If you’re on this blog, you must have heard of SEO — search engine optimization. SEO is by far the most convenient method to improve your websites’s ranking on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yandex. For a web page to be displayed on top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), a combination of on-page and off-page SEO is established and followed to generate successful results.
The entire purpose of SEO is to give your web page a high ranking on the search engine. Hence, many people hire affordable SEO services or outsource this department. Successful, keyword-rich SEO allows your website/web page to have a dominant online presence. The goal here is to rank your website on the first page of a search engine.
Changes In The Industry
With time, the industry has shifted from a keyword-rich approach to a more topic-focused approach. The best example of this is AdWords to Google. It is pretty clear that because of the change in the Google algorithm, Google has changed its policies. SEO has been deemed dead by some, but is it dead?
The answer is no!
SEO is not dead!
Is The Era Of Keywords Dead?
The policies and procedures of optimization have changed dramatically. You cannot simply spam the content on your website with keywords to make it optimized. It has been depicted that the use of keywords has lost its value over the more contextual “topic-driven approach.” It simply is a wrong judgement.
Both methodologies can be used hand-in-hand to optimize SEO that’s being done on any web page.
Advantages Of Topic-Focused Content Marketing
It is extremely clear that keywords will always be an important factor in optimizing any content. To pick correct keywords, it’s crucial to select a topic for the content. This allows you an extra edge over your competitor. Topic-driven content marketing comes with certain advantages:
- This strategy can help you arrange keywords for further related topics and sub-topics.
- Allows you to create a more relevant topic to attract more traffic.
- You’ll be able to create an optimized interlinked web of content.
How To Create An Effective Blend Of Topic-Driven Content By Using Keywords?
It is important to discuss how to optimize your web page and improve its online presence by the use of correct content marketing tools. This is all based on an effective content marketing strategy.
Website Audit
To progress further to obtain a fully optimized website, it’s very important to understand your leads and point of sales funnel leakage. This calls for a complete website audit. A thorough website audit enables the users to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the pages.
There is a huge possibility of having top-quality pages sitting on Page 2 of the SERPs (or perhaps — gulp — even lower). To omit this possibility, you have to review your web pages in detail and compare them with the competitors. Self-evaluation is also crucial. Once you know where you’re lacking, it becomes easy for you to prioritize work and set goals according to the current performance.
Improve Page Ranking
After detecting such pages, you can take certain measures to improve their online presence.
- Create content that can be linked to the specific page you want to optimize.
- Add backlinks to the page that needs optimization.
- Improve the existing content as more readable and efficient for the users.
- Increase engagement with the audience on these pages.
It is also advised to create a content marketing strategy based on performance. The results of your strategy can be seen when your web pages are leading to conversions. We need to impress the client we are working for, and the content should be strong enough to convert a general visitor into a customer.
Online Organic Presence
To determine your organic presence on any web page, it is important that you assess the keyword ranking on your web pages. You might come across many keywords with no use to your site. Therefore, you must target keywords with high-volume search ratios. Selection of the correct keywords improves your online presence.
Consider internal linking and backlinking your web pages. Google Search Console is an optimal tool to understand them and analyze the traffic volume and the source from where you obtained this traffic.
Metrics Of The Users On Your Site
Google Analytics is a great tool to understand the users and their actions on your site. This tool is available for free and provides all aspects to measure the number of users, the source of traffic and what kind of people have decided to look at your website.
Set Strategic Goals
Each web page serves a different purpose on your website. To understand and identify your performance, it is important to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and set goals that can be achieved:
- Creation of optimized content that generates traffic on the website.
- acement of correct keywords at the appropriate location and the addition of related keywords to improve ranking.
- Content must be striking enough to generate conversions. Content that does not lead to a sale despite being optimized is useless for the stakeholders.
Establish A Strong Grip Over Content You’re Providing
Create content that provides the most accurate and relevant information for the audience. It is important that the content you choose for marketing your website and enabling an online presence must be a perfect blend of targeted keywords and topic-focused. Identify keywords that are most relevant and often searched. Do not hesitate in adding them in the title, heading and even meta tags of your web page.
Do not hesitate to work on the SEO of your website. The reign of SEO is not over yet. Policies and procedures have been optimized to prevent the developers and marketers from injecting spam on the web pages. Combine your knowledge of SEO with the basic optimized rules and you are bound to make any web page rank at the top, where it certainly deserves to be positioned.
Construct Site Architecture
Use a down-pyramid approach divided by categories to construct a framework of your website. The idea is that you create sub-topics for a piece of content and interlink them together. This interests the reader into clicking on links to find out what the “highlighted” content is about.
To generate related keywords and plan a topic for your next content, Google Keyword Planner is a great tool. Several other tools are also available online. Once a major topic is completed with sub-topics interlinked, you can then find a new topic to work on. Select the keywords that have the highest search volume in a search engine.
Competitive Analysis
One of the best ways to figure out where you stand and to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses is to analyze your competitors. You can use competitive analysis tools such as SpyFu, SemRush and several others to see what your competition is offering on their web pages. Analyze these categories:
- Keyword Gap: This feature allows you to compare your keywords inserted in the content alongside your competitor. Notice the keywords they have placed on certain aspects of content.
- Ranking of Pages: Evaluate the web pages that have a senior rank on Google results and focus on the areas that have enabled the page to rise to the top.
- Backlinks: The most important goal for any SEO-driven content should be the number of backlinks it can attract. Adding a backlink improves the position of a certain post on the SERPs and also helps other posts and pages improve their presence as well.
- Social Engagement: It is a worthy aspect of SEO. Social engagement is necessary to establish an online engagement with people who may turn out to be your clients. The strength of social engagement can be seen through the number of comments, likes and shares on each post.
Conclusion
SEO is not just about having a topic to write on with keywords. It involves a lot of steps, such as adding meta tags and links. Links involve outbound and interlinking of the content. Do you know that a link that exits from one website to another is termed as an outbound link?With the help of topic-driven content marketing and more relevant keyword usage, you can easily generate the desired traffic on your web pages. It also increases the reach of your content marketing strategy. This helps your important and dominant web pages to be positioned on the top of the SERPs. And that is a goal any SEO expert would want to reach in a minimum amount of time.
Regular evaluation of your website traffic and its content on each web page allows you to understand what your strengths and weaknesses are and the adjustments you should make. Interlinking the content that is already optimized strengthens its appearance on search engines.