The Chat - Content for Marketing: Part 2

Key Discussion Points

1. Understanding SEO Optimization

• Purpose: SEO ensures content is discoverable by your audience through search engines, helping solve their problems.
• Core Concept: Optimization is not just about writing but structuring content to be easily indexed and ranked by search engines.

2. Steps to Optimize Content for SEO

1. Keyword Research:

• Identify and analyze relevant keywords.
• Study top-ranking articles for those keywords to understand their structure, content depth, and use of images or videos.

2. Content Quality:

• Content should come from subject matter experts rather than generic writers for authenticity and accuracy.
• Ensure the tone and structure are tailored to your audience.

3. Key On-Page SEO Elements:

• Keyword Placement:
  • Integrate keywords organically into headings, subheadings, and body content.
  • Avoid keyword stuffing; aim for optimization.
• Headings (H1, H2, etc.):
  • Ensure headings align with keywords and accurately represent the content.
• Images & Videos:
  • Include relevant visuals to complement the content.
  • Optimize images with descriptive alt text.
• Internal & External Linking:
  • Internally link to related articles or resources on your website to boost site crawlability.
  • Use credible external links to enhance content authority.

4. SEO Misconceptions:

• Search engines encourage well-optimized content.
• Optimization helps search engines understand your content, improving ranking potential.

5. Mobile Optimization:

• Importance: Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in rankings, especially for local searches.
• Impact: Lack of mobile responsiveness can result in lower rankings compared to competitors.

6. User Experience in SEO:

• A well-structured article with clear headings, summaries, and readability benefits both readers and search engines.
• Use navigation-friendly layouts and content that naturally incorporates SEO elements.

7. Competitive Insights:

• Study competitors’ keyword usage and content structure.
• Understand how keyword frequency contributes to rankings without overstepping into “keyword stuffing.”

The Chat – Content for Marketing: Part 2 – Optimizing for Search Engines

00:00- Terry: 

Welcome to “The Chat”, where we take you behind the inbound scenes of some of the world’s fastest growing companies. For the past nine years as Chatmetrics, we’ve had an exclusive inside view of how these industry leaders are revolutionizing inbound marketing and sales across diverse sectors. Each week we bring you conversations with top minds in marketing and sales, sharing insider secrets and strategies that drive inbound success.

00:39- Terry: 

Join us on “The Chat”, your front row seat to the future of inbound.

00:51- Terry: 

What about optimizing content for search engines? is it possible that I understand about SEO articles and blog posts, but it’s much more than that? when you’re optimizing for search engines, what would, and if your audience can’t find it, cause when it’s all said and done, that’s what the search engine does.

01:08- Terry:

It helps your audience find your content that’s going to help them solve their problems.what are some ways that we can make sure that we’re optimizing the content, for search engines?

01:21- Pal: 

again, it starts with research. you need to find out the keywords that you’re trying to convey.

01:28- Pal: 

If there is a topic that you’re writing about, for example, how to run paid ads on Google or whatever the topic might be, again, do the, the first step is you go and check out, probably search for that keyword, see what comes out. if the first five people, what have they written about it?

01:45- Pal: 

How long have they gone? what kind of content have the use of these images, videos? What is it that they’ve done? content has to come from the right knowledge and the right intent. I think that’s the core ingredient of good content. If, we give our content to be written by a professional content writer who’s not a technician by any means his or her research will be dependent on information that they don’t fully understand And if it comes from a person who wants to educate you, is not a professional writer, but has the knowledge of that niche, I think I would rather read that content than some content written by some pro who knows nothing about my niche.

02:30- Pal:

Absolutely. But for the reader, it might still sound wonderful. For the SEO, it might still do a great job because that’s their profession. But, I don’t think it’ll be very fruitful of content.Once you have decided what content I, what topics are you picking and then, you’ve sat down, you’ve wrote your content.

02:51- Pal: 

one thing you have to keep in mind that, the keywords that you pick, now if we come to page specific SEO, that, or keyword specific, then, the keyword that you’ve picked should be present in your content that you’ve written. And, obviously, it’s, it should be in a very organic manner.

03:08- Pal: 

and. I don’t think any search engines actually hate or they want to fork out SEO written content. They want you to write SEO content because that’s the only way their search engines, their bots, and their crawlers understand that, how much weight should they give to a particular page. If you do not optimize their con, your content, they can’t do it for you.

