There’s no denying the close relationship between content and SEO. In fact, many of the SEO trends emerging in 2019 make one thing clear. You have to ‘bring it’ when it comes to your content in order to boost your SEO and get page one ranking. A good part of these efforts involves paying attention to content marketing trends and making them work for you.
Are you ready to dig in? Here are a few of the standout trends you should pay close attention to in the next six months.
Successful Brands Are Investing in Content Creation Processes
Content saturation is here, and it’s a real problem. In order to overcome this, brands must produce standout content. To do this, they are investing more money than ever into the content creation process. Not only that, but they’re also putting more thought behind content creation.
There’s a lot that’s involved in creating content that boosts SEO. Writing a quick piece, inserting some keywords, and adding a couple of images is no longer effective. Smart marketing professionals are creating processes to streamline content creation, using tools to improve the process, and dedicating more time and resources to the creation process.
Consider what it takes to produce a piece of quality content:
- Conducting online research to identify relevant topics and keywords.
- Selecting the specific topic for a piece of content.
- Determining the content format to be used (blog post, article, whitepaper, video, etc.)
- Writing or producing the content.
- Optimizing the content.
- Editing and proofreading.
- Pulling hot quotes for social media promotions, creating screenshots, creating blurbs or other short-form summaries, and other items to be used for content promotion.
- Publishing content to the chosen platform.
- Promoting content.
- Responding to user engagement.
By investing time and money into content, you ensure that you have what you need to produce a steady flow of content that increases SEO and ranks higher.
Authenticity is Becoming a Priority
What’s the connection between Authenticity and SEO? Customers are more likely to engage with brands they believe are authentic. They are more likely to consume content, and share content that they believe truly reflects a brand’s persona and values. In fact, 90% of Millennials state that authenticity is an important factor for them.
As a result, more brands are creating content that they believe will resonate with their followers, and that portrays them as being genuine and sincere. Unfortunately, there is often a disconnect. Marketing pros may believe that they are producing content that is authentic and transparent, but consumers often disagree.
Brands that do hit the mark are rewarded for their efforts. Customers reward authentic brands with social shares, likes, follows, recommendations, and backlinks. Each of these things drives search engine rankings either directly or indirectly.
Fortunately, there are things brands can do to create content that reflects authenticity.
- Create and maintain a consistent brand voice. Avoid changing the tone and ‘attitude’ reflected in your content in order to pander to a specific demographic. For example, a serious brand that suddenly begins communicating in slang and ‘netspeak’ isn’t going to impress a younger audience. Instead, they’ll earn eye rolls from that younger audience, and leave their base feeling abandoned.
- Deploy user-generated content as part of your marketing efforts. Positive testimonials, reviews, shared images and videos, and user stories all have a built-in authenticity to them.
- Share your values in your content. Discuss issues that are important to your team, and causes that you support. At the same time, avoid attaching your brand to trending causes and events simply for the social media traction. For example, the ‘Think Before You Pink Movement’ is calling out brands who leverage breast cancer awareness in their marketing campaigns without actually doing anything to support the cause.
- Create content that is honest, detailed, and accurate. Fix mistakes and acknowledge them. Be forthcoming and vulnerable.
Dig Deep to Create Content That Solves Problems And Answers Questions
It’s been long established that Google prefers longer content. The reason is that these posts tend to delve into a subject rather than providing a simple overview. Longer content tends to be better researched and comprehensive.
Content that contains examples, verifiable statistics, studies, and that links to reputable sources is going to get more engagement than content that isn’t. Professional copywriting services like WowGrade.net are emphasizing content products that include data and source reputable resources now more than ever. That engagement leads to improved rankings.
When well-researched content is combined with good formatting, and proper use of keywords, brands increase their chances of seeing their content in Google’s rich and featured snippets, in local 3 pack search results, and in the coveted ‘position zero’ on page one of search engine results for your business.
Topics Clusters Rather Than Keywords
Topic clusters are part of an SEO strategy that emphasizes relevant topics rather than keywords. With topic clusters, you create a comprehensive post or pillar page on a topic that is relevant to your audience, and that you want to be seen as an authority on. Within your pillar post, you link out to cluster content. These are related posts that focus on a specific subtopic within your overall subject.
For example, if you sell fitness related products you might create a pillar post on the topic of ‘Exercise And Maintaining Weight Loss’. Your cluster content may focus on topics such as:
- Understanding how exercise impacts metabolism.
- The role of muscle development and maintaining a healthy weight.
- Balancing calorie intake with physical exercise.
- Best exercises for maintaining your goal weight.
Thanks to updated search algorithms and Google’s RankBrain technology, search engines are better able to return results based on their relevance to a topic. This means that content can focus less on keywords, and more on covering subject matter thoroughly and accurately.
Final Thoughts
Each year, numerous content marketing trends emerge. We’ve waded through these, and picked the ones that we believe have the most potential for impacting your SEO. Implement one or more of these into your content strategy to see what your results might be.