Anyone who has built and launched a website has likely encountered an oft-repeated acronym: SEO (search engine optimization). And while you might not have ever done SEO yourself, you've benefited from it in the past: Every day, search engines like Google employ complex algorithms to sift through more than 400 billion web pages and deliver the most relevant results.
Website owners like you use SEO techniques and strategies to get their websites to the top of the search results for relevant user queries. But SEO is not a one-time endeavor — Google and other search engines change often, and ongoing SEO ensures your website stays in front of the people you want to reach. Just as a physical storefront requires regular maintenance and updates to stay competitive, your website needs ongoing SEO to remain visible amidst the ever-changing digital landscape.
The ABCs of SEO: What is Ongoing SEO and Why Does It Matter?
Don't let the techy jargon intimidate you. HubSpot — considered one of the gold standards for SEO and digital marketing advice — defines SEO as simply a collection of strategies and tips that "expand a company’s visibility in organic search results'' and help "drive more visitors to the company’s website, increasing their chances for more conversions which leads to more customers and more revenue."
SEO Connects the Search Engine Algorithms With Your Website's Content
Regardless of your website's goal or industry niche, all SEO techniques have one thing in common: They look at ways to optimize your website's content, keywords, and links to help search engines rank your website higher in the search results when someone searches for something related to your keywords, content, or brand name.
According to HubSpot, SEO needs to address the key factors that all search engines use to determine the value of your website's content — and therefore how high in the search results your website or specific landing page should appear:
- The intent or meaning behind why someone is searching for a specific term or question
- The relevance between what someone searches for, and the content on your website
- The quality of your content (for instance, a website about physical exercise written by certified personal trainers is deemed by Google to be higher quality than a website where the articles are written by non-experts)
- The performance of your website, such as how long it takes a page to load and whether it works well on mobile devices
Static SEO Versus Ongoing SEO: Why It Matters to Stay Fresh and Keep Your SEO Updates Current
As users' web behavior changes and technology evolves, search engines proactively adjust their algorithms.
If you aren't conducting ongoing SEO maintenance and upgrades, a well-optimized website today can quickly become obsolete tomorrow, causing your search rankings to drop and attracting fewer organic visitors. Google itself updates its algorithms several thousand times per year, including significant "major" changes every few months that dramatically change how it crawls and ranks content. For example, Google's infamous Panda update changed how it ranked how-to lifestyle content on the Internet, causing one major content publisher to lose a whopping $6.4 million of traffic and advertising nearly overnight.
How Ongoing SEO Influences Your Website Strategy
Staying abreast of changes to SEO techniques and strategies provides important guidance to your content, marketing, and overarching website strategy. For example, it can dictate or influence:
- How much content you publish, and the content's format, length, and focus
- How you incorporate other forms of media on your website, including images, video, and audio
- How you organize content on your site, including landing page layouts and your site's navigation
- What keywords and target users your website focuses on
Embrace the Power of Ongoing SEO
Caroline Forsey, an expert in thought leadership and marketing content, looked at the survey results from more than 400 of the world's leading web analysts to predict the biggest SEO trends of 2024. According to her data, some of the top changes in SEO strategies this year include:
- A heavier emphasis on expertise, meaning the content on your website should come from experts in your related field (including bylines and author bios that demonstrate the author's credentials and experience on the topic they're writing about)
- A renewed emphasis on first-person, credible content, especially as more websites generate high volumes of low-quality AI content (Google itself has announced upcoming changes to tackle low-value articles created by AI)
- A priority on websites that are deemed trustworthy, such as e-commerce sites with well-rated customer service, or content sites that do a good job of citing trustworthy research and statistics
- Bonus points on content that is creative and original and doesn't simply rehash content found on other sites
Of course, these SEO trends will inevitably change every year, and ongoing SEO will keep you competitive no matter what Google, Bing, and other search engines do. No matter your website's industry or content strategy, ongoing SEO requires that you:
- Focus on keeping your content fresh and high quality, including new blog posts or regularly refreshing and updating old product descriptions or articles
- Conduct keyword research often, since the terms or phrases that your core audience uses will evolve over time
- Maintain your website's overarching performance, such as mobile-friendliness as mobile devices evolve, and page load speed
- Build a diverse portfolio of high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites within your niche, which may include outreach campaigns, getting others in your industry to write guest blogs, and participating in online forums or communities
- Keep on top of technical and performance metrics, such as scanning your site for broken links (and fixing the links you uncover) and using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track organic traffic, keyword rankings, click-through rates, and conversion rates
- Stay on top of algorithm changes so you can adapt your SEO strategy in real-time
Some website owners think of SEO as the first step of their promotional strategy. But it's less a first step, and more an ongoing journey to ensure you, your brand, and your content stay relevant in such a competitive atmosphere. Whether you choose to go it alone and take a DIY approach to SEO, or you choose to consult with a digital marketing and SEO agency, check in often and make sure your SEO evolves as the world around you evolves.
