perform a free SEO audit on your website. Enter your website address and it will tell you your strengths and weaknesses in terms of content, linking keywords, images headers and social media links.
• Moz is a great tool I have used in the past to monitor our SEO success and find new tips and tools.

7. Build valuable relationships

Long-form content can be rich in images and linked to reliable websites. It won't be seen if you don't actively promote your content and seek distribution on high quality websites.

Buzzsumo is not only a great tool for finding and contacting influencers in your niche.

• These influencers can be reached via social media or email when your company announces something or shares a piece of great content or infographic. Let influencers know how this information or data could be beneficial to their audiences.
• These influencers may be writers. If so, you can pitch them story ideas and offer interviews to your company's thought leaders.
• Ask influencers whether they are open to guest posting on their blogs. You can write high-quality content and link back to your site content.

8. Verify your website's loading speed

Slow loading times will lead to high bounce rates, whether the users are using their mobile devices or desktop computers. You can also use other strategies to ensure your site loads quickly, aside from the mobile rules.

Google's PageSpeed Insights is a good place to start. You can enter the URL of your website to see how fast it loads. Google will show you the areas you should improve in order to make your website load faster on desktop and mobile devices.

They may also recommend optimizing images for both mobile and desktop, as well as minimising HTML and CSS. These rules apply to both desktop and mobile. The only difference is that you can have larger images (20-100kb), flash and more complex designs on your desktop pages.

9. Invest in SEO

Many content marketers believe they can achieve business success with high rankings from organic linking and traffic and ignore the need for paid promotion. Both are necessary for success.

You can't afford to pay for press releases, native ads on quality websites or an SEO firm outside of your company. All these costs are investments in your business. Organic is limited in its ability to take you far. Paid promotion can help spread the message of your company and reach your core audience.

Ghergich says it is important to be familiar with the basics of SEO when you are looking for firms that can help you improve your rankings. He says that you will be able to make better hiring decisions if at least you know the basics.

Before you decide to sign up for a company, make sure that they have examples of websites where their clients have been placed. This will save you time and money. Ghergich says, “If your SEO agency cannot get you on sites such The Huffington Post, they are doing something wrong.”

Highest ranking on Google

Although SEO can be confusing, these strategies have been shown to improve ranking. These techniques will help you reach your target audience and make connections with prospects to get them involved in your buying funnel.

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