SEO: Friend or Foe?

Improve your SEO in a natural and productive way 

By Katya Juliet

Try not to overthink the process of creating content that will generate positive SEO results for your business website. The truth is, SEO is an ever-changing wave in a sea of tech innovation and just when you try to lock down all the best SEO “secret ingredients,” some part of the algorithm dissipates or evolves.

So, what can you do? Make sure to focus most of your efforts on creating interesting, useful, relevant and original content that you can share consistently with your target audience. Also, always incorporate creative elements (think direct links and multimedia) to help with your audience and social media engagement.

Below,  I am sharing a little extra insight to help you improve your SEO in a very natural and productive way. (Alert: You do not need to be a mathematician or web-coder to make progress on your SEO and business website ranking!)

Write for people, not robots.

High quality content that is designed and written for your target audience is wonderful for improving SEO and will also increase overall client engagement.

Make sure to focus your message. Often, businesses make the mistake of trying to address too many topics inside one post or article, believing it will widen the target audience reach. But the reality is that adding too may themes just diminishes the natural content you have written. Keep messages on topic.

Next, always use the natural language of your audience. Using consistent keywords that will help people locate your content is important, but talk to your audience naturally and make it easy for them to both read and relate. Never intentionally overload any post with extra keywords. This can actually impede on your SEO efforts, as search engines recognize this trend as “gaming the system.” Search Engines can now also understand synonyms and pull content that would answer a question asked, even if the words aren’t a precise match. So, write with flexibility and use a variety of words to give your content a more natural feel, making it more relatable and enjoyable to your readers.

If you are writing a new article or press release, consider planning ahead with a few questions to make sure your message is delivered in a clear and precise way. This can help drive organic SEO traffic in your direction.

Consider the following questions:

• Who is my target audience?
• When is the best time to publish or send it?
• What is my article or press release really about?
• Where will it have the best impact?
• Why should my audience care? Think WIFM: What’s in it for me? And put yourself in your audience’s shoes

Always incorporate creative and multimedia elements. 

New Trends: more and more content is now being searched and viewed on mobile devices and inside Social Media applications. Thus, it is important for your content to read and view well on mobile devices and sharing your content on social media is important. It helps your audience build an engaging relationship with you and your business, inevitably helping to promote your website. The average person checks into mobile social media applications 5-7 times a day and many check their applications more than 15 times a day. You can also now search news and general information using a social browser like Facebook has and this has once again, initiated more changes in the long list of SEO best practices.

Titles and Links: If your website allows, title and link any images in your articles with relevant keywords for SEO, and always use direct links to your articles, press releases and general website pages inside any posts to ensure link building from other outside (trusted sites) is consistently happening. SEO is also positively impacted by your audience engaging with your content; sharing your multimedia, articles and direct website links with others. (Tip: stay away from adding several links. Add the most relevant link and if you are writing about a less common or more complex topic, consider adding links to wiki or an outside study/source, as long as it is coming form a well-trusted and established site.)

Media: Adding photos, logos, quotes or promos on photo images, videos and other multimedia content makes all your messages more compelling and increase reader engagement. Search engines do pay attention to social interaction on content, so do invest time and budget in your marketing plan to ensure you have proper customized multimedia to share along with your written content. The old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is extremely relevant today with both SEO and Social Media, so keep that concept front and center.

Bottom line: by spending a few extra minutes thinking through your content/message goals ahead of time, writing naturally for your audience, narrowing your topics per article, and adding multimedia and relevant and direct links, your SEO will steadily improve. But SEO won’t happen over night, so don’t become discouraged. Stick with it!

There are lots of DIY (do-it-yourself) guides, videos, blogs and books out there that can help you improve your SEO. However, many resources tend to give it a technical edge that easily intimidates.

For additional support or consulting services, feel free to contact Katya Juliet through her business website, Buzzword-Consulting. Buzzword Consulting offers affordable digital marketing services, consulting, copywriting & PR for small businesses, start-ups, entrepreneurs & non-profit Organizations. Get people Buzzing About Your Business!