The rules for
effective SEO have shifted seismically over the past few years.
Experts offer tips on the current state of SEO and how you can use it
to maximize your investment in content in 2016.
Marketers are
beefing up their investments in content, but to leverage those
investments, they’ll also have to put some time and effort into
learning the new rules for SEO. The days of driving traffic to your
site by packing headlines with keywords are long gone, experts say,
and the new SEO strategy revolves around another big-money marketing
focus: experience.
“Historically, the
recommendations around SEO have been … to focus on keywords,”
says Martin Laetsch, director of online marketing at Beaverton,
Ore.-based marketing automation company and SEO consultancy Act-On
Software Inc. “The reality is search engines are getting much
smarter. The content creator is having a lot less control over how
their pages are showing up and what words they’re showing up for.”
According to an
August 2015 study on the future of SEO by Moz Inc., a Seattle-based
SEO consulting company, the most important factors for SEO impact
next year will be mobile-friendliness, which will increase in impact
by 88%; analysis of a page’s perceived value (up 81%); usage data
such as dwell time (up 67%); and readability and design (up 67%). SEO
factors that the study reported will decrease in impact are the
effectiveness of paid links (down 55%) and the influence of anchor
text (down 49%).
Here, experts offer
six tips on how to use SEO to maximize your content marketing
investments.
1. Intention is
everything.
You no longer need
an exact keyword to offer a relevant search result, says Cyrus
Shepard, director of audience development at Moz. “In the old days,
it was about getting the click. Now search engines are seeing how
people are interacting with your website: Are they going back and
clicking on results, or are they finding the answers they’re
looking for when they’re on your site? Today it’s about the
post-click activity. Not only do you have to get the clicks, but you
have to satisfy user intent.”
2. Keywords
aren’t the be-all and end-all.
Including keywords
in headlines is becoming less important, Shepard says. “Google has
gotten better about interpreting meaning. It used to be that if you
wanted to rank for ‘best restaurants,’ you had to say ‘best
restaurants’ three or four times. It’s still helpful to mention
‘best restaurants,’ but the semantic meaning is becoming much
more important. Now you can just talk about great dining experiences,
and the search engines will pick up on it.”
Adds Laetsch:
“Historically, we wanted to get a keyword in the body copy or in
the meta description. Now that’s all gone out the window. As the
search engines get smarter, they start to think about other words
that you expect to be in that article, what will signal that this is
an authoritative article on the topic. If you were writing an article
about the Apple Watch, you might have the words ‘Apple,’
‘iPhone,’ ‘Watch,’ ‘apps’ and ‘time.’ If those are in
the body copy, it sends signals to the search engines that this is a
pretty good article.”
Seventy-five percent
of search queries are between three and five words long, so you
should write headlines accordingly, he adds. “The search engines
are figuring out that if people search for the word ‘marketing,’
or any one- or two-word query, they don’t get the results they
want. To get quality results that are most likely to answer their
question, they have to go to three-, four- or five-word queries. As
content creators, when you’re thinking about optimization, you have
to think about that.”
3. Focus on the
user experience.
"Google,
right now, is making 500 algorithm changes a year,” Laetsch says.
“Every change is focused on making sure that when someone searches
on Google, if they get the right result on the first few pages,
they’ve got a great experience. It’s not, ‘How am I going to
tweak the engine or trick Google, Bing or Yahoo?’ It’s how you
make sure that your content is the best possible content on the
Internet for the words that you care about.”
Thus, original
content is becoming more important than ever, says Rhea Drysdale, CEO
of Outspoken Media Inc., a Troy, N.Y.-based SEO
consulting firm. “The more original content that you can
produce—whether it’s an image or a video, or long-form content,
anything you can put together that’s going to justify someone
wanting to read it or share it—the better.”
While articles with
a “top five” list format often are clickable, Drysdale suggests
using them sparingly. “People like things that they can quickly
digest, but it doesn’t necessarily have much weight with search,”
she says. “You have to make sure that whatever comes after the
number makes sense and is useful.”
Create an editorial
calendar to appeal to your customers’ interests, Laetsch says.
“That’s the most important thing that a marketer can do for SEO
in 2016. Your content has to be original and targeted to your
audience. If you curate content, take a paragraph from another
article or site, and give them full credit and add an attribution,
but add a paragraph or two in your own voice: ‘Here’s why I think
it’s relevant.’ You’re adding a journalistic voice and making
it your own.”
4. Size matters.
Longer articles,
between 1,200 to 1,500 words, perform better in search, on average,
Laetsch says. “It’s significantly different than it was two or
three years ago, when 300 words was a pretty long page. Longer
articles are getting more traffic, and they’re ranking higher in
SEO, especially for competitive terms. The changes that Google is
making, and the reason they’re making these changes, is to make
sure they’re sending traffic to pages that delight humans.” He
suggests breaking up long-form content with subheads, bullet points
and images throughout the copy to make it easy for readers to more
quickly scan and digest it.
Longer articles
perform better in search results because there are more words and
images to rank on the page, Shepard says. “People are sharing
longer articles on social media more, and linking to them and citing
them more. Shorter articles do well sometimes, but on average, longer
articles tend to perform better.”
5. Optimize for
mobile.
More people are
reading news on their smart phones, so it’s important to ensure that
your content is searchable there, says Derek Edmond, managing partner
and director of SEO and social media strategies at KoMarketing
Associates, a Boston-based B-to-B SEO and social media marketing
consultancy. “Making sure Google can understand the content that’s
found within a mobile app, and leveraging the marketing of the app
with respect to SEO, is an opportunity on the consumer and B-to-B
marketing side.”
6. Use unique
images.
While images aren’t
as big of a referral source in Google as they used to be, having
unique images on your site is valuable, Shepard says. “The same
image can show up in hundreds of places around the Web, but having
unique content around those images is what makes it stand out. I’m
not opposed to using stock images to illustrate a point, but any time
you can create something that’s custom or use unique photography,
that will pay off more in the long run.”
The most important
SEO tip for 2016 is to focus on your audience, Shepard says. “In
the past, it was about marketers trying to promote what they wanted
people to see. Today it’s about delivering what people actually
want to see that will give you an SEO ranking boost.”
Adds Laetsch: “The
reason we’re doing optimization and want to show up in Google, Bing
or Yahoo is not because we make money because we show up No. 1 or No.
2. The reason we want to rank well in the search engine is so that
our audience, the people we’re trying to reach, have a great
experience. It doesn’t matter how high you rank if your target
audience goes to your site and they’re not happy.”
