Why It's Time to Unite Your Content Strategy and SEO [Podcast]
Marketers—the days of keyword stuffing are over. Today, successful search engine optimization requires a much more nuanced approach to content creation and anticipating user behavior. Best practices for pleasing the almighty algorithm (including perspectives on duplicate content, search ranking, and more) have changed, and we as marketers must change with them.
The problem is, too many businesses continue to strategize their marketing around outdated or inaccurate information on SEO. Marketers should be integrating SEO strategy earlier into the content creation process and ultimately rethinking the relationship between content and SEO.
Bryan Phelps, CEO of Big Leap, joins the Content Experience podcast to discuss what marketers get wrong about integrating content strategy and SEO.
In This Episode:
The Decline of Keyword Stuffing and Its Impact on Content Creation
According to Phelps, Google has gotten so much better at understanding topics, rather than just relying on keywords and title tags. Its sophistication has really gone beyond understanding what people’s intent is and is able to identify what they're ultimately looking for.
“Stuffing keywords on a page just doesn't do it anymore. It's really about the quality and depth of the content.”
The Truth About Google’s Approach to Penalizing Content
Google has gotten a lot better at trying to negate little technical problems that people might not know to fix in the back-end of their CMS. There are so many different ways to build websites now and people are producing a lot more content. Google has started to overlook some of those technical challenges, but technical SEO in a lot of ways has had a resurgence recently.
“If you run your own business and you’re publishing content, Google doesn’t want to penalize you because you don’t understand SEO.” – @bryanphelps
Why SEO Should Play a Vital Role in Content Creation From the Beginning
Phelps explains how he typically works with clients to integrate SEO into their content strategies. His team works to map SEO content to their customer journey or content experience. They usually start creating content to answer FAQs that come up in various stages of the customer journey and optimize for them.
“We like to listen to the team at Google. But we also want to pay attention to real-life stories.” – @bryanphelps