AI and algorithm updates on search engines require digital marketing leaders to refine their content strategies. To rank high in SEO, brand content must solve customers’ challenges, include multimedia and engage visitors.
Key Findings
- Digital marketing leaders are tasked with creating compelling content, but often do not consider how to leverage customer needs to create content that also drives search visibility.
- Siloed SEO and content teams fail to unite keyword trends with meaningful content.
- Digital marketing leaders often miss opportunities to drive awareness and engagement with a variety of channel-specific content formats, as well as formats that take advantage of emerging visual and voice search capabilities.
Recommendations
- To create and execute an effective content strategy that supports SEO, digital marketing leaders must:
- Improve SEO performance by creating content that prioritizes relevance, engagement and quality according to Google’s definitions.
- Reanalyze and reformulate content to meet user needs, and optimize outcomes by pairing SEO and content development teams.
- Optimize content by using various content types, including video, audio, imagery and product listings.
Introduction
To keep pace with the changing requirements of search engine technology, marketing teams must fundamentally change the way they create content. In the past, SEO was focused only on getting users to your site. Now, you must also entice them to stay there.
Google’s “August 2022 helpful-content update” focuses on relevance, engagement and quality. These evolutionary updates shifted the focus away from keyword-driven content to helpful, customer-centric content.
Having separate, siloed SEO and content creation teams will be a liability when attempting to meet the new helpful-content standards. Digital marketing leaders must rethink their strategy for content planning, development and execution to better meet customer needs, or risk being moved lower on the search engine results page.
SEO and website content are cornerstones of impactful digital marketing. SEO was cited most by CMO respondents as an area of increased investment in 2022 over 2023 (45%).
As content budgets grow, so too must investments in SEO. Without parallel growth, the prospect of developing meaningful customer-centric content experiences is slim.
The question, however, is whether digital marketing leaders’ investment is delivering the right content to the right customer. Brands invest in SEO to generate awareness with their target consumers; however, the content must do more than draw attention and clicks. Now, in order to support a customer-centric journey, content must perform at a higher level and with broader functionality compared to a few years ago.
Use this research to learn how to continually produce customer-centric SEO content that is helpful at every stage of the consumer journey.
Improve SEO Performance With Relevance, Engagement and Quality
Search-optimized content unites keywords with natural language that fulfills the user’s intent at every stage of the customer journey. The days of using clickbait, self-serving posts and keyword-stuffed content to rank on a search algorithm will not net page views as they have in the past. Today’s algorithms populate content based not just on keywords but on the creator’s experience, knowledge of the topic, authority and trustworthiness.
Google’s algorithm also evaluates content based on engagement or interactivity. A user who only clicks on one page stays only briefly and leaves without engaging with any page elements, actively scrolling or visiting other pages isn’t considered to be engaged with the content. Google’s most recent updates would rank such content as not meeting helpful-content guidelines. If the user isn’t engaged, they won’t learn, think or feel as you intended. Moreover, they won’t take the next action on your site or continue on their customer journey.
Therefore, it is crucial to understand your user’s search intent, and use customer-centric language to satisfy their needs. The more helpful a user finds the content, the deeper they will explore your content, which should positively affect your search rankings. According to a recent study, 53% of marketers said that focusing on improving the quality of their content helped them rank higher in search engines.
Create Helpful Content With E-E-A-T
To rank on Google today, users must demonstrate, through actions they take on websites, how helpful they find the content. That means brands’ SEO strategy must change from being mostly keyword-based to having a more substantial impact on the content created. In short, SEO should determine the entire story, not just the headline.
Google uses a mix of factors to determine if your content demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, known as E-E-A-T.
To be considered helpful, content must follow these guidelines:
Demonstrate firsthand expertise and a depth of knowledge. Relevance will be given to content created from research and obvious practical experience, such as having used the product you’re referencing or been to the place you’ve reviewed.
Have an intended audience. Who the content is for should be clear and precise, such as stay-at-home moms or business executives.
Have a primary focus. Content should have a narrow subject and depth of insight versus summarizing content that can be found elsewhere.
Teach readers enough to achieve their goals. Content should provide enough insight for readers to feel they can take action, improve or make needed changes.
Create a satisfying content experience. Users stay on the page, engage with page elements, share the content and view other pages.
Content should include relevant keywords or phrases, answer the question queried with its headline and description, and be high-quality and helpful to the user after each click. A series of automated signals and parameters will measure helpfulness, including:
- The average amount of time users spend viewing a specific page or screen
- How far website visitors scroll down a webpage
- A user’s actions when engaging with a piece of content
Reanalyze Content and Restructure Teams
To create more helpful content, go through each stage of your customer journey and ask, “What are people trying to do or learn when searching for this topic? What do they need now and what do they need next?” Use customer-centric SEO content to help them answer a question or solve a challenge that commonly arises within each stage.
