Connect with your audience by covering the topics they care about the most.
Plan out a network of interlinked blogs that answer related questions and help each
other rank.
Write and publish content that helps people, and watch your rankings go up!
Find topics and outlines catered to your business.
Good marketing usually pays off, and that’s unlikely to change in 2024. What is likely to change, though, is how companies think about their SEO strategy in digital marketing. The idea of “search engine optimization” has become the ever-elusive unicorn of marketing, with no shortage of people promising solutions. With the emergence of powerful AI tools and an ever-increasing digital market, the future of SEO is shaping up to be unlike anything we’ve seen to date.
While this changing landscape may seem concerning, at DemandJump we believe the same principles for a good SEO strategy will still apply, even as the digital world evolves. The catch, though, is that it can be difficult to know what actually constitutes a good SEO marketing strategy. What’s worse, many people promise quick fixes and ‘cheats’ around SEO—things that will ultimately not work, and might end up hurting you in the future. You don’t need to exploit SEO system loopholes to win page one rankings, and you don’t actually want to do that, anyway.
What you do want to do is:
Read on about how to do the things above —and more—in a way that won’t need to change with algorithm updates. With a proper understanding of SEO and a logical plan, getting to page one of Google doesn’t have to be a mystery.
Using SEO well in a marketing strategy means understanding the four types of SEO, and how each of them can help (or hurt) your marketing efforts. But what are the 4 types of SEO? Let’s look at each type, and how to use them to your advantage.
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This is what most people think of when they hear SEO: the optimization of search engine rankings for your website pages, mostly by using keywords. While this is a good practice that is the core of SEO, many have conflated “more keywords” with “more SEO,” and that’s not the case. Not only is keyword stuffing useless for getting page-one rankings, but keyword stuffing actually hurts your chances at ranking higher. It also ensures your entire website will be penalized in search rankings.
Instead of trying to cram as many SEO keywords into your website as possible, focus on choosing keywords that are:
On-page SEO is the center of any SEO strategy, and should be developed accordingly. Rather than using keywords as a means to an end, use them as building blocks to construct the foundation of your content.
This refers to the amount of content outside of your website that links back to your website. Backlinks, press releases, and industry publications are just a few examples of what might grace an off-page SEO checklist. This is where you’ll see the benefit of good on-page SEO: if your content is relevant, helpful, and able to provide a unique insight, it’s far more likely to get cited, referenced, and talked about.
When assessing your SEO strategy, you should consider not only how much of your content has off-page optimization, but how your competitors compare:
At DemandJump, we’re able to observe these trends through our Consumer Insights Platform, which lets clients look at their rankings for specific keywords, as well as how their competitors rank. That, among other metrics, helps determine a content strategy that will be both impactful and far-reaching.
If your website is easy to navigate, loads quickly and is easily used by a variety of people, it has high technical SEO. While this leans more towards UX design and engineering, marketing clearly still has a stake in technical SEO for a website. This is mainly because another component of technical SEO is how repetitive your website’s content is; for example, if two different pages on your site have the same copy, that sets your page up to flagging for being “not helpful” content. Ensuring your content is fresh, varied, and unique will help boost traffic as much as a good load time or a screen-reader-friendly design.
If you’ve ever added a “near me” to the end of a Google search, you’re already familiar with local SEO. This also underlines the importance of local SEO: it helps your website rank higher for web users in your geographic region. If you’re wondering how to rank higher on Google, this is a key part of that equation—particularly because your “Google My Business” profile is the main driver for local SEO. Business hours, contact numbers, and customer testimonials all play a part in making or breaking your success in this area.
Above all, SEO relies on creating valuable content for your consumers. No matter which of the four types of SEO you’re trying to improve, content is crucial to your marketing strategy. Yes, there are other factors to topping search results, but “winning” the search engine game is meaningless if you don’t have something waiting for your consumers on the other side. What’s more, high-quality content will help you turn up higher on search engine result pages (SERPs) to begin with. But what does “high-quality” actually mean?
