5 Ways to Ensure a Happy Marriage Between SEO and Content Strategy

Getting the best use out of a website's content is one of the key
principles behind an effective content strategy. And from an SEO's
perspective, making the most of a website's content means populating
it with keywords to drive traffic. Two very different utilities for
the same set of little ol' words.Here are some tips that help our team
work together to achieve our clients' web content objectives:1. Focus
cold, hard SEO efforts on metadata and paid search ads.The eternal
battle between using enough keywords and creating meaningful content
that sounds natural will wage on for an eternity, or at least until
Google changes its algorithms. (Not likely in the near future.) Start
with making the best use of your metadata and paid search ads. Write
title tags and page descriptions that include not only keywords, but
the keywords you want to rank for on each page. The more effort you
put into optimizing your metadata, the more room you have to create
content unscathed by awkward keyword repetition and blandness.2.
Create a keyword map for content in the beginning.The best way to make
sure SEO efforts don't interfere with the quality of your content (and
vice versa) is to consider SEO in the very beginning stages of a web
project. SEOs, like writers and content strategists, don't enjoy being
handed a website to optimize at the very end of a project. Like
content, keywords should be mapped out alongside the architecture of
the site as it is developed. This requires the content strategist or
writer to work very closely with an SEO to make sure both needs are
being met, and in the right areas. When you involve the SEO in the
beginning, you are in control of where and how keywords appear in your
content. If you involve SEO in the end of a project, you wind up
having less control over the context in which those keywords appear.
Not to mention you create more work for yourself when you have to
change what you've written to accommodate new keywords.3. Stay current
on the terms and search trends around your website.Set up good old
fashioned Google alerts to monitor keywords and use free social media
monitoring tools and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to keep up to
date on the terms most relevant to your subject matter. This will help
you govern your existing content, as well. If you're constantly
staying up to date on the content on your site, your search ranking
should follow suit. (Plus, the more you update your website's pages,
the more often your site is crawled by search engines.) This goes to
show just how well content strategy and SEO can work together to keep
content fresh and relevant. It's a win win!4. Create consistent
content and update it often.If part of your content strategy is
consistently updating your website by means of a blog, this is a great
opportunity to create content in an attempt to rank for your keywords.
Not to mention, the context in which you are writing blog posts allows
for more flexibility in your writing as it pertains to naturally
including those keywords several times. For example, if you're writing
a post about the popularity of designer BPA-free aluminum water
bottles, you have more chances to work that long-tail keyword in than
you would on a product page. Obviously saying designer BPA-free
aluminum water bottles five times on a website page would just be
weird, no matter how natural you tried to make it sound.5. Use an
Editorial Calendar for SEO.Speaking of creating and updating content
consistently, an editorial calendar can be used for more than just
blog posts and updating site pages. Create an editorial calendar for
SEO and blog posts together. Target keywords around events or times of
the year that are relevant to your brand, company or product. For
instance, if you sell outdoor gear, focus your SEO efforts on
snowshoes as winter approaches. Pay per click ads have relied on this
tactic for some time, so why not a blog post? It sounds simple, but
people miss these opportunities all of the time. Of course, you don't
want to plan your SEO calendar too far in advance because keyword
trends change, but planning keywords a good 30 days out should put you
in the right place.Let us know if you have any more tips for using SEO
and content strategy harmoniously to achieve your website's objectives
in the comments below.