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Up your SEO Gameplan in 3 Steps: The SEO MAC Framework
People frequently search online using keywords and phrases related to your business or service. It is important to have a robust SEO strategy to derive such traffic.
The SEO game plan is no longer just ranking core keywords, it entails a long-term strategy involving from content, to keyword word research to backlink analysis. We will look at some strategies coupled with free tools to power up your SEO game plan.
More importantly, we want to create the best positive user experience.
Let’s look at the MAC framework that covers Market, Accessibility and Content.
Step 1 – Market: Rethinking Keywords
Far too often, businesses do not relook at their keyword strategy and what may potentially drive customers to them. It’s time to relook at what keywords properly by search intent.
- Answer The Public
Answer the Public results from keyword: “seo”
Answer The Public is a tool that taps on Google’s autosuggestions to provide a visualisation overview of potential long tail keywords that is derived from your focus keyword.
It is great for content marketing and keyword generation as it organises keyword ideas in an intent driven manner.
It is a good way to get a sense of how people feel about a topic, giving hints and suggestions on what keywords you should be ranking for.
Map those keywords in a spreadsheet and prioritise them. Start generating content for them as part of your content marketing strategy.
Step 2 – Accessibility: Optimise your website for accessibility
Start by understanding what pages exist on your website and how well your site exist technically. How fast your website loads matters and whether all your site content is searchable. Your site should not only be easy to navigate, but it has to be fast and responsive across all devices.
- Google PageSpeed Insights
Try using the Google insights tool, a fully powered site test on how your site is performing. Some parts of the results can be overly technical to improve, so do take it with a pinch of salt. Speak with your tech team on how to make improvements for your website. It is time to take a technical view on it.
- Site Speed with Pingdom
Pingdom’s website speed test allows a quick and easy way to analyse your website load speed and find bottlenecks quickly. Businesses can work with their webmasters and look at how to improve site load times for a better user experience.
- Check for Mobile Readiness
Mobile has overtaken desktop in terms of the number of searches performed on each platform. Furthermore, Google has made it clear that it favours mobile friendly sites. People are on the move and frequently check their phones for information. If you are not mobile ready yet, you will be lacking far behind. Google’s quick mobile friendly testing tool checks against best practices in mobile and provides recommendations when necessary.
- Screaming Frog
As your website grows, new content is generated and sometimes content is lost or links are changed. As a business, you cannot afford to lose such crawlable content. Aside from using Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools, Screaming Frog allows you to crawl your website and take an inventory of everything that’s there. Use the tool to further optimise your SEO strategy by extracting and compiling H1 content, meta descriptions.
This will be useful when you are creating your content pillars. Their comprehensive guide provides a good rundown of how their software operates.
Step 3 – Content: Creating Content Pillars
Building trust and authority is part of any business, however this must go digital in today’s context. Hence the importance of providing original, high-quality content will do better in the long run.E-A-T by Google is part of their framework for ranking well. Creating optimised content for Google is crucial in the context of content creation.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Search engines of today are better at sieving out quality content to bring about the best results to search consumers.
Good content builds trust in your market. It shows the people you are trying to address some of their problems.
LinkedIn as an E-A-T Content Hub
LinkedIn is the social network for professionals and not just a recruiting/job hunting site it was in the past. It is a trustworthy platform that many authoritative figures are on. Content does not have to just exist on your website, content can go into multiple social networking platforms such as LinkedIn.
Businesses are now starting to empower employees with content creation, showcasing them as authoritative figures in their own industry. Company pages are created in LinkedIn as businesses are starting to use it as part of their content marketing and SEO strategy with LinkedIn.
Employees are the micro-influencers representing the company and are part of the brand image. Content creation through the form of white papers, videos, webinars, articles are now highly received through LinkedIn
Create Cornerstone Content
Ever been in a situation whereby you Google for something when you never heard of it especially during a meeting?
Lots of people are doing the same! In fact, people do this when they hear about what your company does. They Google terms related to what you do, who you are, what reviews you have and who’s talking about you. You want your website to be where they can learn what they need to know.
Start by writing an authoritative overview of that topic. A long form (often more than 2,000 words) dives deep into the subject, answering a few key questions:
1. What is [the topic]?
2. Why does it matter?
3. How does it work?
4. What are the key points in the content?
5. How can I do it?
6. What do I do now?
This form of content needs to be sales-free and be as neutral as possible. It is you as an expert in the field to educate the reader. Such long, educational pieces help people in your market understand what can help them, whether you can help them before you try to sell them something.
Such cornerstone content/pillar pages provide readers a comprehensive overview of something you can help with.
Cornerstone content is especially useful for:
- Ranking for broad keywords
- Generating customer loyalty through email subscriptions
- Growing remarketing audiences
Content is Crucial
Creating content can be time-consuming, which is why devoting time to create quality content in an orderly manner is crucial. Having talked about content greatly, it is important to note that content does not equate to getting direct leads. It is only part of the customer journey at different points in their decision process.
Creating a Content Calendar
Like social media calendars, it is important to have an overview of content that is published. Your content calendar can comprise the following:
- Type of content
- Publishing timeline
- Target audience or persona
- Target keyword
- Key topic/subtopic
- H1 Titles/Meta Description
- Images
- Desired outcome or goal
HubSpot provides a great free editorial calendar for you to start off with.
Best Practices for Content
SEO is all about the long game. Strategise your game plan and align it to your digital marketing plans. Every part of your marketing funnel plays a part of the SEO game plan and content is one of the most important factor in any SEO strategy.
- Do not expect instant results: Very often businesses churn content expecting instant results. Often, immediate results are not received and in fact it’s a long-term strategy chain in your SEO plans.
- Update your Content regularly: Fresh content tends to rank higher. It is crucial to regularly update your content
- Inbound Links: Interlink your content internally to strong a strong network of link authority.
- Outbound Links: Have outbound links to authoritative sites to support your content.
- Conversational writing: Let your tone and vision draw the target audience closer
Get those reviews: It is crucial to show the support you have garnered from various sources. Let those testimonials and reviews go digital
Malcolm’s experience and teaching spans across the practises of digital marketing, full stack development, immersive media and user experience. Malcolm has been a full-time lecturer with Ngee Ann Polytechnic since 2016, undertaking consultancy and user experience projects along the way.
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