High-quality content entails three traits: it is original, engaging, and helpful. Let’s look at each of these individually, and why content quality can—and should—be part of your SEO strategy.
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No one wants to hear (or read) the same thing over and over, said by multiple people. And having content that adds nothing to the conversation around your topics only contributes to you sounding like the broken record that is most internet content. Instead of repeating the same tactics or copying what your competitors are saying, try to add your unique spin to topics, using the unique thing (or idea) your brand provides. Additionally, you don’t want to repeat yourself because it hurts your search engine rankings. It’s always better to have less content that is high-quality and well-positioned than it is to flood the web with a myriad of duplicate content.
Creating original work not only depends on your approach, but also your starting point. Choosing the right topics based on keywords makes a difference in shaping your web of content, and it makes creating unique pieces much easier. This is why at DemandJump, we use Pillar-Based Marketing to develop strategies alongside our clients, using hand-picked keywords as the foundation. Through this, we’re able to weave a web of linking pieces that thoroughly cover important topics—topics that will interest your audiences and ultimately, attract them to your offerings.
Any piece of content you put online could be the first thing someone sees about your business. While it often takes seeing something more than one time to truly interact with it, it’s important to put your best foot forward. You do this by understanding what your audience wants, how they communicate, and what sorts of content they are already searching for. If they stumble across you on their SERP, they should be able to relate to your content, and be encouraged to do something after reading it—whether that’s contacting you for a demo, learning more about what you do, or simply reading more of your content.
Whether it’s a new piece of information, a new approach to a pain point, or even a topic that can be discussed in their workplace, readers should leave your content with something that is going to benefit them. After all, why else would they come to you for solutions in the future if your content isn’t helpful? Part of establishing yourself as someone to do business with relies on you being a thought leader in your industry; if you can publish things that genuinely help readers, it builds a sense of trust between you and your audience.
For your content to truly be valuable, it should always be original, engaging, and helpful all together. Some of the negative practices we discussed with SEO, like keyword stuffing and AI-generated content, also hurt the quality of what you publish. Neither cheating search engine loopholes nor relying on artificial intelligence can replace doing SEO correctly. There are no quick fixes, and it will take true investment in a proper strategy. Methods like Pillar-Based Marketing are able to use the SEO tools available, while still making content that is high-quality and proven to increase traffic.
The short answer to this question is “no”—at least, not yet. What’s more likely to happen is that AI will become one of many SEO marketing tools in the hands of marketers, content writers and other creators. AI is an amazing creation, but it’s not a stand-in for good strategy or marketing. Admittedly, though, the concern around its fast growth is reasonable. With the recent strides made by AI bots such as ChatGPT, there is a lot of fear around what may disappear as a result. After all, if robots can replace lawyers, who’s to say they can’t replace SEO, or even content writers? Will SEO be obsolete in 10 years?
There are multiple reasons this won’t happen. First of all, while AI is impressive, the truth is that it’s nowhere close to mimicking humans in long-form content. Not only that, but Google’s algorithm updates for spam have made it clear they aren’t interested in promoting AI-generated content. Lastly, AI cannot generate original content by definition. Even if a chatbot can grow to the point of copying human speech, it still needs to scrape existing content off the internet to formulate its content…and that, dear reader, is not good content. Scraped, regurgitated writing is neither original, nor helpful, nor engaging—no matter how well it’s “written” in terms of grammar and syntax. Unless Google changes its stance on generated content or AI evolves into something far more fearsome, AI cannot replace SEO—only augment it.
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Through our Pillar-Based Marketing (PBM) strategy, DemandJump helps you reach your audiences with a content strategy that is based on objective, observable trends. We use PBM to augment our content approach, pulling real-world search data—that is, what customers are actually looking for online—to inform what content we create, and why. With our Consumer Insights Platform, you can see not only the top Google searches today, but how you stack up in those searches against your competitors. From there, you can formulate a logical, strategic plan for content creation that is both original and responsive to data.
At DemandJump, we make sure that when your target audience asks questions, your company will be the answer. Create an account with us today, and see for yourself!
