Content marketing companies consistently stress the importance of SEO. However, the world of SEO can be tricky to navigate, especially since it is not always easy to understand what it is. As an expert content marketing company, Bluetext knows the ins-and-outs and the most effective ways to audit your current SEO process. To help you further understand the importance and relevance of SEO, we’re sharing some important insights. Here are the top 5 things you may not know about SEO:
- Relevancy Matters
Throughout the years, SEO standards have seen many changes. Search engines still reward those who backlink and use keywords, but only to a certain extent. In other words, it is important to stray away from packing keywords and backlinks into web pages, as search engine crawling algorithms can tell the difference between valuable and non-valuable keywords and backlinks. As a way to ensure that the different search engines know your content is valuable, focus hyperlinking to relevant keywords and phrases. For example, linking keywords like ‘article about brand evolution’ is better than linking words like ‘read our article about brand evolution here.’ Other ways to keep your content relevant is by getting rid of broken links and linking to newer resources.
- Update. Update. Update.
One thing many people forget to do is to update older content. For example, as good as it feels to hit submit on a blog post, it shouldn’t be the last time you look at or edit that post. It is crucial to review your older content to know what needs to be updated with new information. Although it may feel like you should solely focus on driving leads to newer campaigns, pages, and posts, investing time into updating older content can be an incredibly helpful way to get users to your pages. Moreover, crawling algorithms favor new content, so updating old content can be a great way to land your work on the first page.
- Images Should Be Optimized
Images are incredibly important to users during their search. However, it can still be very difficult for search engine crawlers to fully make sense of images. Alternative text is a great way to help search engines understand what your image is about. Additionally, when you further optimize your image files, you improve user experience, which, in turn, will decrease your bounce rate and increase average session duration. Here are a few other ways to optimize your photos:
-
- Reduce the size of your image files so the page loads faster
- Include a description that can help the user find what they are looking for
- Add a title to the image to help provide additional information
- Competitor Discovery Is Vital
There’s no doubt you know who your competition is. In fact, you probably keep a pretty close eye on your top competitors to get a sense of what they are doing and how you could improve (at least you should be). But, in today’s age of digital evolution, new brands are constantly popping up and established brands are constantly changing. As a top content marketing company, Bluetext suggests monitoring your top targeted keywords to see whether your competitors have started to rank above you. Conducting a proper competitor audit can help you get a game-plan in place before you lose your position and views.
- SEO Varies Country-To-Country
Having a high ranking webpage can be a tough feat in-and-of-itself. If you do business outside of the US, international SEO deserves separate attention from domestic SEO and adds another layer to the conversation. Although you may rank well on Google.com, you may not rank well on Google.ca or Google.mx. It is important to look at your audience and decide where your attention should be focused.
Even for a top content marketing company, there are still a lot of question marks surrounding SEO since search engines use proprietary and unknown algorithms. Even with these unknowns in the world of SEO, we still do know things that search engines reward. When launching a new campaign or just updating older content, be sure to keep our SEO tips in mind!