OK. So SEO isn’t a marketing strategy all by its lonesome. It is a technique, but if you don’t use other techniques to leverage it, it’s not doing anything. If you’ll tolerate an analogy, the best engine in the world can’t make a car go without a transmission. To extend the analogy, not every transmission works well with every type of engine.
So, what leveraging techniques work best for SEO and content marketing? Read on:
- Find out the keywords your ideal audience is searching for, and optimise for those almost exclusively.
You can use the Google search Console to find out what searches actually drop people onto your website, and get a hint of what brought them there. Then you can use the SERPS or something like it to see what kind of people each search word was associated with, and decide which terms to target based on what kind of visitors you most want. Just be sure to target the term with the same intent they searched for it.
- Use an analytics tool like SEMrush, Google Analytics or the trusty Search Console to spot your best-performing content, and make more like it.
Do any of your content marketing posts get more impressions than the others? Do any of them rank on page one? Then you’ve accidentally struck gold. Use that as a template, and either write (or hire someone to write) all new content in that pattern, or re-write your existing content to match the pattern that works. Better still, check again, and see if any of the variants did even better, and make that the new standard – marketing evolution.
- Discover and use the SEO marketing strategies of your best competitors.
You can actually divine what their marketing strategy is by researching their top keywords (publicly available), their backlinks (same) and their traffic data (ditto). Copy the parts of their strategy that seem to work the best, and especially those that seem particularly well suited to the content you already have. Next, look at the kinds of content that they have but you do not. Is it working for them? If so, it will probably work for you. Don’t copy it wholesale, of course, but write your own pieces that essentially do the same thing.
- Analyse your own traffic to see what is working and what is not.
There are dozens of great traffic analytics solutions out there, and I won’t go into which ones are the best for different purposes here. Use the program of your choice, and see what people are actually doing on your site. Do people read the first paragraph of your articles and jump away? That might be poor content, or it might simply mean that your SEO efforts are bringing in the wrong kind of visitors for that content. To fix this kind of thing, try some A/B testing and see which version works better, until you engineer a way around each piece’s bottleneck.
Naturally, there is more to it than that, but we’ll have to delve deeper in a later article.
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