Is your SEO practice in tandem with your content marketing strategy?

A marketer from a very famous men’s grooming brand told BuzzInContent that his brand’s viral content wouldn’t have gone that viral had they been stuck in the SEO spiral. He said one can’t play with the creative quotient of the brand’s content for SEO’s sake.

But given the times we are living in, how does a brand ensure its content reaches the target audience before its competitor and is also valuable to consumers? Comes to the rescue is a good SEO practice.

Payal Shah Karwa

Payal Shah Karwa, Content Director, The Word Jockey (a creative content studio), believes SEO can enslave content creators and chain their creativity. A lot of content marketers make the mistake of going with the SEO-first approach. If a content strategy emerges with the SEO at the centre, it would not allow the content to evolve naturally, she said. “The creator must adapt to the consumer/reader first, and what value their content can add to them. SEO key phrases should be used to understand the consumers and enable them to find the right content on your site. So use SEO as a guide, but not as the leader,” she explained.

Snehil Gautam

Snehil Gautam, Head of Marketing, REA India (parent company of Housing.com, PropTiger and Makaan.com), said one’s content fails only if he/she gets stuck in bad practices in SEO. “People will unnecessarily add keywords to content to get more SEO benefits. It used to work 5-6 years ago. But now content marketers look out for a better experience for both users and the Googlebot. If a specific keyword is XYZ, and the content marketer stuffs XYZ across the article, it gives a bad user experience. That’s when the content marketer doesn’t get enough results.”

For our readers’ understanding, Googlebot is the generic name for Google's web crawler. Googlebot is the general name for two different types of crawlers: a desktop crawler that simulates a user on a desktop, and a mobile crawler that simulates a user on a mobile device.

Asif Upadhye

Asif Upadhye, Co-founder, Director and Story Teller at Yellow Seed, a content marketing agency, emphasised that there is simply no substitute for authoritative content, which is the number one driver of your search engine rankings.

He said black hat SEO techniques that include manipulating search algorithms and selling or purchasing links that pass PageRank is a clear violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and hampers good quality content in the long run. “Which is why, a key area that content marketers need to pay attention to is how toxic backlinks can often hurt their SEO efforts and damage your rankings,” said Upadhye.

In this story, which is divided into two parts, content marketing practitioners discuss the right way to go about SEO in content marketing to deliver maximum results and without hampering its creativity and the user experience.

The first part discusses the importance of SEO in content, when can marketers go wrong with SEO in content marketing and how much SEO in content is not too much SEO, which ends up making the content stale.

The second part of the story to be published next week will discuss the things to be kept in mind while deploying SEO in content marketing and if nicely created content can survive without SEO.

In the second part, content marketers also discuss how a content marketing team should marry SEO with content marketing practices in a way that it fetches maximum results.

What can a thought-through SEO practice do for content marketers?

Karwa of The Word Jockey gave an apt example to explain the importance of SEO in content marketing. She said a good SEO strategy is like leaving a breadcrumb trail in the form of linkbacks, meta tags, etc., to help your readers find their way to your content in this jungle of communication. “So leaving the trail right is imperative. A well-laid out content strategy can definitely manifest a better user experience and help maximise relevant traffic to the site/content,” she said.

Upadhye of Yellow Seed told BuzzInContent that great SEO is the heart and soul of content marketing and impacts everything from the user experience to website traffic and the way that content gets ranked online.

He added, “While using important keywords to write influential content falls neatly under the SEO umbrella, it is important to also ask the question – Does your content offer any demonstrable value to your target audience? So instead of just producing great content, it would be wise to create content that covers topics that people are actually searching for. From a technical standpoint, something as simple as enhancing metadata, optimising URLs and making the slug concise is vital to the success of any SEO campaign.”

Gautam of REI India believes that SEO provides a content marketer with avenues to distribute content without any cost.

How much SEO is too much SEO in content marketing?

Now that we have discussed the importance of SEO in content marketing and the SEO malpractices that can make content go stale, BuzzInContent would like to throw light on the art of marrying SEO with content marketing to get good quality content that is relevant for a brand’s TG without hampering the creative aspect. 

Upadhye thinks using too much SEO is a very real practice that content marketers often fall prey to. “Just like moths to a flame, search engines feed on fresh SEO content, which is why consistently updating your website needs to be at the top of your list.”

He pointed out that splattering a variety of keywords into your content and creating a chain of incoming and outgoing links to your pages is a thing of the past, and most definitely will not work in your favour today.

He said Google values content that is written for people, and not just to boost rankings. Explaining it further through means of an exercise, Upadhye said a content marketer must ask these questions to oneself: Are you using keyword-rich anchor text for internal linking? Are you using keywords that are not relevant to your site? Are you focusing more on the technical aspects of SEO more than creating authentic content that sticks?

“If your response to any or all of the above questions is yes, then it’s time to hit pause and re-evaluate the bigger picture,” said Upadhye.

Karwa said content marketers must use SEO like salt to taste. Not too much, not too little. Just right. The objective is to make the content searchable, not distasteful.

She said one of the best SEO practices is to ensure you use the right amount of SEO.  For instance, you must keep the keyword density to 1%- 2%, for example, that particular keyword must be used max once or twice per 100 words of a blog/ article.

Gautam of REA India sums up that SEO has become a very useful tool to understand what the user purchases on the digital platform. SEO isn’t only about putting keywords, titles and meta descriptions. One can use it before and after creating content. “It is also about doing keyword research for your users, what is that your user is looking for. One can do that through various tools available in the SEO framework. One can just look at those keywords and understand what the user wants and then create content to address those keywords and SEO will take care of it. Like this, SEO can be used before and after creating content,” he said.