3 content marketing strategies to support SEO success

“When we think about [SEO] success, we often think about ranking on the first page of Google,” said Jon Lightfoot, founder and CEO of Strategic SEO Solutions, in a recent webinar. “But beyond ranking [at the top], there’s something more [important], which is ranking for the right keywords.”

Ranking for the topics your target audience is searching for doesn’t come from keyword stuffing or overemphasizing keyword density. Success in this area relies on crafting quality content that audiences love and search engines recognize as authoritative.

Here are three effective content strategies Lightfoot recommends marketers enact to support SEO success.

1. Identify user intent

“Intent is the purpose behind the [user’s] search,” Lightfoot said. “There are four buckets to understand and nurture when it comes to your strategy.”

The four areas of user intent he identified relate to specific content or services searchers are looking for. They are as follows:

• Informational: Searchers looking for information, such as an answer to a question.
• Navigational: Users looking for a specific website.
• Commercial: People researching a product or service.
• Transactional: Those who are searching for products or services to purchase.

“How do we harness this and use it in a way that’s effective for our companies? The first step is to perform keyword analysis,” he said. “The epicenter of this is understanding what people want to receive from these queries so you can then create the content that serves them.”

Analyzing keyword data to glean user intent means looking at more than just volume. It requires a thorough analysis of the types of content those words and phrases bring up in the search results and getting a sense of what audiences want from these searches.

This content was originally published here.