SEO is the secret sauce that lets your digital content land where you want it to. We incorporate SEO into our content strategy at Blended Sense because we know how effective it can be to help new and existing customers find you.
While you can’t ignore organic reach, SEO is still important.
If your SEO stinks or is non-existent currently, fear not. We’re going to walk you through 6 ways to make it better by the end of your workweek.
SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, involves using keywords and key phrases so that non-humans (Google’s bots) can find and present content you’ve written to actual humans.
SEO targets non-paid traffic or “organic traffic.”
Imagine picking up your phone right now and saying, “Siri, I want sushi in North Austin.”
SEO is a phrase like: Sushi in North Austin.
The right terms are going to do something miraculous for you, but you need to know how to incorporate them effectively into your copy and digital assets (even your videos).
Let’s look at a simple example if we type “sushi in Austin” into a Google browser:
Notice the search results: 41,200,000 results pop up. There aren’t even that many sushi restaurants in Austin!
Now check this out if we type in “sushi in North Austin.”
126,000,000 results pop up.
But what if we type this instead: “sushi in Cedar Park, TX”
We’re down to 7,690,000 results. We’ve just eliminated more than ⅔ of your competition.
If we now type in “sushi in Cedar Park, TX that serves nigiri” our results are whittled down to just 50,400 and a map pops up of restaurants close to us that serve the kind of sushi we’re looking for.
If we keep adding “SEO” phrases to our copy, photos, and video, we help people find the exact services or products that they really want. We don’t make them search in a sea of competing noise to find us.
If your SEO currently makes people wade through thousands of pages, then, yea it stinks. But you can make it as fragrant and high-performing as as a bouquet of hyacinth and lavender on your lover’s anniversary.
Let’s get straight to what you can do to help visitors arrive at your site and find you among fewer competitors.
You’ve probably landed on a website before and had no idea what they were about. You likely navigated away as fast as you could, unable to waste a single second of time for someone or something that doesn’t have a clear message.
Keep your content relevant, interesting, and focused on your customer. But it also needs to be fresh. No one wants to purchase goods or services from a company who couldn’t be bothered to update December content since last April.
There are 4 simple reasons you need to publish relevant digital content:
Great content earns links to your site from other sites, which raises your domain authority. You want to become the authority in your field, and as Moz points out, this can’t be faked. Great content exists as proof to the world that you know what you’re talking about.
Words are important, but photos and video pave the way for people to listen. Moving pictures attract the eye. In fact, more than 75% of our brain’s processing power is dedicated to visual cues. With good video, people stay to find out what else you have to say.
Video improves engagement by up to 74% according to Databox. Video boosts click-through rates, and increases the time someone spends on your pages.
Quality is what counts the most. If you don’t get the thumbnail just right, don’t worry about it. Just post engaging video.
Advice Media’s Joe Sloan suggests that you focus on the first 5 seconds. That’s how quickly you can win or lose someone’s attention.
G2 Crowd’s Derek Doeing says, “Consider what you enjoy as a video consumer, and use that to craft your own videos.”
You might capture some good video on your new iPhone, but it won’t have graphics, high-quality audio, music tracks without copyright infringement, color correction, or the perfect light.
You also won’t have the expertise or professionalism of a video team, motion graphics, and an editor that can piece your visual story together. In a 30 - 60 minute interview taken of multiple people, only 30 - 45 seconds is often used in a final cut.
At Blended Sense, we distill the narrative down until it carries the most impactful message. We edit until we’ve got the crux of the story. The denouement!
With motion graphics, for instance, you can grab attention with high quality visuals, but there are multiple types of video assets you can employ to boost engagement. Each type of video is best used on platforms that honor their specific intent most productively.
“Video and graphics are my passion. I spend almost too much time with them, but it’s what I love. I can’t imagine doing anything else.” - David Ruiz, Blended Sense Video Content Editor
According to Blended Sense’s own Video Content Editor, David Ruiz, here are 3 rules of thumb when creating motion graphics and video:
To get the most out of your video posts, you need to apply a few SEO techniques.
Many people don’t realize that they’re sitting on all kinds of engaging content. If you simply refresh content that hasn’t aged well on your site, you can A. save time, B. Have new content people and search engines alike are interested in perusing.
Find an old blog post or sales landing page that has potential, and refresh it. Post updates, and add video that is relevant to the piece, and watch your engagement improve. Google favors new content, so update your old content for a better ranking.
Metadata, also known as meta tags, are text that your reader doesn’t pay attention to, but search engines like Google, do. Meta tags shows up in your browser’s search results.
Meta tags are used by search engines to sort and rank information so that people can more easily find pages that they want to visit.
To have good meta data, you need to start with a good meta title (just like using good titles on your landing pages).
A meta title is the title you see when someone clicks from choices presented by Google on a search. It should be clear and unique. No two pages on your site should have the same meta-title or meta data.
It’s also a good idea to follow a standardized naming convention for your site. For example, capitalize all words in a title or use sentence case consistently so that if multiple pages rank on Google, they will be formatted similarly.
There’s no “ideal” meta title length because it will likely display fully or get cut off depending on the device someone is searching on, but it’s smart to keep mobile in mind since more than 57% of people are now viewing content on a mobile device.
Moz recommends meta titles of 60 or less characters but you can also get a lot of SEO and organic engagement out of titles that are longer. You can use the Moz meta title length check tool here.
Also be sure that your meta title and content match. The closer your meta title is to your actual blog or landing page title, the easier it will be to rank for specific keyword results that relate to your product or service.
It’s a good practice to create written content that captures your keywords in the actual title and meta titles anyhow. If you need some good tools to research organic keywords, try UberSuggest or SEMRush.
If your meta title and meta data are done correctly they can help Google rank your page(s).
For example:
In this example, “8 Powerful Reasons You Need to Use Video Marketing” is the meta title.
The meta description is “Find out why 63% of businesses use video content
marketing right now. . . Low quality and poor design didn’t matter nearly as much. So it’s fair. . . .”
In this example, dreamgrow has a fairly good meta-title. That’s important because Google is constantly changing their algorithm and sometimes they’ll show meta descriptions, and sometimes they won’t. This makes your meta title even more critical.
A good meta description should expand on your meta title, utilizing keywords for organic search and higher page rank.
There’s nothing more frustrating than creating stellar content for your site and then watching your bounce rates go up. A bounce rate is how quickly someone “bounces” or leaves your website without ever really giving you a fair shake, and really viewing your pages.
Look at how abandonment rates increase for websites with long page loading times.
One of the fastest ways to decrease bounce rate is to make sure that your pages load super fast. Just SECONDS can mean the difference between someone staying or going.
If you aren’t creating content with mobile in mind you’re missing a huge opportunity to connect with your intended audience. More searches are now taking place on mobile devices than on computers, so make sure that content loads on a mobile screen in a way that is easy to read, watch, or view.
Your text shouldn’t be too small, since it is harder to read on mobile and all video and photos should scale to mobile size. Most modern website platforms automatically consider mobile, but if your site was built on an older platform, you may want to consider migrating your site to one that supports mobile.
If your SEO stinks or is non-existent currently, apply these 6 tricks. You’ll notice huge improvements in no time.
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