With Panda, Penguin and all the other Google updates, SEO has changed over the years. What used to work doesn’t anymore.
Source: www.quicksprout.com
As many have observed for some time now, SEO has completely changed over the past few years. From being machine-centric, it became people-centric. But what does it mean concretely to content marketers?
This infographic by Neil Patel gives a number of interesting points, a couple of which I want to comment:
1. It’s about the long tail:
70% of search traffic comes from long tail keywords. So while you (or your CEO) might be fascinated by that one keyword that you’d like to rank #1 for, you might exhaust yourself doing that while missing opportunities.
One way to naturally cover the long tail is to curate content as explained here. By defining a topic you’re curating on, you will naturally create connexions between keywords. This page by EcoVadis for instance makes natural connexions between words like “sustainable development”, “supply chain”, “child labor” or “procurement”. As such EcoVadis’ target audience – procurement managers, sustainable development directors, etc… – are more likely to search for keywords that include these combinations and which results will show EcoVadis’ curated content on the first page. As I write this, EcoVadis actually shows as #1 for “supply chain sustainable procurement benchmark” – a combination that might seem very long tail but that describes precisely what the company does… and what potential buyers are interested in.
2. Integrate Content Marketing and SEO:
Old-school SEO tactics were obscure, technical back-linking techniques. Not only does this not work anymore but as Neil shows, it’s dangerous. The way to solve this is to stop considering publishing content is one thing (creative, marketing-driven) and SEO is another (technical, outsourced).
Integrate content and SEO: it’s more and more the same thing.
And if you’re interested in leveraging the benefits of content curation for SEO, check out our complete guide.
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You’d do even better if you considered structured data, rich pins, open graph, schema.org and rich snippets as a part of the new SEO. Its overlooked by many, its surprising.
I have been working on the longtail keywords and it is finally starting to pay off. Much easier to rank in a bunch of longtail versus one or two keyword dominated by the big brands.