Marketers are beefing up their
investments in content,
but to leverage those
investments, they’ll also
have to put some time and effort into
learning the new rules for SEO. The days
of driving traffic to your site by packing
headlines with keywords are long gone,
experts say, and the new SEO strategy
revolves around another big-money
marketing focus: experience.
“Historically, the recommendations
around SEO have been … to focus on
keywords,” says Martin Laetsch, director
of online marketing at Beaverton, Ore.-
based marketing automation company
and SEO consultancy Act-On Software
Inc. “The reality is search engines are
getting much smarter. The content
creator is having a lot less control over
how their pages are showing up and what
words they’re showing up for.”
According to an August 2015 study
on the future of SEO by Moz Inc., a
Seattle-based SEO consulting company,
the most important factors for SEO
impact next year will be mobilefriendliness,
which will increase in
impact by 88%; analysis of a page’s
perceived value (up 81%); usage data
such as dwell time (up 67%); and
readability and design (up 67%). SEO
factors that the study reported will
decrease in impact are the effectiveness
of paid links (down 55%) and the
influence of anchor text (down 49%).
Here, experts offer six tips on how
to use SEO to maximize your content
marketing investments.
1Intention is everything. You
no longer need an exact keyword
to offer a relevant search result, says
Cyrus Shepard, director of audience
development at Moz. “In the old days,
it was about getting the click. Now
search engines are seeing how people are
interacting with your website: Are they
going back and clicking on results, or are
they finding the answers they’re looking
for when they’re on your site? Today it’s
about the post-click activity. Not only do
you have to get the clicks, but you have to
satisfy user intent.”
2 Keywords aren’t the be-all and
end-all. Including keywords in
coreconcepts SEO
November 2015 | marketing news 15
SEO coreconcepts
headlines is becoming less important,
Shepard says. “Google has gotten better
about interpreting meaning. It used
to be that if you wanted to rank for
‘best restaurants,’ you had to say ‘best
restaurants’ three or four times. It’s still
helpful to mention ‘best restaurants,’
but the semantic meaning is becoming
much more important. Now you can just
talk about great dining experiences, and
the search engines will pick up on it.”
Adds Laetsch: “Historically, we
wanted to get a keyword in the body
copy or in the meta description. Now
that’s all gone out the window. As the
search engines get smarter, they start to
think about other words that you expect
to be in that article, what will signal
that this is an authoritative article on
the topic. If you were writing an article
about the Apple Watch, you might have
the words ‘Apple,’ ‘iPhone,’ ‘Watch,’ ‘apps’
and ‘time.’ If those are in the body copy,
it sends signals to the search engines
that this is a pretty good article.”
Seventy-five percent of search queries
are between three and five words
long, so you should write headlines
accordingly, he adds. “The search
engines are figuring out that if people
search for the word ‘marketing,’ or any
one- or two-word query, they don’t get
the results they want. To get quality
results that are most likely to answer
their question, they have to go to
three-, four- or five-word queries. As
content creators, when you’re thinking
about optimization, you have to think
about that.”
3Focus on the user experience.
“Google, right now, is making 500
algorithm changes a year,” Laetsch says.
“Every change is focused on making
sure that when someone searches on
Google, if they get the right result on
the first few pages, they’ve got a great
experience. It’s not, ‘How am I going to
tweak the engine or trick Google, Bing
or Yahoo?’ It’s how you make sure that
your content is the best possible content
on the Internet for the words that you
care about.”
Thus, original content is becoming
more important than ever, says Rhea
Drysdale, CEO of Outspoken Media
Inc., a Troy, N.Y.-based SEO consulting
firm. “The more original content that
you can produce—whether it’s an
image or a video, or long-form content,
anything you can put together that’s
going to justify someone wanting to
read it or share it—the better.”
While articles with a “top five” list
format often are clickable, Drysdale
suggests using them sparingly. “People
like things that they can quickly digest,
but it doesn’t necessarily have much
weight with search,” she says. “You have
to make sure that whatever comes after
the number makes sense and is useful.”
Create an editorial calendar to appeal
to your customers’ interests, Laetsch
says. “That’s the most important thing
that a marketer can do for SEO in 2016.
Your content has to be original and
targeted to your audience. If you curate
content, take a paragraph from another
article or site, and give them full credit
and add an attribution, but add a
paragraph or two in your own voice:
‘Here’s why I think it’s relevant.’ You’re
adding a journalistic voice and making
it your own.”
