The rules for effective SEO have shifted seismically over
the past few years. Experts offer tips on the current state of SEO and how you
can use it to maximize your investment in content in 2016.
Marketers are beefing up their investments in content, but
to leverage those investments, they’ll also have to put some time and effort
into learning the new rules for SEO. The days of driving traffic to your site
by packing headlines with keywords are long gone, experts say, and the new SEO
strategy revolves around another big-money marketing focus: experience.
“Historically, the recommendations around SEO have been … to
focus on keywords,” says Martin Laetsch, director of online marketing at
Beaverton, Ore.-based marketing automation company and SEO consultancy
Act-On Software Inc. “The
reality is search engines are getting much smarter. The content creator is
having a lot less control over how their pages are showing up and what words
they’re showing up for.”
According to an August 2015
study on
the future of SEO by Moz Inc., a Seattle-based SEO consulting company,
the most important factors for SEO impact next year will be
mobile-friendliness, which will increase in impact by 88%; analysis of a page’s
perceived value (up 81%); usage data such as dwell time (up 67%); and
readability and design (up 67%). SEO factors that the study reported will
decrease in impact are the effectiveness of paid links (down 55%) and the
influence of anchor text (down 49%).
Here, experts offer six tips on how to use SEO to maximize
your content marketing investments.
1. Intention is everything.
You no longer need an exact keyword to offer a relevant
search result, says Cyrus Shepard, director of audience development at
Moz. “In the old days, it was about getting the
click. Now search engines are seeing how people are interacting with your
website: Are they going back and clicking on results, or are they finding the
answers they’re looking for when they’re on your site? Today it’s about the
post-click activity. Not only do you have to get the clicks, but you have to
satisfy user intent.”
2. Keywords aren’t the be-all and end-all.
Including keywords in headlines is becoming less important,
Shepard says. “Google has gotten better about interpreting meaning. It used to
be that if you wanted to rank for ‘best restaurants,’ you had to say ‘best
restaurants’ three or four times. It’s still helpful to mention ‘best
restaurants,’ but the semantic meaning is becoming much more important. Now you
can just talk about great dining experiences, and the search engines will pick
up on it.”
Adds Laetsch: “Historically, we wanted to get a keyword in
the body copy or in the meta description. Now that’s all gone out the window.
As the search engines get smarter, they start to think about other words that
you expect to be in that article, what will signal that this is an
authoritative article on the topic. If you were writing an article about the
Apple Watch, you might have the words ‘Apple,’ ‘iPhone,’ ‘Watch,’ ‘apps’ and
‘time.’ If those are in the body copy, it sends signals to the search engines
that this is a pretty good article.”
Seventy-five percent of search queries are between three and
five words long, so you should write headlines accordingly, he adds. “The
search engines are figuring out that if people search for the word ‘marketing,’
or any one- or two-word query, they don’t get the results they want. To get
quality results that are most likely to answer their question, they have to go
to three-, four- or five-word queries. As content creators, when you’re
thinking about optimization, you have to think about that.”
3. Focus on the user experience.
"Google, right now, is making 500 algorithm changes a
year,” Laetsch says. “Every change is focused on making sure that when someone
searches on Google, if they get the right result on the first few pages,
they’ve got a great experience. It’s not, ‘How am I going to tweak the engine
or trick Google, Bing or Yahoo?’ It’s how you make sure that your content is
the best possible content on the Internet for the words that you care about.”
Thus, original content is becoming more important than ever,
says Rhea Drysdale, CEO of
Outspoken Media Inc., a Troy, N.Y.-based SEO consulting
firm. “The more original content that you can produce—whether it’s an image or
a video, or long-form content, anything you can put together that’s going to
justify someone wanting to read it or share it—the better.”
While articles with a “top five” list format often are
clickable, Drysdale suggests using them sparingly. “People like things that
they can quickly digest, but it doesn’t necessarily have much weight with
search,” she says. “You have to make sure that whatever comes after the number
makes sense and is useful.”
Create an editorial calendar to appeal to your customers’
interests, Laetsch says. “That’s the most important thing that a
marketer can do for SEO in 2016. Your content has to be original and targeted
to your audience. If you curate content, take a paragraph from another article
or site, and give them full credit and add an attribution, but add a paragraph
or two in your own voice: ‘Here’s why I think it’s relevant.’ You’re adding a
journalistic voice and making it your own.”
4. Size matters.
Longer articles, between 1,200 to 1,500 words, perform
better in search, on average, Laetsch says. “It’s significantly different than
it was two or three years ago, when 300 words was a pretty long page. Longer
articles are getting more traffic, and they’re ranking higher in SEO,
especially for competitive terms. The changes that Google is making, and the
reason they’re making these changes, is to make sure they’re sending traffic to
pages that delight humans.” He suggests breaking up long-form content with
subheads, bullet points and images throughout the copy to make it easy for
readers to more quickly scan and digest it.
Longer articles perform better in search results because
there are more words and images to rank on the page, Shepard says. “People are sharing
longer articles on social media more, and linking to them and citing them more.
Shorter articles do well sometimes, but on average, longer articles tend to
perform better.”
5. Optimize for mobile.
More people are reading news on their smartphones, so it’s
important to ensure that your content is searchable there, says Derek Edmond,
managing partner and director of SEO and social media strategies at
KoMarketing
Associates, a Boston-based B-to-B SEO and social media marketing consultancy.
“Making sure Google can understand the content that’s found within a mobile
app, and leveraging the marketing of the app with respect to SEO, is an
opportunity on the consumer and B-to-B marketing side.”
6. Use unique images.
While images aren’t as big of a referral source in Google as
they used to be, having unique images on your site is valuable, Shepard says.
“The same image can show up in hundreds of places around the Web, but having
unique content around those images is what makes it stand out. I’m not opposed
to using stock images to illustrate a point, but any time you can create
something that’s custom or use unique photography, that will pay off more in
the long run.”
The most important SEO tip for 2016 is to focus on your
audience, Shepard says. “In the past, it was about marketers trying to promote
what they wanted people to see. Today it’s about delivering what people
actually want to see that will give you an SEO ranking boost.”
Adds Laetsch: “The reason we’re doing optimization and want
to show up in Google, Bing or Yahoo is not because we make money because we
show up No. 1 or No. 2. The reason we want to rank well in the search engine is
so that our audience, the people we’re trying to reach, have a great
experience. It doesn’t matter how high you rank if your target audience goes to
your site and they’re not happy.”