03:33- Pal: 

So it’s exactly what they wanted to do. People think that, no, nobody wants me to write. They don’t want me to write SEO content. No, it’s wrong. They do want you to write SEO content. They do want everyone to write SEO content. And because that’s easy for them now to decide who’s done a good job, who has not.

03:50- Pal: 

whereas if you’ve written great content, you haven’t optimized that, in terms of what H1 headings should be, the main title of the page, that should also be research specific. Okay. If you’re writing about content writing, for, amateurs or something like that as a keyword, let’s say, and then you’re heading off your pages, something like, content writing for everyone, something like that, or has no mentions of content writing, then it’s a wrong signal for SEO.

04:19- Pal:

And that’s not what Google wants. They don’t want you to write the right content. sorry, please go ahead.

04:26- Terry:

No, I was just going to say, so SEO in this,discussion is really about search engine optimization of the particular article. SEO itself has got so many other,components to it, but search engine optimized article very specifically making sure that the keywords of the topic or the content, that you’re writing about are there so that the search engines can find it and that they do see that this would be relevant to somebody that’s, if somebody’s looking for content for marketing for amateurs, then in the, in there, it’s got to actually say content for marketing for amateurs.

05:01- Terry: 

Google’s not a mind reader in terms of if you’ve just got talking about all of this stuff and it’s just not clear what it’s, what it’s about. So I think that clarity helps with the reading too, quite frankly, with people reading it.

05:13- Pal: 

That’s right. Exactly. Yes.

05:14- Pal: 

coming back to the, we left off, you need to optimize your content, add some images there, add the right images that, cause, search engines can actually contemplate what is in the image. If there is any text on the image, they can even not necessarily read that text, but, they can go to those lengths that, so what’s on that image.

05:36- Pal: 

The videos, the videos that he embed, make sure they’re relevant videos. Even if they’re not your videos, if they complement that content, then they should be, I would prefer to pick a video that is relevant and has some good views in on it because then it has some credibility associated with that.

05:56- Pal: 

So yeah, I think that sums up that, how do you optimize, your headings, your content. subheadings, your content in between, your images, your videos, any PDFs you want to attach, or any other, other. Resources that you want to point to, some links going to some other websites or something, they better be making sense.

06:17- Pal: 

And if you have relevant content within your website, then you have to do your internal linking so that you’re giving this weight to other pages that Google may want to crawl. That’s a huge part of optimizing also.

06:30- Terry: 

Okay. Okay. So linking back then to relevant articles to the keywords or the topic that you’re writing about for this particular article, or that might expand on it, for instance, the relative.

06:40- Pal: 

Exactly. So if you have prepared your content to the level that you know you’re starting with content writing basics, stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four, and your first article that you write should, have some internal links going to stage two. Okay. Within your website and their Google will definitely crawl if you’ve done the right thing and then they might find some weight to it.

07:03- Pal: 

Whereas if it is not internally linked, they might come back to that lot later when they discover that page directly. So that’s the job of internal links so that they point the crawlers that Okay, I’m talking about, content writing for social media, link, go back to that page. they might want to go there and they see, oh, this is great content too.

07:24- Pal: 

This is also very qualified, see what’s the competition for that keyword. If it is not comp, no competition there, you might just start ranking for that particular keyword right away.

07:35- Terry: 

all of these things that, and that can affect the overall, speed of SEO for the entire site really can’t it?

07:41- Pal: 

Absolutely. You don’t want the crawlers to stop where they could have gone further and research more about. You might have a content that’s written down on level four of a page that you know, a sub page of a sub page or whatever.

07:56- Pal: 

they might not dig that deep as crawlers has limitations. but if you’re pointing it in very well written article or blog or video, whatever, they might just, take a step and go and read that content and classify that as some weight to that content. So internal linking is critical and external linking, obviously.

08:20- Terry: 

So it, it appears to me that, aside, as well as the, linking to relevant articles, a well written, content, well written content for marketing. Really, what should almost naturally be SEO optimized, you wouldn’t have to say SEO optimized. The SEO optimization, additional components might be, the linking to relevant articles and images and, the alt text on the images and so forth, but a well written article that is easy to read and easy to navigate for the reader incorporates all of those things.

08:59- Terry: 

It’s clear headings. It’s clearly sending the message in the heading what the content is about and it’s, there should be a clear heading, so people, somebody wants to scan rather than read the whole thing through, or there should be a small summary at the front that will give you exactly what a summary is of that piece of content on the way through.

