SEO Strategies for Every Content Marketer

As a content marketer, your client will be expecting you to optimize content and rank higher in Google searches. Additionally, they may inquire as to how to balance the art of writing creatively alongside balancing marketing metrics. The solution exists in SEO or search engine optimization.

With SEO, making inroads in content strategy and evolving as a pivotal cog in your marketing efforts, content marketers are expected to use skills and strategies to write SEO-friendly content and distribute it to a wider audience.

Since the content team can’t invest much time in taking SEO classes, here is a quick checklist of major SEO strategies that every content marketer can use in his or her content plan.

SEO checklist for content marketer

1. Churn Out Quality Content

The popularity of content helps to get a higher search engine ranking. Relevant content coming from popular sources will grab more attention. Every writer has to master skills to differentiate reputable online sources. If you are using quotes or references, make sure that they are coming from industry leaders.

Make it a point to churn out quality content, and it will improve your content marketing strategy. Content that is appealing and knowledge-worthy increases its search ability.

2. Add Internal and External Links

When you are writing articles, identify a few keywords and link them to popular blogs or web pages of your product to give internal links. You can also link to other websites, which can add more value to your content as part of external links.

Avoid link stuffing and ensure that you get a backlink from a high Domain Authority (DA) site. This, in turn, increases your rankings in search engines.

3. Zero in on Smart Keywords to Target

The ranking on search result pages can be increased by targeting the keywords that help potential readers find you. If you are penning a blog post on social media management, you need to consider keywords such as ‘social’, ‘share’, ‘reach’, ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’. To know whether these keywords are smart enough to target, follow these three suggestions:

• What’s the search volume for these keywords?
• How to rank the keywords?
• With all the available information, can I create a great web page for this topic?

Once you get satisfactory answers to the questions, make sure to place long tail keywords, which have competition and lower search volume. Long-tail searches account for 70 percent of the search demand. As people are specific with these searches, they usually include the most common phrases and end up in more conversions. Google Adwords Keyword Planner is a great tool for seeing the competition and average monthly search volume for keywords.

4. Avoid Keyword Stuffing and Place Keywords in Right Place

After you’ve identified keywords, search engines look in various places for the keywords. Here are places to put keywords:

• Title and headings
• URL
• Alternate text (<alt> text) for images
• Internal links on your site
• Page content
• Add images with all tags
• Use long-tail keywords
• H1 tags should start with targeted keywords

For example, “content marketer” is the focus keyword. It’s used in the title, URL, alternate text and page content for this blog post.

These are a few SEO tips that every content marketer should consider to strike a fine balance between creativity and metrics.