It’s no secret that SEO is important for brands looking to expand their outreach, but that’s such a given that it can feel difficult to set your content apart from the competition.
If audiences are so exposed to SEO, as they are to all forms of marketing, they might be unlikely to give it the kind of thought and attention that you might want.
With that in mind, developing some approaches towards your SEO that can help it to function a cut above the rest, both to those who read it and within search rankings, can make it worth your while.
1. Proper Use of Headers
One of the more important aspects of quality SEO that you might see mentioned time and time again is the way that you implement headers. You have the H1, which functions as the title, so the main headers that you see throughout the content itself tend to either be H2 /or H3.
It’s important that these headers are concise, relevant to whatever is contained underneath them, and interesting enough from a readability standpoint. Sometimes, you might also feel as though it’s pertinent to frame your headers as questions so that they perform well in search engines that utilize AI in their rankings.
2. The Right Level of Topic Relevance
Different publishing sites might have different requirements for how they prefer the content to be tailored. Some might not mind if it’s more general, making it more flexible how you incorporate the topic that’s relevant to your brand, but others might want it to be about one thing or another.
If that aligns closely with what you do, it might be a natural fit, but otherwise, your link could seem out of place. If you’re talking about cybersecurity topics, for example, news pages can be a good place to talk about business threats like an API attack that might lead to it. Similarly, tech blogs give you a lot of flexibility. However, something like a gaming blog might be less of a natural fit.
3. Landing Page Awareness
The choice of landing page is very important as well because it might well be the first full impression of your brand that your (potential) customers get. Depending on the content itself, you might have different preferences about which part of your website this leads to, and over different pieces of content, you might want to diversify which one you choose.
Still, if the paragraph in which your link is placed is talking about a particular service or product that you offer, and people follow the link only to arrive at the customer support page or something else unrelated, there could be a disconnect that takes some of the impact out of this first impression, a moment that otherwise has the power to completely win them over.
4. A Disguised Ad
Some brands are going to want to be more upfront than others about what’s contained in the content. Some will be perfectly happy for a section to be written about why the reader should follow the link and purchase their services.
However, others might rather that the content looks more disguised . Initially, you might not understand why that’s something that you’d want, but going back to the idea of customers being inundated with marketing, an interesting piece of content that has no ulterior motive might ultimately be more persuasive.
5. Considering AI Search Engine Results
There is a certain level of uncertainty when it comes to understanding how you can change your SEO marketing strategy in order to account for the fact that many search engines use AI to tailor the results to different users.
Utilizing AI tools in the first place might be a good place to start with this, but that could also be an approach that takes a toll on the quality of your content, and readability might be more crucial to your success than you give it credit for.
In that case, understanding what users are looking for in this environment, as well as how featured snippets play a role, can help you to tailor your marketing to this new paradigm.
6. Choice of Outbound Links
The presence of outbound links can help your content in search rankings, but it can also help to legitimize it. Of course, this is a fine line to ride, because you don’t want to accidentally include links to your competitors, which readers might end up being more inclined towards.
If you are going for a more subtle, disguised approach, then reliable and well-known pages can make for good outbound links as they help to support your point and make your link look more trustworthy as a result.
It can also be effective to use these outbound links as a way to support statements made that work in favor of your marketing, points, and statistics that can help to underscore why a given reader might want to engage your services.
7. Aligning Message with the Publishing Page
As mentioned previously, publishing pages might have their own set of criteria when it comes to deciding whether or not your content is suitable for their page. However, in order to really make your content feel more natural from the perspective of the reader, it should feel like something that’s a perfect fit.
If a visitor to that page felt inclined to browse the front page of that blog and read whatever took their interest, what’s going to make them pick your post over something else?
You have to consider what a visitor to this specific page is going to be interested in, and you then have to make your content seamlessly fit in with that umbrella, yet also stand above everything else as a particularly interesting piece.
Then you have to work out how your primary link fits into all of that.
8. Social Media Ready
It’s not just your website that you’re hoping your readers will flock towards. If your SEO content is successful, people will follow the link and see what your page is all about.
They’ll explore the rest of your website, and before engaging your services, some people might want to investigate your brand further through the rest of your digital presence.
This is where a holistic approach is important, creating the sense that wherever your brand has a platform online, it is consistent with everything else that your audience members have seen from you.
You want your social media pages to be updated regularly, featuring top-of-the-line content that is engaging and, while consistent in terms of branding with your website, also able to offer something that they might not be able to find from there.
9. The Right Number of Keywords
Whenever the topic of SEO comes up, the term ‘keywords’ is never far behind. It can feel like such a core and instrumental part of the whole process that the temptation naturally becomes to jam every piece of content absolutely full of relevant keywords.
The problem is that this can sometimes have a negative impact on the content itself.
When it comes to SEO, how you think about the content might vary between it as a written blog post that someone might actually be interested in reading, and a technical document designed to have an impact on how your brand fares in the search engine results.
Of course, there is room to think about it in a mix of these two ways, but leaning too far into either direction might neglect the overall potential that this method has.
Keywords especially can be very impactful for the results that you’re looking for, but once readers begin to feel as though they’re simply looking at a list of keywords, your intentions for the writing become plain for all to see, and they might have no interest in reading on.
10. How Does it Read?
So, how do you improve readability? The general style of writing, how punctuation is used, and how one sentence flows into the next all can have an impact. At the same time, you have to think about the size of paragraphs (something that can also have a role in how well SEO performs from a more technical perspective).
Writing with a purpose will always be more engaging to a reader than something that is just trying to tick a box or achieve the bare minimum. While many businesses might turn to AI to create their SEO content, it’s a tool that can be more effective at achieving the technical side of SEO.
If a reader visits a blog and opens a piece performed by AI for your brand, they might realize fairly quickly that its primary purpose isn’t to convey a central point or through-line.
It can feel strange to apply ideas of artistic intent to something as rooted in the marketing world as SEO, but it is an attitude that can help you to construct content that manages to effectively reach people, a mentality that can be broadly applied to your marketing on the whole.
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