SEO content is now much more reliant on a good content strategy. The good news is that there is no real need for a ‘Content for SEO’, looking at content marketing, works for SEO – as good SEO content is intrinsically linked to good content generally. It is, however, worth taking a quick look here at some specifics.
The content you need
Google uses ‘robots’ to try to interpret your site. It therefore stands to reason that informative content helps. While you and I can look at a picture of a bag of nails and know what it is, Google struggles (search engines are making progress on image recognition but we cannot rely on it just yet). The content that sits on your site that describes your services/products and so on is commonly referred to as functional content. It will never win any awards but it really is a crucial requirement.
A technically sound site with great functional content will go a long way, but to get real traction the site needs a degree of popularity. To help make it you will need a very different type of content: engaging content. This is content that gets attention from your target audience wherever they may be online. It can be fun (but doesn’t have to be), it must be relevant and it must be on brand. Engaging content done well will get published elsewhere and some will cite or link to your site. Each citation/ link acts as a signpost to Google that you are producing something of value that others like and, as such, you might warrant a higher position in the search engines for related terms.
SEO rules for content
As we discussed earlier, the secret to SEO is not to optimize for the search engines but for your audience and this applies to content as much as any other area. If you have done your research right, you should find that you are naturally using very relevant keywords and the content you create should fly. Second, it is important to keep producing. Whilst online content will not disappear unless you delete it, Google does like to see fresh content, so ensuring an ongoing production of content is important. Finally, but perhaps most critically, you should make sure your site has a home for content. The great engaging content you produce should live on your site so that Google knows the origin and so that other sites have a reason to link back to you. This may seem obvious but, with the growth of social media, many companies have concentrated on producing content for YouTube and Twitter at the expense of the content on their own site and this can harm SEO performance.
Mobile
It is increasingly important to ensure that your site renders well on all devices. Today that really means desktop/laptop, tablet and mobile phone. The ideal approach is to create a site that is ‘responsive’, ie it adapts to the device being used. Although there is a lot of mystery around SEO in general there is 100 per cent clarity on this: Google actively pushes mobile-friendly sites up the rankings when a mobile device is being used. Mobilegeddon in 2015 was a major update to Google’s approach to mobile rankings and it is recommended that you read more on this and the other Google updates listed above in order to have an understanding of how Google approaches these things, to gain an insight into its philosophies and to develop a view of what may happen in the future.
Location
Google loves being relevant. If I’m in Madrid and search for ‘art museum’ I am probably not that interested in reading about the National Portrait Museum in London. So Google includes ‘local’ results where it can.
Our job as digital marketers is to make sure we make it as easy as possible to let Google know where we are. A chapter could be written on local SEO but the basics are:
● Create a specific location page on your site and ensure that your location(s) (name, address, number) are all in-text so that the robots can read them.
● Create a Google page for your business.
● Get Google reviews. The tipping point for displaying reviews is around five entries, after which you should see the review stars next to your location. To achieve this, though, you may need to educate your customer base on how to leave reviews.
Reviews are an important part of today’s internet and this is unlikely to change. Whilst there have been some issues with the authenticity of reviews – such as the news in 2015 that many reviews on Amazon had been produced by individuals who were paid to write them (through no fault of Amazon) – they remain an important influencing factor for shopping online. Encouraging users to visit your Google page and other review centres to leave you a review, if they are satisfied, is good practice. You will almost certainly receive negative reviews as well and it is important not to try to manipulate the result. Ultimately you need to ensure that your service is deserving of positive reviews before you begin, rather than trying to hide the negatives after they start to arrive.
Penalties
Very few marketers have not heard about Google penalties. However, very few actually understand what they really are.
There are two types of Google penalty:
1) algorithmic;
2) manual.
But rather than explain the intricacies of each it is perhaps better to briefly cover how to avoid a penalty in the first place. While not exhaustive, the list below will go a long way to keeping you on the right side of Google:
● Check your backlink profile.
You will need some SEO expertise to do this, but in short you need to look for the quantity of low-quality/ spammy links you have. If the ratio is high then remedial action may be needed (see below).
● Take remedial action,
if needed. If you have a high proportion of links that are clearly low quality then you are advised to remove them. Of course, this is not easy as it involves trying to contact webmasters who are unlikely to be that responsive. However, this is the preferred route. A last resort is to use Google’s ‘Disavow’ process. Available through Webmaster Tools the disavow tool allows you to inform Google that you no longer want association with the site links uploaded. However, this is a very powerful and therefore dangerous tool and it would be remiss of me to try to advise on how to use it in one paragraph. In short, get expert help if you think you may need remedial action.
● Do not buy links.
The significant majority of your links should be earned. Of course business is business and there may be a place for some high-quality paid placements but they should be the exception rather than the rule. There is a history of a high volume of poor-quality links being bought, when it was volume that counted. This is no longer the case and so paying someone to attain thousands of links for you will be quickly visible to Google, will add almost no value to your SEO and will give you a very high risk of a penalty.
● Check for duplicate content.
If you reuse your own content or, worst case, reuse others’ content, you may trigger a penalty.
● Ensure that your site is largely original content (not a mash-up of auto-generated content or adverts).
● Ensure that you do not have too many pages with thin or no content (ie few words that add little value).
● When you actively seek out links
(ie coverage for the great compelling content you have crafted) make sure you are seeking them from related/relevant sites.
● Avoid unnatural anchor text
(Anchor text is visible text in a link, for example: cheapest sun tan lotion) – although if you are not buying links this really should not be a problem as most naturally created links will be your brand name.
● If you accept user-generated content,
for example, reviews, ensure that you are not vulnerable to exploitation by using the nofollow attribute. This ensures that Google will not use your link for SEO purposes and therefore will not punish you.
Organizational structure and SEO
One of the surprisingly important areas of SEO and one that is often overlooked or not implemented, due to its complexity, is organizational structure. To ensure that your SEO strategy can be fully implemented it needs buy-in and ownership from the top down. If your board of directors have the level of understanding that this section offers then you will likely be in a good place – the reason being that to do everything discussed requires multiple departments working very closely together.
Strategy
Extracts from an interview with Ben McKay, who was then Head of Organic Performance, explains how they achieved this success:
We have dissolved the SEO and social media teams in their traditional form, and remoulded them to be more consumer value and campaign centric – the team is now called Organic Performance. This means that the energy and talent of a wide variety of digital marketing professionals is integrated under shared KPIs… Where MSM has been most successful (from its core employees to its board) is by being very ambitious and progressive in removing organizational barriers, and thus helping consumers save money. (McKay in Devenish, 2012)
By developing a strategy that brought content, social media and SEO into one organic team the channels have been able to work much better together.
Key lessons
The key learning for your strategy here is that:
● It is not just good techniques that are important, but also enabling these techniques to strengthen through better integration.
● By pulling together the teams that directly influence the result you can significantly improve performance
● SEO, social and content are great examples of where you must align your goals and communicate highly effectively.
So, in short, SEO is perhaps the most wide-reaching digital channel and, as such, to get it right you need to consider the structure of your entire organization. In Chapter 15 we look at how to present a strategy to your board and how to influence the decision makers.