Last updated on June 26th, 2013
If you’re working to optimize your search engine ranking, there are many technical ranking factors you have to understand – fun stuff like page loading speed and latent semantic indexing.
To use a hackneyed metaphor, this is the brains of SEO.
But the red-blooded heart powering successful SEO is content. After all, the search engines really only care about you getting the brainy stuff right because it helps them find good, relevant content to show their users. Perhaps that’s why, through research we’ve conducted at MarketingSherpa, your peers told us that creating content is the most-effective SEO tactic.
Easier said than done
“You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I’m afraid, looks a [EXPLETIVE DELETED] mess.” – Julian Barnes
But here’s the rub. Much as the human heart is expressed in poetry and art, many marketers find it much less clear how to produce content then how to follow the technical aspects of SEO. The brain is logical; the heart is fickle.
In fact, marketers tell us that content is one of the most difficult things they do, trumped only slightly in difficulty by tradeshows (which require not only logistics and cajoling the sales team to stay on message, but also finding the coolest swag to get people to your booth…now that’s hard).
So when Nathan Williams asked me to write this guest blog post for SEO Advantage, I knew the message I wanted to tell you about producing content for SEO. I want to play Béla Károlyi to your Kerri Strug and let you know, “You can do it.”
Here’s why…
#1: You’re already producing content. A lot of it.
In fact, most of the activities your company engages in produce content. It just stays within the four walls of your company. Set it free.
Things like…
- Internal company emails (make sure to edit out confidential information, which may be less than you think)
- Answers to common customer questions through customer service
- Answers to common prospect questions by Sales
- Product demos and tutorials
- Customer testimonials (customers say nice things about your company to your employees, find ways to capture that in writing, audio, and video and get permission to use it).
To get your creative juices flowing, read on to see how a B2B company increased search engine traffic 157% with content in Content Marketing: Videos attract 300% more traffic and nurture leads.
#2: Your prospective and current customers want your content.
They’re turning to you for one of two reasons: either to overcome a pain point or to meet a goal.
Your product or service helps them do that. Your content can do the same on a lesser level as well.
One way to start helping them is to answer their questions. You’re already doing it every day, as mentioned in #1 above.
Just take those one-on-one, in-person conversations, emails, and phone conversations and turn them into content everyone can see.
Yeah, yeah, maybe you’ve got an FAQ on your website. That’s a start. But let’s think big for a moment. Why not:
- Write blog posts answering their questions
- Hold a webinar where attendees can ask questions live during the broadcast
- Pose some of the most common questions to a subject matter expert in your company or other industry expert on a podcast
Once you start producing this content, give your audience an easy way to contact you with more questions that will produce even more content.
Don’t know where to begin? Now sure how to conduct an interview? Here are 5 questions to ask subject matter experts to get the ball rolling.
#3: You don’t have to produce a lot of content, but you do have to know how to reuse it
That live webinar can be transcribed and placed on a landing page on your website (hello, long-tail search) that includes an embedded YouTube video (inbound channel be thy name) of the webinar replay and the slides themselves can be placed on SlideShare.
Once you get going, the possibilities are nearly endless. That original content is like a piece of sand in an oyster and can produce pearl after pearl of reused, yet still valuable content.
Get some more ideas for multiplying your content efforts in Reformat, Reuse, Recycle: 5 Strategies to Stretch your Marketing Content.
#4: Creating content is a business process like anything else
You don’t have to be Hemingway; you just have to be helpful.
Once you realize the task of creating content is a business process like anything else, you can set up project plans, workflows, systems, processes, and all that other fun B-school stuff to create an effective process.
You better do it
The second, less well-known part of the Béla Károlyi quote I used to encourage you above is “You better do it.”
If you overly rely on technical factors for your SEO, and don’t produce truly helpful, high-quality content, it’s only a matter of time before some math PhDs in Mountain View put you out of business with ever more accurate algorithms.