In a post-Penguin world, SEO will be led by what it always should have been – great content. Producing, distributing and recycling great content is the future of SEO, and if your website doesn’t have a fine-tuned content marketing strategy, be prepared to be left in the dust.
Creating and marketing exceptional content, whether that be a blog post, infographic, video, podcast or any other interactive content, will be essential for websites to both build and maintain organic rankings for the foreseeable future. And really it makes perfect sense.
It’s always been Google’s goal to provide web searchers with the most relevant and authoritative content related to their search queries. Over the years, Google’s search results have been muddied by less-than-ethical SEO companies that have spammed the Internet with thin, garbage content that had little to no value (but were riddled with links) in an effort to gain top organic search rankings for their clients. Those days are now long gone after Google put the kibosh on websites that gained rankings from spammy link profiles promoted by websites with zero authority.
So now to survive, SEO companies that didn’t previously practice good ethics will now be forced to do so to stay in business and the No. 1 method to do so will be content marketing.
With this in mind, below I’ll outline 3 essential strategies for content marketing that will help websites build authority (links), gain relevancy and drive traffic (and rankings) to their websites.
Create Diverse & Exceptional Content
This should be a no-brainer, right? You’d be surprised. Despite Google’s push to clean up web content, the Internet is still flooded with content with little to no value.
To successfully content market, you have to produce compelling and meaningful content for the users to read or the success of your SEO objectives are sure to follow suit.
In content marketing, content comes in a variety of ways from simple blog posts and whitepapers to more interactive content such as podcasts, videos and memes. Each of these pieces of content (if exceptional) can play an essential role in increasing your website’s popularity, but also drive top rankings for targeted keywords and in turn more traffic to your website.
With so many channels and mediums to produce content on, it’s important to diversify your content and mix a variety of articles, blogs, videos and images as part of your content marketing strategy so you can be sure to reach a diverse readership.
Get SEO-cial
SEO-cial is a new buzzword going around in the SEO industry because of the major inclusion of Social Media signals in Google’s highly sophisticated algorithm. It’s now not just best practice to socially share your content on a variety of social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., it’s now imperative to do so to have any sort of chance and getting your content ranked.
Nowadays socializing your content is incredibly easy with a variety of free social sharing widgets that you can install on your websites to share your content on multiple social media platforms with just a few clicks.
So why is it so important that you get SEO-cial with your content? When you share socially, your exceptional content has a far greater chance of going viral and reaching hundreds (if not thousands (millions?)) of Internet users. Assuming your content is exceptional and has something of great value to offer web users, you’re also far more likely to get re-shared, liked, +1ed and LINKED to naturally by other users.
Get Blogging
Article marketing and blogging are the most traditional mediums for content marketing. It’s the battle-tested, tried-and-true method for building valuable links back to your website. There are many free blogging platforms available to start your blogging conquest, including: WordPress.com and Blogger. Each of these platforms has their own unique benefits. WordPress is very search engine friendly. Blogger is owned by Google.
When blogging for SEO, don’t forget to optimize your posts for the search engines using best practices for Meta Tags, and links. And as I said above, definitely don’t forget to socially share your blogs on various social media websites.
Content marketing and striving to create exceptional content is the future of SEO (and that’s the way it ought to be!) These 3 strategies are great ways to build more authority and trust with the search engines, and also to build relevancy for users and rankings in the search results.