SEO Marketing Basics:

Now it’s time to learn how to do SEO marketing. Understanding it is one thing, but SEO requires a lot of action and time. This is not something you can make a change to today and expect to see results tomorrow. SEO takes daily actions with the goal of long-term success.

Content

You’ve probably heard it before: “Content is king.” Bill Gates made this prediction in 1996, and it’s as true as ever today.

Why?

Because a Google user is happy when they find the result that serves their needs in the best way.

When you Google “quick and easy homemade mac and cheese,” Google puts all its energy into delivering to you what Google believes is the best recipe for homemade mac and cheese (that takes little time and uses few ingredients) on the entire web.

It doesn’t look for just the quickest recipe, just the easiest recipe, or throw out a bunch of online shops for frozen dinners. It tries to give you exactly what you asked for. Google always tries to provide the best experience possible by directing you to the greatest content it can find.

This means your number one job to do well with SEO is to produce great content.

That’s a bummer, right? You still have to put in a ton of work. SEO is no different than any other skill: great results come from big effort. Just like the best marketing in the world won’t help you sell a bad product, super advanced SEO is useless if you don’t have quality content.

Elements of Content

There are a million elements that go into creating high-quality content; here are a few of my most crucial ones:

Quality

Once, posting a piece of content with a bunch of keywords was the standard. If you were creating quality content that actually solved someone’s problem, you were a standout, and that made it easy to rank.

Today, content is much better, and many online businesses have blogs they use to add value to their site and rank higher on Google.

Coming up with great content isn’t easy, but the good news is, you don’t always need to create your content from scratch. You can piggyback off of what others have created but simply add more value and make your piece of content more in-depth.

The bottom line is that your content needs to solve a problem or provide a solution to whatever brings the reader to your post. If it doesn’t, they’ll quickly click away from your page, telling Google your piece of content isn’t solving anyone’s problem.

Intent

Google puts a lot of emphasis on intent. It wants to understand what the searcher is looking for when they type something into the search bar.

Do they want to know something?
Are they trying to buy something?
Are they window shopping?

As the content creator, you need to understand this as well. You can’t create a piece of content about the “best ice fishing rods” and target “bass fishing” as your primary keyword. It doesn’t make sense because people don’t typically use ice fishing rods to fish for bass in the cold. Thus, you’re not providing the right answer to the query, and Google will know.

Freshness

HubSpot set a benchmark showing that posting frequently helps with Google rankings. However, posting new content is only one way to signal Google freshness. There are plenty of things you can do with content you’ve already published to make it more up-to-date.

Going through and updating your content for accuracy, fixing any broken links, and refreshing old data with new statistics that are more relevant are all ways to show Google your piece of content still deserves a spot on page one.

4 Tips for Creating Quality Content

Here are my best tips for creating the best content readers love and Google respects:

Understand user intent: You need to know what the reader wants to accomplish when they land on your page.

Develop a customer avatar: You also need to know who your reader is, what they like, what they dislike, and why they’re there.

Break up the text: People have short attention spans, and writing giant walls of text doesn’t work anymore; you need to break it up with plenty of headers and images.

Make it actionable: There’s nothing worse than reading a piece of content and not getting everything you need to accomplish something. Your content should be thorough, but it also needs to answer the question, “What now?” Will the reader have everything they need when they finish your article?

Keyword Research and Selection

We just briefly touched on keyword research, which dictates what you call your site or how you describe your brand online.

Keywords even determine how you build links, including everything from the tactics you choose to how you plan on implementing them. Another common mistake people make is that they stop.

Maybe they redesign their website or come out with a new marketing campaign. They do it for a week or two, update their pages, and then stop. They think keyword research is a one-and-done thing. In reality, it’s the exact opposite. The best SEOs are constantly doing keyword research.

Keyword research is done for several different reasons, but the two primary reasons are to rank on Google and create relevant content. Keywords can often open the door to inspiration by telling you exactly what people want to know based on what they’re searching for.