Content teams should avoid leaning on guesswork when answering these questions. Instead, combine data from internal SEO and paid search teams to identify higher-volume queries that drive more traffic to your site. Organizations can also find information about user search intent from customer data, owned site search and qualitative information such as survey feedback. Digital marketing leaders should follow this process as often as content ideation happens with any content created.
This process doesn’t need to be complex. Much information can be gleaned from “Related searches” and “People also ask” on Google. These two areas of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) give a good idea of user intent when searching for specific keywords.
For example, if you search the broad term “content strategy,” you may see a SERP that looks something like Figure 2 (omited).
These results confirm that users searching for “content strategy” are looking for help and “how to” content on creating one. Reviewing each question or related search will offer more questions and inquiries to help narrow in on what this audience wants to know. A website that creates helpful content to answer several of these questions will be considered a reliable source by Google and, with good technical SEO, should see an increased ranking for “content strategy” (see Fundamental SEO: 9 Tactics to Improve Organic Visibility).
Once the marketing team determines broad topics, like “content strategy,” and long-tail phrases or questions to answer, see if there are gaps in what’s already available online. Website relevance and ranking should rise with more interconnected and related content.
Fix or Delete Poor-Performing Content
Creating content is not a one-time task; these documents should evolve with search algorithms and user trends. Make it a point to periodically review the top 15% of mid- and top-ranking content to look for improvement and refresh opportunities to keep it relevant. Do maintenance reviews at least every quarter, and consider more significant reviews in these scenarios:
- New product launches
- Brand refreshes or new market positioning
- Competitive product launches
- Changes in search algorithms or other site functionality influencing search
If brands have a lot of unhelpful, self-serving or shallow content, remove or improve it. Improving poor-performing content by making it more helpful to the reader can boost website rankings. Likewise, unhelpful content can lower overall site rank. For example, if a brand has one piece of excellent content but 10 pieces of unhelpful content, Google may not highly rank the excellent content because the website overall is viewed as “unhelpful.”5
Siloed teams are most prone to creating unhelpful, self-serving, unstrategic content, making nonsiloed teams a critical mandate for organizations with low content governance. Restructure teams to more closely align SEO and content teams, and take strides to improve or remove unhelpful content to see your site rank improve over time.
Track and Adapt to Shifting Consumer Needs
External factors influence how consumers search online. For example, during the height of COVID-19, we saw consumers go online for information. During that time, they shifted from shopping in-store to using delivery or pickup services in high numbers. When something happens in an industry, people will search online for answers. Meet them there with timely, helpful content. This strategy, however, requires the agility to create helpful content for these trends as they happen (see Implementing Agile in Communications).
Content teams can use several tools to pinpoint contextually relevant topics, such as:
- Google Trends: This free tool6 is a go-to resource for tracking user search behaviors and topics.
- Exploding Topics: This is a partially free tool7 that aims to pinpoint popular topics before they reach “trending” status.
- Google Search Console: This is another free tool8 that can help determine how users searched to get to a site.
- On-Site Search: This helps digital marketing leaders identify trends and gaps in search behavior on owned websites.
Optimize Using Various Content Types
Search engines frequently display content beyond text with video, direct answers, imagery and audio suggestions. Plus, people search in many ways using smart devices, and brands could miss them if their content only consists of text. Modern search engines give preference to high-quality content that includes these elements.
New features that help users dig into topics using visual elements like maps, images and videos are displayed differently across the SERP. Users now use Multisearch9 on mobile to ask Google questions with pictures and voice instead of typing into the Google app.
Hone Voice Search
Voice search enables users to search the web using audible commands with virtual assistant technology and smart speakers. Its growing usage makes it a vital SEO consideration. The share of U.S. households with at least one smart speaker is projected to reach around 75% by 2025,10 and major search engines and apps include a microphone on the search bar for easy voice search.
Voice-based search emphasizes longer-tail searches and conversational language that more accurately reflect natural human speech. Think beyond the keyword and consider how content can convey meaning to those asking questions or trying to solve problems.
Take Advantage of Image and Visual Search
Image and visual search are key considerations for organizations hoping to improve digital commerce, but they’re also a growing way that users will find content overall. The ability to search for and with images works on all of the popular search networks and most social media platforms. Image search is conducted using a web browser to search for images, such as “show me pictures of white dogs,” while visual search uses images to search for information, such as “what type of dog is this?”
Image and visual search are irreplaceable for e-commerce product sales since they improve conversion rate by enabling a better user experience (see Improve Product Revenue by Implementing the Right Visual Search Solution). Ensuring that each image is tagged with the appropriate metadata, uses natural language and is crawlable by search engines is imperative. Augmented reality features like “view in room” and 360 videos will set products apart and give the search engines more results to index.
These ways of searching go far beyond keywords to use text and images simultaneously. Brands that adapt to using imagery, video, voice and visual elements in their strategy will help broaden understanding and help users find relevant, helpful content faster.