10 SEO Tactics to Incorporate into Your Content Strategy

It’s well known that content is king, but if your company is producing tons of engaging and informative content without optimizing it—what’s the point? Implementing search engine optimization (SEO) tactics into your content strategy is the key to maximizing your brand visibility and boosting the searching engine ranking for your business.

Leverage these 10 SEO tactics to take your content strategy to the next level:

1. Utilize Keyword Research in Content Planning

Keyword research provides your business with specific search data that can help you answer questions such as:

• Which keywords are people searching for?
• How many people are searching for those keywords?
• In what format do they want that information?

When planning out your content, start by researching the types of questions that your target audience is asking and identify the specific keywords your company would like to target. Don’t forget to be competitive and strategic when selecting keywords by researching them based on the target region, industry, season and other relevant filters. Tools such as Moz, SemRush and Google Trends are just a few of the options available that can make this process much easier and effective. By understanding your audience’s mindset and accounting for micro-moments, you can create highly targeted content that drives action and boosts your website’s SEO.

2. Generate a Hub-and-Spoke Model

Creating a hub-and-spoke model for your content is important for SEO because it increases your search engine rankings around individual topics, as well as the main—or “hub”—topic. The hub-and-spoke model is important for content marketing and SEO because it creates authority around specific topics, increases the keywords you rank for, and generates more organic traffic and qualified leads. Some benefits of this model include improved organic internal linking and improved user experience.

3. Leverage the Inverted Pyramid

When using the inverted pyramid of journalism, the most newsworthy information—such as who, what, where, when, why and how—comes first and is followed by less important details. This is then concluded with any additional background information. Using this writing style helps clarify the keywords in your content, which is beneficial for SEO. Plus, having the main points available at the top saves your readers a lot of time searching for the most important information.

4. Update Content Regularly

Generally, everyone prefers to find and reference the most up-to-date information that is available. Incorporating regular content updates as part of your content strategy is not only beneficial for your SEO, but it also continues to build trust with customers and website users over the long run. Keep in mind that “regularly” means something different for every company, so be sure to research competitors to see how frequently they update their information. As a best practice, you should include dates on all blog posts so that readers know when they were last updated.

5. Utilize Subject Matter Experts

In addition to sourcing the most updated content, people also want to make sure that content is reliable and trustworthy. One way to demonstrate your expertise to readers is by including author bios for any blog posts or other content that is written by one of your company’s subject matter experts (SME). This helps build more trust, which in turn benefits SEO ranking because Google favors those pages that are most relevant to users.

Media interviews are another great way to showcase the expertise of your SMEs. This tactic is also beneficial because those SMEs will also be more likely to share the article with their networks, which further improves your brand visibility and SEO.

6. Promote Positive Company Reviews

Did you know that 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to make a purchase after reading a trusted review? It might seem difficult to track down reviews in the beginning, but many happy customers will be thrilled to write a nice review if asked. Additionally, creating a reviews page on your company’s website will make the reviews easier to find for prospective customers. Don’t forget to reply to any reviews, whether positive or negative, with a similar, structured response to build better brand awareness, as well as gain trust and credibility as a business.

7. Drive Direct Traffic to Your Website

Organic search is extremely beneficial when ramping up SEO efforts for your website. One of the most important ways to improve your organic search is by driving direct traffic to your site. Event sponsorship, TV ads, direct mail and ads in public spaces are just some of the ways to help boost you direct traffic.

8. Create “Link-Worthy” Content

External links are huge for SEO, but external links usually need to be earned. By creating great content with a unique angle, and doing some additional research and outreach, external links can lead to SEO success. On the flip side, creating content about a “hot take” or posting an ego-baiting awards list that mentions specific people or companies will likely result in a decent number of external links as well.

9. Ensure Your Site is Mobile Friendly

In 2019, Google switched to mobile-first indexing as the default for new websites and, this year, Google officially said goodbye to desktop crawls. This means that all websites are ranked using mobile-first indexing now. For this reason, Google recommends having a responsive website design that will adapt to mobile view. For example, PLIDCO, a leading manufacturer of pipeline repair and maintenance fittings, recently upgraded to a responsive website with enhanced design and functionality.

10. Improve Your Site Speed

Did you know that 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less? If your company site is running slow, it could likely be driving visitors away faster than you realize. Be sure to partner with your website developer to remove any unnecessary plugins, run frequent speed tests and adjust on the backend of your website as needed. When adding images or videos to your website, remember to compress images and use external hosting platforms, such as YouTube or Vimeo, so that you don’t slow down your website speed.