SEO Branded Content

The quality of content you offer influences everything about your brand: Is your audience having to sift through hundreds of pages to reach the information they want or are they being drawn in by content that offers no value? If the content in front of them isn’t relevant, or indeed useful, then why would they carry on reading, or even consider sharing it?

A company may have hundreds of pages positioning their services and products, but if the information is passive and adds little value against those competing in the online market – what makes them stand out?

The newest addition to Google’s Hummingbird algorithm is Rank Brain. Rank Brain is a new AI that thinks like a human, identifies relevant information and can even make decisions based on whether the information is what the search was looking for. If your content doesn’t fill any of Rank Brains needs, it’s bad news I’m afraid.

Crafting great quality content takes time and research. Knowing what your customers search for and indeed want can be a difficult task. Without the right tools and understanding, or use of relevant keywords and appropriate title tags, your great quality content could, and in all likeliness, will, be going to waste.

Using tools such as Search Console and Analytics can really help you understand the motive behind consumers coming to your site. You can take a glimpse at the type of content drawing in traffic and what Google currently determines to be relevant to your brand.

For instance, you would expect us at Rooster to have content keywords that are relevant to our brand such as Marketing, Rooster and Creative but a large proportion of businesses have keywords such as email, phone and contact reappearing in their most relevant keywords. This is because Google was presented these words more frequently than any other when they crawled the site.

A way to avoid this is by rewriting or reproducing great content that talks about your company in detail, employing keywords that are specific searchable terms: by this we mean using specific terms such as ‘Event Management App’ instead of ‘App’. Doing this, Rank Brain will recognise you as a relevant site to appear for these precise terms and thus, will reduce your bounce rate whilst building your site’s authority and reliability.

 

Link Building as an SEO Strategy

Content, however, isn’t the only solution to all search ranking dilemmas, although it is a considerable factor in influencing organic ranking and traffic. What happens behind the scenes is just as significant. You need to qualify your content. Why would someone believe everything they see or read on the Internet? Link building is the recognition from other websites that your content is trustworthy, informative and useful, which builds on your SEO performance.

Link building is one of the more difficult tasks of an SEO specialist, it’s an alliance of another site linking to yours,commonly used to increase brand awareness and improve domain authority.

The key to setting up these links is using what you currently have. Do you have customers or businesses that have worked with you? Use this to set up a client’s page with their logo and a link to their homepage and ask for the same in return.

If that isn’t working, produce a blog. Most businesses have a latest news/blog page that features current content and information. Maintenance of a blog must be continual, most limit themselves to two articles a month. However, by having a selection of guest bloggers, current news and viewpoints, articles across your blog can result in a high link building potential.

For instance, think about the sites you visit and how they operate, do they just have one topic in a single form or a range of content such as articles, videos or sound, for example, podcasts, that give you a great user experience, and keep you going back?

 

Sharing Optimisation for SEO

You’re probably thinking that link building is the same as sharing: Absolutely not! These should be kept separate and have separate strategies. Sharing typically comes from social media with individuals sharing your content directly, rather than linking to your homepage.

Shared content adopts characteristics of being useful, informative, humorous or possesses viral potential. Such content frequently comprises of the common: “how to…” and “top tips for…” articles, also known as Linkbait. Linkbait is a strategy adopted for brand building to increase organic search rankings for niche topics.

With the use of social media becoming commonplace, this strategy doesn’t improve your rankings greatly – but it can boost brand awareness of campaigns through an increase in a  site’s organic positioning.

 

Bringing SEO Together

With the ever-changing world of search engine optimisation, it can be hard to keep on top of new best practices and continual updates on algorithms, let alone understand them.

Remember that the core of a strong SEO strategy relies on creating great content, engaging with an audience via social media, and earning high-quality links along the way. This can be done with research around interesting and purposeful content ideas, as well as identifying new link building opportunities to increase your search engine ranking.

With the ever-changing world of search engine optimisation, it can be hard to keep on top of new best practices and continual updates on algorithms, let alone understand them. However, the core of a strong SEO strategy relies on creating useful content, engaging with an audience via social media, and earning high-quality links along the way. This how-to guide can point you in the right direction and aid you in creating a successful SEO strategy.

There are many ways that consumers can find and discover your business. One of the most impactful is by having a strong online presence. Either way, if you’re a small or medium sized business, search engine optimisation (SEO) really can help bring those much-coveted visitors to your site. In order to build a search optimised brand you need to begin with the first thing that an online consumer will examine; content.