How to align SEO & content strategies for unmatched search performance

Want more organic traffic to your website? It may not be simply a matter of running yet another standalone SEO campaign. To truly accelerate search performance, it might be time to add quality user-focused content into the mix as well.

Like all good online marketing strategies, the key to success is to find the right blend of tactics and techniques. If you can align SEO with your content strategies, everything will be pulling in the same direction.

Get it right, and you can drive organic traffic, deliver value to users and push your site up the search rankings.

Read on for a look at how to create a hard-hitting strategy that unlocks the potential of both disciplines.

Amazing things can happen when SEO and content work together

SEO and content can be powerful allies if you can marry them together in the right way.

The benefits are myriad, including amplifying your brand’s online visibility, driving meaningful engagement and attracting the right audience.

And crucially, aligning strategies can drive traffic to your website and boost conversions, leading to an uplift in sales and revenue. It all happens through improving your site’s search performance.

Aligning SEO and content - key things to focus on

Your SEO and content teams will already have their own techniques finessed to a fine art. But it can be challenging to bring both disciplines together, working under the same umbrella possibly for the first time.

Below, we’ll look at a few key things to focus on at this stage. But before you do anything, it’s a good idea to draw up a new list of objectives for your new collaborative strategy – along with key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you measure effectiveness

Mastering E-E-A-T

Value is the most important word to keep in mind when developing content. You’ll already be optimising it for search engine rankings, but there’s arguably a more critical thing to focus on – value for the user.

This is where E-E-A-T comes in. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, the key attributes that Google uses to evaluate the quality of its search results. It isn’t a direct Google ranking factor, but it’s still a crucial concept in SEO – and in content.

To score highly on E-E-A-T, you’ll need to create engaging, high quality and original content that offers helpful information to the reader. The user’s needs take top priority, beyond selling products and fitting in high ranking keywords.

Nailing the technical side of SEO

You’ve got a crack content team in place, but there’s also the technical side of things to consider.

Working collaboratively, both teams will need to optimise on-page SEO, including your brand’s local landing page content.

As well as ticking all the boxes with regards to meta descriptions, alt text, relevant long-tail keywords and other on-page elements, you can include customised content specific to location. This is a great way to improve the relevance of your content, as well as tailoring it to specific audiences.

And don’t forget about other technical SEO basics, like page load speed and mobile-friendliness.

Developing high quality user-focused content

So, what makes great user-focused content? Ultimately, it’s providing the user with exactly what they were looking for when they started their search.

It should be based on those critical E-E-A-T principles, providing original, well-written, engaging, relevant and helpful information and insights. This sounds like a tall order, but it’s perfectly achievable if you have the right strategy (and a team of skilled content writers) in place.

Remember that it all begins with those all-important featured snippets Google uses on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is the descriptive text that can ultimately decide whether a user clicks through to the site. Featured snippets have become incredibly important in SEO, simply because they can be key to driving (or turning away) traffic.

Real world impact

So far, we’ve looked at a few of the ways you can bring SEO and content into closer alignment.

But if you’re in need of a little real-world inspiration for putting your new collaborative strategy into action, this next part is worth reading. We’ll take a look at a real life case study, of when Click worked on user focused content (UFC) for Ultra Chloraseptic.

Ultra Chloraseptic case study

Throat spray specialist Ultra Chloraseptic came to Click Consult wanting to increase online visibility and organic search for a number of keywords relevant to their brand.

After a comprehensive analysis of the brand’s current strategy, we developed a plan for UFC focusing on long-tail keywords that directly answered user questions (based on popular search queries). The aim was to improve reach by targeting keywords with high search volume and low competition.

The results were excellent, with Ultra Chloraseptic holding top Google ranking for 11 targeted keywords. The brand also scooped up 188,000 page views and reached the top featured snippet position for 7 queries related to targeted keywords.

Read more about our work with Ultra Chloraseptic here.