Learn SEO in 2017 — Move Up on Google the Easy Way
Okay, maybe it’s not easy. But it is getting more straightforward.
(If you’re new to SEO, be sure to read our thoughts on SEO prerequisites.)
As content creators move from being able to mindlessly hack search engines, to having to produce thoughtful content for actual human beings — the focus is now on creating things that people want to look at, read, and consume.
More specifically, the idea of helping prospects get what they want is a non-negotiable pre-requisite for any company who wants to be successful in this day and age.
The mindset spreads across domain expertise within businesses. From sales. To customer success. To website development. To content writing.
”Quality Content” and SEO are hopelessly intertwined. And that will increasingly be the case for the foreseeable future.
When crafting content, your #1 goal — above all others — is to make it easy for humans to quickly comprehend and navigate your page. That alone will get you about half of the way there, and you’ll have a better SEO foundation than most websites on the internet.
You could actually skate by on just knowing that, probably. But here’s a process that will get you started in the right direction and set you up for sustained branding success:
How to Create a Search-Engine-Optimized Content Framework
Step 1: Define pillar content.
That’s to say — what generic topics do you want your business to be known for? Productivity? Social media marketing tips? Recipes? There’s no reason you have to limit this to just one topic — but start with that for now.
Step 2: Take the generic term you’ve chosen, and type it into Google. Scroll down to look at “Searches related to your term” at the bottom of the SERP (search engine results page).
No doubt there are other ways (i.e. free and paid tools) that can help you go deeper. But this will help you get a decent grasp of what related topics people tend to search for.
A visual mind map sort of diagram can also help.
- The Main Idea is your pillar content (i.e. what you want your business to be known for).
- The Branches are major subtopics —topics of blog posts you want to write, for example.
- Twigs are even more specific sub topics. These can easily turn into specific blog post titles.
Building out something like this will help you when it comes to planning a content calendar weeks in advance — another useful best practice.
Step 3: Spend some time writing a long-form content piece (e.g. eBook, blog post) that targets this pillar topic in significant depth.
You‘ll want it to focus on pure, value-offering content to build awareness of your band and connection with potential new customers — but try to also thrown in a lead capture form. This is for the people who are further along on their customer-decision journey, which is to say — more immediately interested in buying.
Step 4: Continue building out quality content pieces that people resonate with, related to your pillar topic. These are the subtopics of your pillar content.
Step 5: Repeat the process by coming up with new pillar topics that house related subtopics as you see fit. As a general rule, maintain quality over quantity. But stay consistent.
That’s it. We promise that executing on this strategy (in a way that makes sense for your audiences and brand) will put you leaps and bounds in front of your competition who haven’t modernized their approach to content.
A couple high value SEO tricks you’ll want to pay attention to.
Link internally to other related pages that you wrote on the topic. Again, this goes hand-in-hand with helping users and computers navigate and understand your site.
In line with that, it’s not a bad idea to occasionally (1–5 times a post) link out to other reputable web pages that relate to the topic you’re writing about. You’re actually doing them a favor, and if your content is good — they’ll sincerely appreciate you for it. Why?
Because you’re providing them with backlinks. And backlinking is more or less synonymous with social proof — an extremely powerful agent of behavior change.
Long term, you’ll want to think about how to get what are called “high authority sites” — think any big, popular organization that people respect — to endorse your content by posting links to your site on one of their pages.
(There are numerous tactics for making this happen, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)
Sometimes it’s as easy as commenting on someone’s popular blog and including your name and site. But it usually involves developing a successful business relationship somehow. And asking the other party to promote you.
As alluded to numerous times, this entry is not a comprehensive guide to everything SEO.
But if you use this as a foundation to acquire a rough grasp of search engine optimization, seek out additional knowledge in the same vein, and then build out a SEO content framework for your business / brand / blog / etc. — your digital content will be in great shape for years to come.
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