CEO and Founder of Sosemo, an award-winning digital marketing agency that specializes in search marketing and paid social media marketing.
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You can achieve meaningful ROI through stand-alone SEO efforts, but for sustained and robust growth, it's crucial to complement SEO with a comprehensive content marketing strategy. When seamlessly integrated, SEO and content marketing have the potential to emerge as the most effective digital channels, primarily because they're not reliant on continuous spending and they grow organically over time. Even if content production halts, ROI persists—a unique advantage over even organic social media, which hinges on fleeting viral moments that dissipate over time.
Contrary to common misconceptions, an abundance of content isn't mandatory. The key lies in strategic topic selection rather than random choices. Opting for a strategic approach minimizes content production efforts while maximizing ROI.
Here are five steps to help you plan and execute a content marketing strategy that delivers maximum ROI without unnecessary investments.
1. Select Topics Based On Keyword Research
Search engines can be likened to a vast database of intentions. Therefore, keyword research is market research. Literally tens of thousands of unbiased respondents are raising their hands through their search behaviors and telling us what information, products and services they are interested in. It makes sense to develop content based on an analysis of your target audience’s interests, right?
Elevating this approach involves conducting a competitive analysis to pinpoint keywords that are more feasible to rank for in the organic search results. Taking it a step further, you can conduct a gap analysis to identify keywords that generate substantial search volume but return less content to compete within the search results. Subsequently, you can determine content topics that align with your target keywords.
2. Optimize Content For Target Keywords
When crafting optimized content, there are numerous best practices to consider. These include incorporating target keywords in headers, aiming for a keyword density of 10%, and featuring target keywords in both the opening and closing sentences. The list goes on. However, in a scenario where all other ranking factors are equal, the crucial determinant for ranking higher than the top sites is having better-optimized content. This underscores the importance of selecting content topics based on keywords with both high search volume and lower competition, simplifying the content optimization process by loosening requirements.
Additionally, this approach allows optimized content to provide a more natural reading experience without the need for excessive keyword stuffing, preserving the clarity of your messaging and safeguarding your brand value.
3. Set Up A Resource Center Vs. A Blog
The challenge with a blog lies in the chronological ordering of articles based on their publication date. While new articles receive a freshness boost in search results, older ones are typically devalued and tend to lose visibility over time. Pagination and organization by month and year are the main culprits that signal the search engines to devalue articles organized in this manner. Articles buried deep within pagination or categorized with older dates may even be excluded altogether from search indexes due to storage limitations.
A more effective approach is to create a resource center featuring evergreen content organized by topic. Resource center articles tend to have a longer shelf life in the search results because older content isn't devalued in the same way, offering an effective method for maintaining search visibility over time.
4. Drive Links To Articles With Optimized Anchor Text
Link building has historically garnered a negative reputation, but the latest generation of link exchanges poses minimal risk to a website's ranking potential, unlike in the past. Additionally, when executed correctly, a comprehensive link-building campaign undeniably increases visibility.
Requesting that specific keywords be included within the anchor text used by third-party sites linking to your website remains highly impactful for increasing the search engine rankings for those target keywords. However, you must exercise caution to avoid overdoing this, as this may trigger red flags with the search engines that may lead to a ranking penalty or, more likely, cause the engines to disregard the link.
Considering the quality of the sites linking to yours is crucial. The timing and quantity of links also play a role, with certain thresholds potentially raising red flags. Nevertheless, a skilled practitioner can strategically execute a campaign with minimal risk. For those with ambitious growth goals, incorporating a well-thought-out link-building strategy into your plan is advisable.
5. Avoid The 'Load More' Functionality
The "load more" functionality, a content management system plug-in that should have been phased out years ago, poses challenges for search engine accessibility. If you opt for the "load more" functionality to enhance usability, be aware that there's a significant chance that the content below the initial load will be inaccessible to the search engines and won't be included in the search results. A simple test involves copying and pasting a block of content from below the first load, enclosing it in quotes and conducting a Google search. If the page doesn't appear in the search results, the content is inaccessible.
While there are workaround solutions to mitigate the issue, such as using a sitemap and placing pagination above the function, organizing articles by topic instead of relying on a long-scrolling page is a more effective approach for organic search engine visibility.
Conclusion
If strategically planned and executed, content marketing has the potential to yield a higher ROI compared to other digital channels, particularly as time progresses beyond the first year. This is because the visibility of content in the organic search results doesn't require continuous investment and tends to grow over time. However, achieving this level of success requires a meticulous selection of content topics based on comprehensive keyword research and a competitive analysis.
Make sure you optimize articles for target keywords following SEO best practices, and address any accessibility issues that might hinder search engine performance. You also need to structure content in a way that maximizes its value in the eyes of search engines, positioning it as evergreen and enduring. Additionally, carefully plan and execute an effective strategy for link building to enhance search engine visibility.
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