Here’s a question we get all of the time – “how can our business appear at the top of search results?”

The answer is through something called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). How exactly to do SEO effectively and impactfully is a bit more complicated. In the past the main tips to succeed in SEO was to create content that contained a high density of keywords and ensure that the back end of the site was optimized, this included keyword metadata, relevant back links, and labelled images. That’s no longer the whole story.

SEO now takes time and a lot of resources to complete successfully. But it can’t be ignored. The majority of marketers say this year improving SEO is their top inbound marketing priority, according to a recent webinar from Contently.

Before investing money into a SEO program, it’s important to understand where many brands are currently struggling in SEO.

• Resources are scarce
• They have no access to analytical data for SEO
• The team simply doesn’t understand SEO
• Search related KPIs are deprioritized
• Unsure where to start

A trick people used to use to appear highly on search engine result pages was to stuff content with keywords. SEO experts would fill a site with keywords making it unreadable. (This is the part of the reason why so many corporate websites were practically illegible a decade ago.) Google has caught on to this practice and has changed their algorithms. Keyword stuffing is no longer an effective way to appear highly on a search engine’s results page.

What’s replaced stuffing is Semantic SEO. Semantic SEO uses information provided in a search engine’s results page to create relevant content that offers value to customers.  

The first step in building a semantic SEO program is to understand what your readers want from your content. Always use analytics to inform SEO decisions. Conducting research into your audience base, the questions they’re asking, the topics they’re researching, and the challenges they’re facing. Software such as Google Search Console or SEMRUSH can collect and analyse this data.

The next step is tricky – figuring out a way to differentiate your content from what is currently performing best. Allow your copywriters to unleash their creativity, within limits. Ensure content is answering the targeted search terms and key terms are mentioned. Content marketing and SEO is truly a balance between art and science. Once content is drafted your SEO team should then edit the piece for SEO. It’s important to ensure that the content flows naturally and not to stuff the text with keywords. The SEO team should also ensure that there is a title, description, keyword metadata, links to other relevant content, and descriptions to images.

After your content has been approved, it’s time to publish and begin reporting. Using Google Analytics, you can analyse how your content performed in organic search channels. The more traffic your page received, the more optimised the content was. You can use the findings from your reporting to feed back into new content and consistently improve your SEO ranking.

SEO is more than just writing relevant and original content. A cohesive SEO program needs to also focus on the more technical side of SEO. One way to do this is to ensure that when publishing content, you are also link building. Higher-quality inbound links are crucial to SEO. Link building can be conducted through contextual links, editorial links, and sharing your content on your social channels. Contextual links are either outbound or inbound links found within a body of text.

One way to utilise this for instance is, if you created one long article, you could split this into bite size pieces and have them linked internally between each other. As readers read one article, they could click to the next one. This would improve the credibility of the content and most likely reduce your bounce rate – or how many people immediately leave the site.

Effective SEO is not just a one-time operation, ideally it’s part of an ongoing relationship. Get in touch with us at Cognito if you’re ready to begin your SEO journey.

Emmet Caslin is an account executive in Cognito’s London office