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author
Jim Yu
M Posted 9 years ago
t 5 min read
Content Marketing

If you’re still trying to perfect your content SEO strategy, you’re not alone. In fact, 52 percent of respondents in the BrightEdge 2014 Search Marketer Survey said they would invest at least 10 percent to 25 percent more in their content SEO strategy if they could identify what was most engaging to their audience.

Knowing how to market your brand through content, and what your audience responds to is an age-old question, actually. Pioneers in content marketing include John Deere with the launch of a magazine in 1895 – “The Furrow” – that provided information to farmers to be more profitable, and Michelin with its “Michelin Guide,” first published in 1900, with info on auto maintenance, accommodations and travel.

What is new in the content marketing equation is the mass of data we have about how our audience is responding to content.

Marketers today know how important data is. In fact, 78 percent of those surveyed for our search marketer report said it’s either “more important” or “much more important” to connect content efforts to ROI in 2014.

But that connection doesn’t come easily. You, of course, need data you can trust and a roadmap of what to measure. With the multiple ways to publish and track content today online, where do you start?

Start with the foundation: your website.

Your Website, SEO and Content Marketing

Organic search is one of the best channels to understand demand. Through organic search, you can know what topics matter to your target audience and what the competition is up to as well.

Your website is the hub of your brand and the beneficiary of all your content marketing efforts, no matter which channel you decide to focus on, be it organic search, pay-per-click, social or any other.

That’s why any content SEO strategy should begin with the foundation, your website, optimized for both search engines and users. In fact, your website content can be one of the most powerful inbound marketing tools when optimized for search.

Most professional marketers are now comfortable with the idea that SEO is a form of content marketing. In fact, traditional SEO and content marketing have the same goal: to get the right content in front of the right people.

However, brands sometimes still feel a disconnect within their organizations between content creation, organic search and ROI. Is optimizing your content SEO strategy really making a difference? How do you know?

BrightEdge studied the impact of optimizing pages for search, and we found potential to drive 10 percent more traffic, 25 percent more revenue and 50 percent less time to results for targeted pages.

So yes, optimizing your organic content seo strategy can and does work.

In fact, 83 percent of marketers surveyed for the BrightEdge search marketing report see the potential, too, stating that increasing content performance by optimizing your organic content seo strategy in 2014 is “much more important” or “more important” than 2013. 

Optimizing Your Organic Content SEO Strategy

The appetite for content to be served on a silver platter to its consumers is growing. Your audience doesn’t want to, nor should they have to, go digging to find the content they need when they need it.

Likewise, content not only has to be relevant, but also strike a chord. Would you find the information you’re publishing useful? Engaging? Thought-provoking? If not, start over.

Some say we’re in the age where traditional marketing meets digital marketing when it comes to SEO. Today, you need staff to focus on both the technical and creative side of content, and staff who will analyze the results to shape the strategy moving forward.

Last month at the Adobe Summit, BrightEdge announce an enhanced Content Optimizer that includes the following capabilities:

  • Real-Time Content Coach: Marketers and content writers will have the ability to enhance content as they create it, saving time and effort while growing revenue. The technology guides the author seamlessly through each step directly within Adobe Experience Manager, prompting optimization recommendations for highly effective content.
  • Content Demand Targeting: For the first time ever, marketers can tailor content as they write to match the topics that people are actually searching for and interested in reading. The technology bridges the gap between SEO experts and content writers, enabling marketers to be better equipped to develop content based on demand and publish content that consumers are most interested in.
  • Optimal Content Structure: Combining the strengths of search engine optimization with the powerful impact of content offers new opportunities for content engagement. SEO managers are now able to determine the optimal structure for effective content, set guidelines and policies within the BrightEdge S3 platform, and instantly share these guidelines in Adobe Experience Manager, connecting SEO know-how with the content creation process.

When thinking about how to boost the quality of your organic content seo strategy, keep in mind all the moving parts of how to make your content for organic search shine, including:

  • The research: What topics resonate with your audience? What conversations are happening around a topic? What words are people using when they search? What content is already out there on that topic?
  • The creative side: What do those who have a vision of the brand say about content? What messages do you want to disseminate? How do you want it to feel?
  • Optimization: All the White Hat foundations of SEO help your content be discovered through on-page optimization best practices.
  • Promotion: Beyond optimizing the content for search, tell people about the pages and blog posts on your website through your social mediums.
  • Tracking: Harness the big data that’s available to you by setting boundaries on what you’ll track and how you’ll measure the performance of the pages and posts you create.

This year, don’t be a statistic. As marketers, we can all work a little harder to ensure we’re connecting our content to performance metrics that matter to our business, and, make sure our organic search channel is working at full capacity for our brands and our content.