{"id":42783,"date":"2017-11-15T10:00:16","date_gmt":"2017-11-15T18:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/?p=42783"},"modified":"2023-03-31T14:37:27","modified_gmt":"2023-03-31T21:37:27","slug":"prioritize-seo-content-strategy-in-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/prioritize-seo-content-strategy-in-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019ll be 12 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.<\/p>\n

I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?<\/p>\n

I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, \u201cI want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We\u2019re in the business of communications\u00a0\u2014 crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.<\/p>\n

We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.<\/p>\n

\"seo<\/p>\n

I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.<\/p>\n

SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawl-ability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in an SEO<\/a> content strategy.<\/p>\n

The Job of an SEO<\/h2>\n

Here’s an infographic you\u2019ve probably seen before. It\u2019s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO\u2019s domain.<\/p>\n

\"seo<\/a>
Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There\u2019s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But, if we accept this diagram at face value, then we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.<\/p>\n

For instance, look at the on-page factors. You\u2019ll see content and you\u2019ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.<\/p>\n

\"content<\/p>\n

Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawl-able, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals, and are parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I\u2019d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You\u2019re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawl-able code. Not having these things will<\/em> hurt you, but having them won\u2019t give you a competitive edge.<\/p>\n

Remember what Google said \u2014 the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.<\/p>\n

Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority<\/h2>\n

Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.<\/p>\n

1. Content is in your control.<\/h3>\n

When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you\u2019re not buying links (and you’d better not), you\u2019re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.<\/p>\n

Who links to you is an X factor. It\u2019s not as squarely in your control. What is<\/em> in your control? Content.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
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Who links to you is an X factor not in your control. What is in your control? #Content.<\/a><\/div>\n

Click To Tweet<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

2. Content has trackable metrics.<\/h3>\n

What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.<\/p>\n

Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • The number of thin pages that you make better.<\/li>\n
  • The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.<\/li>\n
  • The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    \"leading<\/p>\n

    What\u2019s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you\u2019re creating more great content.<\/p>\n

    3. Bigger sites make more money.<\/h3>\n

    When your boss asks you, \u201cWhat\u2019s the ROI of this content initiative?\u201d you can say that big sites make more money.<\/p>\n

    When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper.\u00a0WaPo grew\u00a0WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.<\/p>\n

    How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.<\/p>\n

    Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.<\/p>\n

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