09:16- Terry: 

so it almost appears to me that a naturally well written, piece of content for marketing is in fact, SEO optimized from the writing perspective. It’s done properly.

09:28- Pal:

I’ll give you a tip. If you want to ever research it yourself, you pick up a keyword that you want to rank for. Go to Google, pick the first three or four sites.

09:37- Pal: 

You can go as long as 10 pages, but go for the next, the first two or three or four of them. Go to that page. And find on that page how many times that particular keyword has been repeated. Now, as we all hear this that, do not repeat your keywords too much. It’s called keyword stuffing. I’m talking about the most competitive keywords on the web.

10:02- Pal: 

And you will see the first four have got that keyword repeated at least 50 times on each page. So is that keyword stuffing? No, it’s called keyword optimized. So that tells you that, you can do that research by yourself. If you would find any one ranking for such keywords and doesn’t have that keyword on that page, Show me that website because I’ve never seen one.

10:25- Terry: 

Yeah, it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen for sure. And what about mobile, mobile friendliness? Is that, does that have an impact?

10:34- Pal:

Yeah, it has a huge impact. Huge impact when it’s searched from the mobile because obviously Google has got the data. They know that, these kind of searches more happen on mobile searches.

10:47- Pal:

And, the other times, they know that this mostly happens on the web, on the desktop. More or, equally but that being said, it’s a very rare difference that, you will go and search something, you might be searching for a, a blender, that you need for a kitchen, on your mobile.

11:06- Pal:

And then you do the same on your desktop. You will see some difference of the results, mainly in ads, but, the organic, you won’t see much difference. So you would see the organic difference when you’re searching for some things like, local,service providers like electricians or, cleaners and stuff like that.

11:29- Pal: 

that’s when, if your mobile, which these kinds of searches happen more on mobile than desktops, because, it’s, household, moms and, elderly people, whoever they’re searching on their phone, they don’t go to a desktop and, do that small search.

11:44]- Pal: 

So that. That might differ from what it shows on the desktop compared to a non optimized website for mobile. it has differences, but it’s not that you will see in every search.

11:58- Terry: 

do, does it matter from an SEO perspective? Whether a website is mobile friendly. So do the crawlers actually recognize whether a website is optimized for mobile or not, and would make a decision to, reduce the level of importance when somebody searches for that particular keyword.

12:16- Terry: 

we’re going to show you that lower down the ranking on mobile because it’s not mobile. whereas, for instance, on the desktop, you might rank number one on the desktop. But if it’s not mobile optimized, is it likely that you could rank number three on, mobile or is it the same on, but would it be the same on both?

12:32- Pal: 

No, I think it will differ. So for example, the crawlers, do have, the ability to read content and, follow your pages, follow your links. They also have somehow the ability to see the layout of the website because their entire job is to figure out if your website is, structured.

12:53- Pal:

Is it user friendly or not? So more than mobile friendly and responsive,to the screens, their simple intent is that, if it is user friendly, so if it is not responsive at all, it’s just not going to fit into any mobile. I think it’s then gone to the next level of decision. That’s that from my understanding, if I was a crawler, what would I do?

13:16- Pal: 

If I had 5, 000 people to rank and I’ve been given 10 positions.only out of those 5, 000, I got to find the best 10. So if I see out of those 5, 000, they’re like 4, 500 doesn’t have a mobile friendly website, then I already picked the remaining and I see select out of those, which 10 should I want to rank now, if out of those You know, 5, 000, all 5, 000 have got responsive websites.

13:44- Pal: 

Then I go to the next level that, who’s got the best content, who’s got the best links, who’s got the best backlinks coming to the website and all that. So I think it’s all dependent on the competition. What does, even search engines and crawlers decide later on that who ranks that, who goes second, third, fourth.

14:00- Pal: 

but it’s in real time. it hardly matters that, if you’re ranking on desktop for, number three for something. Search on mobile and you’re not there. it’s a rare chance. But, if you are not mobile friendly, and there is a lot of competition, everybody else is mobile friendly, then it’s a chance that you won’t rank.

14:18- Pal: 

on desktop either

14:19- Terry: 

at all yeah of course yeah so if there wasn’t much competition i understand it maybe be different on both but if it’s very competitive then it wouldn’t even consider ranking on the desktop yeah

14:31- Pal: 

If you’re the only best content there they will still rank you regardless of what your website looks like yeah because you’re the only one talking about that content yeah but competition that makes a decision