Have you been wondering if you’re using the right content mix in your content marketing strategy? To a large extent, your content mix will make a big difference in how effective your content marketing efforts are. There are many alternatives, including blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, videos, and graphics. Here are the steps you can take to identify the right mix.
1. Match Your Intent to the Type of Content
Make a list of the reasons why you communicate to your audience. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but you’ll undoubtedly find that your list includes some or all the following:
- Provide information: You have conceptual knowledge that you want to impart to your audience to help them make sense of the information that bombards them on a topic.
- Teach: You want to provide actionable advice to your audience.
- Persuade: You have a product or service that will solve a pain point for your audience, and you want to explain how it can benefit them.
- Entertain: Depending on your brand, you may want to provide something related to your industry that is light-hearted and can give your audience a reason to smile.
- Raise awareness: You want to point out a problem you can fix and ensure that your audience knows you have that capability.
Once you have the list, it’s easy to match your intent to the types of content. For example, you probably wouldn’t put a cartoon in the middle of a whitepaper. Providing actionable advice might work well in a blog post or video. Raising awareness is often effective in a case study because your audience can see how you helped others.
You’ll start to see patterns and understand how different vehicles can be used based on the intent of the communication. Varying your content mix is effective in reaching your audience in the way that will serve them best. It will also let you reach the part of your audience that prefers to absorb information from the written word and the part that prefers the interactivity of a video.
2. Set an Initial Content Mix
Initially, you can set your content mix based on the decisions you made when you matched the intent of your communications to their corresponding content type. This type of structure will help your content creation team to provide variety and focus on your strategic goals.
For example, you may decide to:
- Provide information twice a week using blog posts, videos, infographics or e-books
- Teach weekly using videos, e-books, or infographics
- Persuade once a month using whitepapers or case studies
- Entertain once a month in a blog post
- Teach weekly using blog posts, videos, e-books, or infographics
- Raise awareness once a month using whitepapers, case studies, or e-books
3. Track Your Results
The most important thing you can do to make your content marketing work hard for you is to track the results of your efforts. It’s far too easy to “set it and forget it,” but it happens all the time. Those campaigns produce very poor results. Content marketing can increase leads and support your sales staff, but you need to respond to changes in the market and your audience to reach that goal.
After you set an initial content mix, track your results. Determine whether you’re getting more leads from your blog posts or your case studies. Determine whether you’re attracting your targeted leads, if your messaging is getting off track, or if you’re not reaching your audience where they live.
Tracking your results can be done with social metrics. There, you'd track Reach, or the number of people who see your content. You can also track changes in your number of followers, comments, shares, click-through rates, and more. Google Analytics is another excellent tracking tool. It will let you track the number of visitors to your website, how long they stay, how many pages they view, conversion rates, and much more.
In addition, marketing automation technology allows you to see the results of your marketing efforts and identify when sales are being closed. All of these types of metrics and reports give you the ability to analyze and measure your results, which will help you make better decisions moving forward.
4. Update Your Strategy
After tracking your results, you’ll see patterns in how new business is generated. You’ll understand more about the types of content that are resonating with your audience. Based on that understanding, you can continually evolve your content mix to reach the right audience with the right message.
How Happy Are You with Your Content Mix?
If you don’t think your content marketing is giving you the return you need, you may want to consider updating your approach. Marketing automation is a technology that will allow you to make the most of your marketing dollars. Get in touch with our team to learn how we can help you use marketing automation technology to grow your business.