What Content Marketers Need to Know About Search in 2019

Unlike content marketing (which is centuries old), SEO is a very new discipline. It has been around for just a couple decades, and it quickly became the primary digital focus for many marketers.

Yet, SEO cannot exist without content, and I am happy to report that the search industry has reached maturity when it goes back to basics: recognizing that content is the most important and fundamental part of the marketing puzzle. Now, with SEO maturing so quickly, there are still many misconceptions and misunderstandings around it. Those misconceptions may impact the content marketing process in a not-so-positive way.

Let’s clear things up a bit:

1. SEO Has Become Much More Integrated and Diverse

SEO used to be standalone: no one had any idea what SEOs were doing and how they got pages ranked. Many SEOs would ignore very important digital marketing aspects, including user experience, brand building, etc. The only purpose was to get a page ranked.

These days it’s finally different: SEO is just one element of success. It’s next to impossible to achieve high rankings without building authority and brand awareness, or without ensuring users are going to have a good experience using the site.

#SEO is just one element of digital success. It’s next to impossible to achieve high rankings without building authority and brand awareness, and delivering a great user experience Click To Tweet

Google has taken all of that in the account: they monitor how users interact with a website, how satisfied they are, and how quickly they find answers when landing on a page from search results. Google has made trust and authority important ranking signals.

As a result, there are fewer and fewer companies that focus on a single component of SEO (like link building) or even just SEO. Most companies are offering full-package internet marketing services that include video production, social media marketing and usability. Some companies even go beyond that by offering “integrated marketing services”. talkingAds, a company that oversees the entire marketing plan for its clients, describes the benefits of this approach in much detail and why it’s crucial for businesses:

The important elements in marketing communication are advertising, personal selling, direct marketing, public relations, website communication, sponsorship and social media presence. A disjointed approach isolates these functions that lead to non-consistency of brand value to the end-user.

Lonely Brand offers a few examples of integrated marketing and defines it as follows:

Integration means mapping your strategy to the reality of the customer.

Do you see where keyword research and data analytics fits in here? Exactly: like any other marketing channel, SEO goes back to the customer. If the customer is pleased, Google will catch on that.

2. SEO Is No Longer Focused on Exact-Match Strings

As an SEO, with a huge passion for writing, I think this is the most welcome development as far as I am concerned.

Remember the days when writers were given one phase and forced to use it a certain number of times within a copy?

Well, those days are happily over.

Search engines have moved beyond so-called “keyword strings”. They can now understand concepts, entities and topics. You can see the trend all over Google search results pages.

Try searching for something specific, like [good hiking spots], now scroll through those results. A few years ago, Google would focus on the exact match [good hiking spots] and show you results that have the exact phrase in their title tags. Now they’re much smarter than this. You’ll see a good mix of phrases that express the same thing, i.e. places nearby that are great places to hike.

Google understands all kinds of phrases that can satisfy the initial query and focuses on the quality of the results rather than matching to the query wording verbatim. Quality and depth of content have become much more important than the exact keyword you put on the page.

Action item: Use keyword tools that don’t focus on exact-match and give you a variety of phrases that can inspire more content angles. Ubersuggest is a great option. It’s open, completely free and offers a good selection of filters as well as a quick analysis of current search results for each query. But the best part is: it generates all kinds of keywords that relate to the term you type in.

Try it yourself: type in your term to see all kinds of synonymous phrases and varied angles.

For another example of how search engines have advanced, look at how Google clusters topics by entities (i.e. “brands”) they know about. If you type something generic, like [how to set up call forwarding], Google would know that the query may be multi-faceted, so it will allow you to quickly browse through a more specific answer right within the featured snippet:

Action item: When working on content, make sure you understand related subtopics and subcategories that need to be included in your article.

Use Serpstat to cluster your keyword lists by topics. They use Google results for each keyword in a list to identify how closely queries are related based on how many overlapping URLs there are ranking for each set of keywords. The fact that Serpstat isn’t using a traditional clustering technique (i.e. the one that groups phrases based on a common core term in each phrase) makes it a much smart and more up-to-date option to use nowadays:

[Read more about Serpstat’s clustering feature here.]

3. Search Gives Us Lots of Cues

Search has evolved. Google has become smarter at identifying search intent and giving their users exactly what they want. They have become better at identifying peoples’ struggles and serving the best answer within search results. They have learned to find questions behind queries and show their users more options for researching a topic.