4Size matters. Longer articles,
between 1,200 to 1,500 words,
perform better in search, on average,
Laetsch says. “It’s significantly different
than it was two or three years ago,
when 300 words was a pretty long
page. Longer articles are getting more
traffic, and they’re ranking higher in
SEO, especially for competitive terms.
The changes that Google is making,
and the reason they’re making these
changes, is to make sure they’re
sending traffic to pages that delight
humans.” He suggests breaking up
long-form content with subheads,
bullet points and images throughout
the copy to make it easy for readers to
more quickly scan and digest it.
Longer articles perform better in
search results because there are more
words and images to rank on the page,
Shepard says. “People are sharing longer
articles on social media more, and
linking to them and citing them more.
Shorter articles do well sometimes,
but on average, longer articles tend to
perform better.”
5Optimize for mobile. More
people are reading news on their
smartphones, so it’s important to
ensure that your content is searchable
there, says Derek Edmond, managing
partner and director of SEO and social
media strategies at KoMarketing
Associates, a Boston-based B-to-B
SEO and social media marketing
consultancy. “Making sure Google can
understand the content that’s found
within a mobile app, and leveraging
the marketing of the app with respect
to SEO, is an opportunity on the
consumer and B-to-B marketing side.”
6Use unique images. While
images aren’t as big of a referral
source in Google as they used to be,
having unique images on your site is
valuable, Shepard says. “The same image
can show up in hundreds of places
around the Web, but having unique
content around those images is what
makes it stand out. I’m not opposed
to using stock images to illustrate a
point, but any time you can create
something that’s custom or use unique
photography, that will pay off more in
the long run.”
The most important SEO tip for 2016
is to focus on your audience, Shepard
says. “In the past, it was about marketers
trying to promote what they wanted
people to see. Today it’s about delivering
what people actually want to see that
will give you an SEO ranking boost.”
Adds Laetsch: “The reason we’re
doing optimization and want to show
up in Google, Bing or Yahoo is not
because we make money because we
show up No. 1 or No. 2. The reason we
want to rank well in the search engine
is so that our audience, the people
we’re trying to reach, have a great
experience. It doesn’t matter how high
you rank if your target audience goes to
your site and they’re not happy.
investments in content,
but to leverage those
investments, they’ll also
have to put some time and effort into
learning the new rules for SEO. The days
of driving traffic to your site by packing
headlines with keywords are long gone,
experts say, and the new SEO strategy
revolves around another big-money
marketing focus: experience.
“Historically, the recommendations
around SEO have been … to focus on
keywords,” says Martin Laetsch, director
of online marketing at Beaverton, Ore.-
based marketing automation company
and SEO consultancy Act-On Software
Inc. “The reality is search engines are
getting much smarter. The content
creator is having a lot less control over
how their pages are showing up and what
words they’re showing up for.”
According to an August 2015 study
on the future of SEO by Moz Inc., a
Seattle-based SEO consulting company,
the most important factors for SEO
impact next year will be mobilefriendliness,
which will increase in
impact by 88%; analysis of a page’s
perceived value (up 81%); usage data
such as dwell time (up 67%); and
readability and design (up 67%). SEO
factors that the study reported will
decrease in impact are the effectiveness
of paid links (down 55%) and the
influence of anchor text (down 49%).
Here, experts offer six tips on how
to use SEO to maximize your content
marketing investments.
1Intention is everything. You
no longer need an exact keyword
to offer a relevant search result, says
Cyrus Shepard, director of audience
development at Moz. “In the old days,
it was about getting the click. Now
search engines are seeing how people are
interacting with your website: Are they
going back and clicking on results, or are
they finding the answers they’re looking
for when they’re on your site? Today it’s
about the post-click activity. Not only do
you have to get the clicks, but you have to
satisfy user intent.”
2 Keywords aren’t the be-all and
end-all. Including keywords in
coreconcepts SEO
November 2015 | marketing news 15
SEO coreconcepts
headlines is becoming less important,
Shepard says. “Google has gotten better
about interpreting meaning. It used
to be that if you wanted to rank for
‘best restaurants,’ you had to say ‘best
restaurants’ three or four times. It’s still
helpful to mention ‘best restaurants,’
but the semantic meaning is becoming
much more important. Now you can just
talk about great dining experiences, and
the search engines will pick up on it.”
