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When it comes to being on a search engine’s first page, search engine optimization, or SEO, is a business owner’s best friend. In other words, it’s your pass to guaranteeing that customers who are searching for your services find your company. However, for this, you cannot go without following the SEO content best practices. 

Google constantly reaffirms its intention to enhance the user experience on the platform. The biggest search engine in the world is something that all digital marketers and website owners have in common. 

Through content marketing and SEO, it is imperative that you provide your ideal clients with the finest experience possible by giving educational content about your goods and services, which will help us win over potential clients and keep them as long-term clients. 

You can make sure that everything you produce is SEO-friendly by following this guide. Start applying these recommended practices right away to position yourself for success in the future, whether it is through the use of simpler SEO techniques or SEO tool implementation.

Before we dive into SEO content best practices, let us first understand the connection between SEO and content marketing. 

What Is The Link Between SEO & Content? 

Content writing is frequently associated with thought leadership and narrative. Through content marketing, you can communicate your point of view, and opinion on various matters in the industry. You can also use it as leverage to discuss the latest developments in your industry. Through content marketing, you can make your business exponentially visible There won’t be any audiences for your material, though, if you do not combine your storytelling with search engine optimization (SEO).

In order to help your content rank on the first page of search engine result pages, SEO content writing preserves the fundamental component of content creation, which is storytelling and adds optimization signals on top of it (SERPs).

The divisions of SEO and content marketing are not separate. Both actually depend on one another. Content marketing can only be effective with the right SEO. Content marketing and SEO work incredibly well together.

What Are The Best Tools To Implement SEO Content Best Practices? 

If you are new to the concept of digital marketing and SEO, ask your digital marketing agency and they will share with you the best paid and unpaid tools that you can use to implement SEO in content. 

Some of the most popular tools include the following: 

Ahrefs 

Ahrefs is a market-leading SEO tool well known for its ability to do competitor and backlink analysis as well as keyword research.

However, it also provides a number of capabilities to meet the needs of organisations in terms of content optimization. Because it provides keyword research, rank tracking, backlink analysis, and content exploration on a worldwide level, Ahrefs is a superb enterprise-level tool. It is a content writing agency best friend, to say the least as it makes keyword research and addition a smooth sail. 

It touts having the “largest extensive index of backlinks” and a database of more than “1.6 billion search queries.” The platform aims to serve as the “one source of truth” for businesses wishing to make strategic SEO decisions in this regard.

Sprout Social

Small businesses, big organisations, and advertising agencies all frequently extol the virtues of how simple it is to plan, organise, and disseminate content and campaigns via social networks.

It takes a lot of time to transition between networks given that the bulk of businesses today post content to numerous social media platforms. You may use Sprout to publish your most current Instagram photo, Facebook post, and Pinterest pins all at once. User-level permissions give marketing managers, authors, and everyone else a specialised capacity to add to a social media calendar, allowing marketing teams to collaborate with it.

The platform aims to serve as the “one source of truth” for businesses wishing to make strategic SEO decisions in this regard. You can even identify content marketing trends using this tool and use them to further your content marketing strategy. 

ClearScope 

Brands that use Clearscope’s content optimization software can produce highly relevant content. In order to find out what people are searching for, what content is performing the best for these searches, and how brands can enhance their content to rank higher in the search results, Clearscope leverages AI technology.

To evaluate the SEO of your current content or raise the grade on your new material as it is being produced, determine your “Content Grade.” Many of the tools that companies already use, such as Google Docs and WordPress, are integrated with Clearscope. As a result, adoption is simple and free of time-consuming back-and-forth between technologies.

BrandWatch 

Social media experts can more easily listen, engage, measure, plan, and create content that counts with Brandwatch’s organised set of tools. Your content calendar is the foundation for all the analytics KPIs you’ll be tracking, according to Brandwatch. You can quickly plan, schedule, revise, and post from your content calendar.

Brandwatch provides users with a high-level perspective of engagement, competitor benchmarking, and important performance when it comes to performance analysis. Brandwatch posts report on social media about the following: 

• Trends in attitudes (reputation management)
• Chances for influencer marketing.
• Accounts that have a particular issue or trend on their mind.
• A brand’s share of voice (SOV)
• Keyword positions

Brandwatch’s coverage includes blogs, review sites, and other content venues in addition to social media.

SEMRush 

Semrush is a well-known SaaS platform for SEO and content marketing that assists companies and marketers in getting more from their content.  This tool handles everything from competitor and keyword analysis to social media management. If you closely follow an SEO guide, you can make the most of SEMRush to follow SEO content best practices.

