SEO for SMEs Part 2: Creating and Engaging with Quality Content

Following on from the first in our series on how to improve your SEO with search ranking strategies, this article outlines three steps for helping you to engage with and create high quality content.

The first step is to concentrate your efforts on initiating conversations with the right audiences by providing useful, expert, high-quality content. This will establish your core values and your overall brand message. Once you have created a distinctive ‘voice’ through your own content, you can then deploy it in order to tapping into related conversations and develop your brand’s presence across different channels. This will help make your brand’s image and tone consistent across all your posts and interactions, whether you are talking to other content creators or user-driven channels such as chat forums, Facebook groups, LinkedIn discussions, Twitter threads or Instagram feeds.

In sum, it is important not only to create regular, good content, but also to steadily engage with what is already out there.

The final step is about utilising this content for building connections to other sites, and maximising the potential touchpoints that these connections and content provide to audiences through the strategic use of tags and keywords.

Make your posts deliver

Firstly, you will need to position your content within a range of topics and conversations relevant to your sector. Your aim should be to become a point of convergence for any discussions that may relate to your brand, the industry, and your audience’s adjacent interests.

Build a section of your website where you can write about your industry, blog about events, and participate in conversations that align to your audience’s interests. These activities will be noticed by Google, who will also reward you with SEO points for adding outbound links to relevant, original content that you have sourced elsewhere on the web. Some specialist affiliates may also be able to create this kind of content for you, (often for a flat fee) which they may allow you to link to or post on your site.

Make sure you are creating content that is playful and dynamic, and be sure to engage with the community that exists through activities which can be embedded within or direct readers back to your website.

Engage with different platforms and mediums

Social media and forums can be inspiration for diversifying and moving away from simple blog posts or listicles, and can include image galleries and short videos to keep your content interesting for all users. Social media platforms are sites with very high Domain Authorities. This means that having links to, say, a YouTube hosted video placed neatly on one of your landing pages can be a quick win for your SEO.

Plus, being active across different social media channels provides other avenues of discovery for new potential clients. As sites of interaction and discussion, social platforms allow you to gain nuggets of insights into your customer base and surrounding online communities.

Unlock keywords

Your product listings, descriptions, blog content, and landing pages should also make use of the strongest possible keywords related to your business. Regular keyword research is another crucial element of improving SEO rankings, and using them in a structured, consistent, but natural way will also improve your searchability.

Tools such as SERanking and SEMRush, as well as Surfer SEO are all useful for tailoring your approach to keywords for your niche. You can use them to help with competitor research or to attract new partner sites. You can also use them to gain insights into the similar search terms that audiences are using, and therefore to inform upcoming content and product releases.

Make sure each page or post is unique and differentiated so that your tags and keywords are not competing across your site. You may find it useful to create a taxonomy when categorising pages, tags, and keywords.

How affiliate marketing plays in:

Key words are used in lots of different contexts by affiliate partners. Two of the main channels they are used for are Pay Per Click (PPC) partners (through affiliate marketing this includes PPC arranged through a CPA payout model)  and Comparative Shopping Specialists (CSS) campaigns. Working with specialists in these channels means that your overall SEO improves, because the algorithms they use to maximise the amount they bid for keyword placements is governed by the cost relative to the forecasted conversion rates. Effectively, you can be confident that the prices for keywords are not being pushed up, and instead, affiliate partners will plug gaps and help find new pools of untapped keyword potential.

Quick Tips :

• Create regular posts and organic content on your site to present your brand as a specialist in your sector.
• Stay up to date with news and trends in your sector and engage in discussions across a broad range of platforms in order to boost your profile. This will enable you to network with potential new partners.
• Use content such as embedded Tiktok or YouTube Videos, Instagram Galleries, and Tweets to benefit from the high rankings of host sites and open the door for new traffic streams.
• Hone in on the keywords that are most relevant for your content and keep these organised and structured across your page. This will help establish your branding and maximise its efficiency
• Use your product listings and feeds, CSS and PPC partners to find the gaps in your search terms and reach unexplored customer bases.

Look out for our next article which will explore our final topic in the series: Building Links, Profiles and Presence

Click here to check out our glossary of SEO related terms