Adds Laetsch: “Historically, we
wanted to get a keyword in the body
copy or in the meta description. Now
that’s all gone out the window. As the
search engines get smarter, they start to
think about other words that you expect
to be in that article, what will signal
that this is an authoritative article on
the topic. If you were writing an article
about the Apple Watch, you might have
the words ‘Apple,’ ‘iPhone,’ ‘Watch,’ ‘apps’
and ‘time.’ If those are in the body copy,
it sends signals to the search engines
that this is a pretty good article.”
Seventy-five percent of search queries
are between three and five words
long, so you should write headlines
accordingly, he adds. “The search
engines are figuring out that if people
search for the word ‘marketing,’ or any
one- or two-word query, they don’t get
the results they want. To get quality
results that are most likely to answer
their question, they have to go to
three-, four- or five-word queries. As
content creators, when you’re thinking
about optimization, you have to think
about that.”
3Focus on the user experience.
“Google, right now, is making 500
algorithm changes a year,” Laetsch says.
“Every change is focused on making
sure that when someone searches on
Google, if they get the right result on
the first few pages, they’ve got a great
experience. It’s not, ‘How am I going to
tweak the engine or trick Google, Bing
or Yahoo?’ It’s how you make sure that
your content is the best possible content
on the Internet for the words that you
care about.”
Thus, original content is becoming
more important than ever, says Rhea
Drysdale, CEO of Outspoken Media
Inc., a Troy, N.Y.-based SEO consulting
firm. “The more original content that
you can produce—whether it’s an
image or a video, or long-form content,
anything you can put together that’s
going to justify someone wanting to
read it or share it—the better.”
While articles with a “top five” list
format often are clickable, Drysdale
suggests using them sparingly. “People
like things that they can quickly digest,
but it doesn’t necessarily have much
weight with search,” she says. “You have
to make sure that whatever comes after
the number makes sense and is useful.”
Create an editorial calendar to appeal
to your customers’ interests, Laetsch
says. “That’s the most important thing
that a marketer can do for SEO in 2016.
Your content has to be original and
targeted to your audience. If you curate
content, take a paragraph from another
article or site, and give them full credit
and add an attribution, but add a
paragraph or two in your own voice:
‘Here’s why I think it’s relevant.’ You’re
adding a journalistic voice and making
it your own.”
4Size matters. Longer articles,
between 1,200 to 1,500 words,
perform better in search, on average,
Laetsch says. “It’s significantly different
than it was two or three years ago,
when 300 words was a pretty long
page. Longer articles are getting more
traffic, and they’re ranking higher in
SEO, especially for competitive terms.
The changes that Google is making,
and the reason they’re making these
changes, is to make sure they’re
sending traffic to pages that delight
humans.” He suggests breaking up
long-form content with subheads,
bullet points and images throughout
the copy to make it easy for readers to
more quickly scan and digest it.
Longer articles perform better in
search results because there are more
words and images to rank on the page,
Shepard says. “People are sharing longer
articles on social media more, and
linking to them and citing them more.
Shorter articles do well sometimes,
but on average, longer articles tend to
perform better.”
5Optimize for mobile. More
people are reading news on their
smartphones, so it’s important to
ensure that your content is searchable
there, says Derek Edmond, managing
partner and director of SEO and social
media strategies at KoMarketing
Associates, a Boston-based B-to-B
SEO and social media marketing
consultancy. “Making sure Google can
understand the content that’s found
within a mobile app, and leveraging
the marketing of the app with respect
to SEO, is an opportunity on the
consumer and B-to-B marketing side.”
6Use unique images. While
images aren’t as big of a referral
source in Google as they used to be,
having unique images on your site is
valuable, Shepard says. “The same image
can show up in hundreds of places
around the Web, but having unique
content around those images is what
makes it stand out. I’m not opposed
to using stock images to illustrate a
point, but any time you can create
something that’s custom or use unique
photography, that will pay off more in
the long run.”
The most important SEO tip for 2016
is to focus on your audience, Shepard
says. “In the past, it was about marketers
trying to promote what they wanted
people to see. Today it’s about delivering
what people actually want to see that
will give you an SEO ranking boost.”
Adds Laetsch: “The reason we’re
doing optimization and want to show
up in Google, Bing or Yahoo is not
because we make money because we
show up No. 1 or No. 2. The reason we
want to rank well in the search engine
is so that our audience, the people
we’re trying to reach, have a great
experience. It doesn’t matter how high
you rank if your target audience goes to
your site and they’re not happy.
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