It genuinely serves as your SEO strategy’s “one-stop shop.” Large firms and corporations should choose the business subscription level because it allows for virtually unlimited keyword research, tracking, measurement, and optimization.

You’ll need a programme that can keep up if you have multiple websites with hundreds to thousands of pages and are ranking for thousands or tens of thousands of keywords.

Now that you know which tools you and your SEO agency need to turn to follow SEO content best practices, let us now look at what these best practices are. 

Optimise (Atleast) Your Main Pages

With SEO, you may continue to contribute to your existing content library or build a blog series to generate visitors based on a certain term. Then you can start attempting to obtain additional backlinks through media coverage and guest posting, you can raise the domain authority of your website.

In the end, if you configure your primary web pages to be search-engine friendly, you can unwind knowing that Google is handling the bulk of the work (even while you’re asleep) to deliver your website to users who are actively looking for the specific service you offer.

Invest Thoroughly on On-Site SEO

Making your website search engine friendly is known as on-site SEO. Making your website simple to use and informing search engines about it are the major components of this. 

Start by optimisng your images. This is the easiest way to start with on-site optimisation an your SEO agency can easily start by adding relevant alt-text to each image. As you know, Google cannot really read images. It reads cues given by you through alt-text to make sense of what the images associated with the text might represent. 

Make sure every image you upload to your website has been optimised for file size and file name. For a better user experience, images with reduced file sizes load more quickly. Google also evaluates page load speed as a ranking criteria. 

Next, improve your titles and headings. Choose wisely when creating the site and page titles and incoprorate your keywords, too. By improving your headings, your chances of increasing your click-through rates increase massively. Make sure that the titles and headings indicate exactly what is written inside the blog. Do not oversell with your title or else this may lead to increase in bounce rate. 

Also, Off-Site SEO 

In order to increase your rating on search engine results pages (SERPs), you can use off-site SEO, which entails a number of activities you carry out away from your website.

If you use WordPress, Squarespace, or another website builder, you should still follow these steps because off-site SEO is independent of the website platform and complements onsite SEO in helping people locate your website. 

• Verify the existence of your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools to encourage those search engines to crawl it.  
• Send Google and Bing, your sitemap.
• This ensures that search engines don’t overlook any pages and helps them comprehend the structure of your website.
• Create a Google My Business account for your website. This increases your visibility in local search results, and I’ve seen that as I get reviews there and reply to them, it improves my general SEO.

Pro tip: A vote of confidence in your website is effectively expressed when other websites connect to it. Pages with more inbound connections typically rank better in search results. After sharing your website pages on social media and registering with directories, think about alternative chances to obtain backlinks, through methods such as guest blogging.

Keep Monitoring Site Speed 

Many visitors will simply leave your site if it takes more than a few seconds to load. It should be clear that your site has to be quick and responsive. However, bloated websites are becoming a bigger issue, particularly in eCommerce sites with plenty of images.

A sluggish, jerky website degrades user experience and harms SEO. In addition to producing the PageSpeed tool that assists you in loading time analysis, Google also uses the same technology to rank websites according to how responsive they are. This makes it an underutilised free SEO tool that you can use.

A good user experience depends on speed, which is also a component in your customers’ experiences and search engine rankings. If your site’s user experience is good, users will stay on it longer and browse it more thoroughly. Your search ranking will increase as a result of the increased engagement and internal link clicks, which also serve as a sign of strong UX.

Focus On Local SEO 

Utilize SEO tools to carry out research to determine the amount of searches and level of competition for specific terms. You can look for geo-specific terms by adding your location to the keyword search. The volume and rankings of searches conducted worldwide are discussed while discussing search engine optimization strategy. 

However, local companies need SEO just as much as eCommerce does. These companies are actually well-positioned to completely dominate their long-tail keywords by concentrating on a local specialisation.

Getting featured on Google is crucial for any local business wanting to expand its clientele. You make your website readable to Google’s site crawlers by including your name, address, phone number, and other contact information on it.

Consider making local pages for each of your branches if your franchise has a few small ones. This will allow you to use the same SEO strategy for each area you visit, customising your website copy and online content for each one along the way.

In the past, there were several ways to improve SEO using techniques like keyword stuffing or cramming alt-text with keywords. But as Google’s ranking algorithm has evolved to give more weight to factors like user experience, SEO and content are becoming more closely related. Therefore, you must keep yourself updated with the SEO content best practices if you consistently want to rank high on the SERPs. 

All the best!