In today’s post, Bhavna speaks about the Use of “Content” to trigger your Social Search Success.
What gives the users an enhanced search experience? A relevant and quality search is what the users are looking for and Google has kept this in mind by bringing about the changes in its algorithms in response to highly focused and appropriate content. This has taken content marketing to newer heights and its adoption is what has transformed search engine optimisation. Search and social media activities are powered by creative and high quality content which has taken over the way algorithms work i.e concentrating on the human audience as opposed to the aggressive black hat tactics like keyword stuffing, invisible text etc which focused only on the search engines. Content marketing has been able to align search and social media and help them work in unison cohesively to deliver a meaningful search experience to the user.
There is consumption and distribution of content across geographical boundaries, across multiple devices (laptops, smart phones etc) and in more than one formats (text, video, images). Suddenly there is an extraordinary supply of content over the web as there is ease of creating, consuming and sharing content. These reasons have brought about transformational change in search and social relationship. Search engines relate social signs of user engagement to be dependent on high quality content and as a means to scoop out relevant data from this gigantic content pool.
Relationship between SERPs and content
Google had reduced the organic listings from 10 to 7 since August and these listings had been replaced by image results and results with maps. In 2013, Google has open doors to ranking across various search types and formats with quality and relevancy of content to dominate the SERP results over image, video and social media results.
Content and SEO activities
Search marketers are focusing their efforts on social media activity to dig out more and more SEO opportunities and advise on the actionable steps to increase their search engine visibility. Social engagement as a result of powerful and relevant content is highest on priority by the marketers.
Content and Marketing Efforts
Content is the not only driver for search and social activities but also helps formulating a content plan based on search and social research. Here are some basics of the marketing efforts in relation to content.
- Understand the User: The best way to leverage content is to understand your target audience.
- Keywords: Once you understand what the target audience needs, keywords and social trends should be combined together in formulating your content strategies. An analysis of the rankings of the competitors in SERPs can help understand what is missing and accordingly content can be re strategized for social and search activities.
- Topics based on social trends: Social media can help understand what the users are interested in, as the content being shared is the one which is working. Hence, having content with social media topics and using the search keywords can help synergise the SEO strategies with social trends.
- Producing Quality Content: There is nothing more negative for your marketing effort than a low quality or spam content. Good quality content needs to be original, powerful and relevant. It has to be managed well with a well sought after methodology. Content has to be integrated with SEO activities and the results have a direct effect in form of high search rankings, traffic conversions and revenue.
- Distribution of content: Content can be distributed across various formats and channels for achieving optimal social and search results. Web pages with quality relevant content, guest posts, research, white papers, case studies, client testimonials are some of them.