In our recent report, "Content Marketing in the Real World,” we asked real-life tech marketers to tell us what’s really going on behind the scenes at their companies when it comes to content marketing and search engine optimization. According to our research, 56% stated that SEO was a “must have” when writing content. (The remaining 44% of respondents said SEO was “nice to have.”) Additionally, 38% responded that content marketing success equated to improved search ranking.
What does this all mean? As a tech marketer, it’s clear you already understand the importance of content marketing—and you also know why SEO strategy matters. (After all, 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic searches!) But tying the two together can be a challenge: you need to write on-brand content that spurs action by the reader and ranks favorably within Google.
Easier said than done, right?
Here are a few points for you to keep in mind as a tech marketer if you’re looking to increase your SEO rankings through content marketing. Use these with new content or to revive older content that might need a refresh.
The first step in creating a strong SEO strategy is to figure out what you want to achieve with your content marketing. Do you just want more organic traffic overall? Or are you most concerned with directing traffic to specific pages? Do you want to write content that will generate more leads? Or content that better qualifies leads and reduces your sales cycle time? It may be tempting to say “all of the above!” but you can’t do it all. Instead, pick out your top priorities and the related KPIs you’ll use to measure success. Here are some ideas:
Whatever you're trying to achieve, decide what kind of content your audience needs to make this happen and fill in the gaps in your current content marketing as needed.
Tech marketing content can have its challenges. After all, you’re writing about specialized and often complex topics—and you need to do so in an easy-to-understand, yet thorough way. Here are some points to focus on in your content marketing.
The first step in quality content creation is analyzing your audience to understand their unique needs and peculiarities. Create buyer personas that speak to your customers’ personalities and challenges and use these to guide the kinds of content marketing you create. Remember, people don’t buy products…they buy solutions. Solve their problems vs. selling your product.
Focus on creating content using keywords your customers are searching for to make sure you’re appealing to their needs. According to the HubSpot State of Marketing Report, 71% of marketers said that using strategic keywords was their number one strategy for SEO.
When using keywords, however, be sure not to “overstuff” your content with them. Aim to incorporate them once approximately every 200 words, or as often as is natural within your text.
(Gone are the days of writing like a robot…Google is smart enough now that you can write for humans, not bots.)
When it comes to length for your content, longer may be best. Longer form content (1,500 words or more) helps boost your SEO ranking. But don’t forget to include images and lots of subheadings to break up long blocks of text.
Posting frequency is also an important factor. How often you should post depends on your marketing goals. For example, if your goal is to create greater brand awareness through your website, one to four times per week is ideal. If your goal is to maximize organic traffic to your company website, you should post three to five times per week.
Not only will frequent, quality content provide useful information for your current and potential customers, it also builds your company’s reputation as a thought leader in your field. And creating fresh content often provides a way to engage with and build trust with your customers. If new content creation isn’t always realistic, repurpose existing resources into different formats to help you reach more customers.
Further optimize your content by including links throughout the text. These can be internal links to other pages on your company website or links to any related blog posts you’ve written. It’s also good to include links to reputable external sources for an SEO boost. Just set external links to open in a new browser tab so as to not lead your visitors away from your website. (Internal links can open in the same window.)
Want more incoming links—also called backlinks—to your own website? Link building is another way to build your site’s authority and rank higher. Writing guest posts for other sites and including your own links within is one way you can do this. The more sites that you can get to link to your content, the better.
Today’s website visitors hate to wait. If you have a slow-loading site, here are ways you can increase page speed and reduce your bounce rate.
You know it’s good to include eye-catching images along with your content to engage readers and keep them on your website. But if you’re not optimizing your images, large file sizes can easily slow down your page load time and negatively affect SEO.
When it comes to file size, an image’s dimensions (width x height), file type, resolution, metadata and image quality all contribute to how “big” a file is. Here are some quick tips to how to optimize each of those criteria:
Looking for a tool to help you optimize images? We like Smush Pro, ImageOptim and EWWW Image Optimizer.
AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, is a mobile-specific page format that loads almost instantly on mobile devices. To load the content quickly, the AMP version of your blog posts won't load any Javascript files, stylesheets, head HTML or footer HTML.
If you’re using HubSpot for blog posts, turning on AMP is as easy as toggling a switch. However, it’s important to note that AMP is only available for blog posts (not landing or website pages) and views won’t be tracked on a contact’s timeline because JavaScript in HubSpot’s tracking code will be blocked.
A CDN, or content delivery network, is a network of servers distributed across the globe. By using a CDN, your content will be served up by the server closest to the visitor, reducing page load time.
Use a tool like Minify to clean up your code by removing white space, stripping comments, combining files and optimizing common programming patterns.
Help Google understand what your page is about by adding (mostly) behind-the-scenes tags to content and imagery.
Title tags show in the browser tab and in your SERP listing. They should be under 60 characters and as relevant to your content as possible. Here are some other tips:
Meta descriptions are a sentence or two that further describe what your page is about. They should be under 160 characters and will show up on the SERP listing. Always end your meta descriptions with a good ol’ CTA, like read, watch, learn, etc.
Image alt tags are great for screen readers, but also important for Google.
Need an example?
Schema markup provides search engines more specific information that is used to understand your content and provide readers with results more relevant to their search. For example, if you’re using the word “jaguar,” how does Google know if you’re talking about an animal, the car or the football team? Yes, it will reference the rest of the page to take a guess, but by adding schema markup, you can let it know for sure. Easy items to tag on a website include:
While you may understand the importance of increasing your SEO rankings, you might not have the time or expertise in house to do it. If you haven’t spent much time working on content marketing SEO in the past, you might find the competition to be fierce. In this case, it’s best to hire an expert to help you analyze and optimize existing content, and create new content as needed.
No matter which strategies you use to increase SEO rankings, one thing is certain. Patience is key. Building a strong reputation takes time, but we guarantee it will be vital to your company’s online success in the long run.