If you want to be successful in search optimization, you need competitive onsite and offsite content. But with so many competitors and such a different online landscape, it's hard to know exactly what makes modern content effective.
What steps can you take to increase the quality and value of the SEO content you create for the modern era?
One of the most important steps you can take is working with content creation and SEO professionals. The best option is working with an online marketing firm, since this business can connect you with many different experienced professionals and functionally limitless resources. But you may also find value in hiring a full-time team member with significant experience in this field, or hunting down a contractor with a history of provable results.
The goal here is to work with people who have more knowledge and experience than you do. They might make your campaign more expensive up front, but they can almost guarantee you better results in the long term. They know what it takes to create good content, and they have plenty of experience doing so – which means they can save you a lot of headaches if you trust them to do the work.
One of the biggest issues search optimizers have faced in the past few years is dealing with the consequences of focusing on quantity over quality. Each new article you produce for your website is a new page that can be indexed by Google, and a new opportunity to focus on a fresh target keyword. Every new article you publish on an external website is an opportunity for link building. So, on some level, it makes sense why people have focused on producing as many articles as possible, rather than making each individual article as strong as possible.
These days, if you want to be competitive, you need to focus on quality over quantity. You'll typically see better results if you have one amazing pillar piece that's 10,000 words long and packed full of original data than if you have 1,000 articles that are barely worth reading.
Some companies suffer from keyword cannibalization. Essentially, this means you have several articles on your website competing for the same target keyword or phrase. While this isn't going to earn you a Google penalty, it can limit your overall potential.
When you identify instances of keyword cannibalization, you have three main options for how to resolve it:
When creating new content, always make sure keyword cannibalization is not a concern.
You can avoid competition and accelerate your ranking improvements by appealing to more specific niches. Depending on your current competitive landscape and the nature of your business, that could mean appealing to a different target audience, focusing on more granular details of a specific product or strategy, or even speaking to people in a different area.
Local SEO is an immediately available strategic possibility worth considering on this front; can you adjust your content strategy to focus on people in a single geographic area, rather than competing on a national level?
Your content will perform better if it provides something truly original. That's hard to do in the modern world, when there are tens of millions of active blogs on the web.
Thankfully, there are many ways your originality can manifest, such as:
Finally, make it a point to get feedback on the content you do create. Collect comments, conduct surveys, and get opinions from content creators you respect. If there's a way you can improve, you'll hear about it.
Creating effective content for an SEO campaign is more challenging than it's ever been in the past, but it's certainly not impossible. If you're willing to work with skilled professionals, and you're not afraid to adjust your strategic targets, you can create a much more robust portfolio of keyword optimized content pieces.
