Saheed O.

Back in the dark ages, when SEO was just something you did if you wanted to give your content an extra boost, writers and content strategists had it easy. To optimize a piece of content, all you had to do was take the piece, load it up with as many keywords as possible, add a generous helping of links, sprinkle it with images for spice, serve it up on the internet and voila, one google first-page ranking, all for you. If you try this approach now, you are liable to wake up to an army of search engine bots on your doorstep, with canes in their hands, looking to flog some sense into you. SEO, as with every other aspect of the online marketing revolution, has evolved steadily over the years. While SEO has never had cut-and-dried rules, it does have loose guidelines and accepted practices. The general aim of these guidelines is to make sure content is ranked more by value and less by brute force, and the guidelines are always evolving to better achieve this aim. Like the many-faced Hindu god, Vishnu, SEO guidelines present whichever face helps them achieve their aim best. While this article is not an in-depth examination of SEO practices, let us see which face the guidelines are presenting currently. The New Face of SEO The new face of SEO is saying one thing and one thing only (screaming it in fact); value is more important than ever. The days of brute force ranking are gone. The days of keyword stuffing without penalties have fallen into legend. Nowadays, the only way to properly rank your content is to provide value. Not just the actual value contained in the content but the implied value through your outbound links and backlinks. The inherent value in your website's ease of use, page speed, and mobile compatibility. Google's algorithm's have learned to not just analyze keywords entered in a search, but also to analyze the search intent. Not just the individual words entered in the search parameters but the contextual meaning of those words. This allows Google to better present relevant results to the searchers. What this means is that your content, more than ever, has to address actual issues. Your content has to be relevant to the context of the keywords you are trying to rank for. As if that is not enough, Google bots now also analyze the quality of links present on your website. You can't just stuff your content full of links, the links have to be relevant. Your outbound links must not be spammy and your backlinks had better come from authoritative websites or you are out on your ears. Google uses your site links (especially backlinks) to curate two metrics; domain authority (has to do with how widespread your domain name is) and page authority (relates to how authoritative the content of a single page is) and these, in turn, are used to curate your overall site authority which plays a very big part in your site rankings. Getting complicated, isn't it? Lest I forget, you also have to optimize your title tags and meta descriptions and your URL's. Your website UX has to be as smooth as possible or you'll have a bounce rate higher than a basketball's in a league game. And the higher your bounce rate, the lower your ranking. Keywords also remain important as ever, maybe more. The only thing that has changed is how you use them. Like I mentioned earlier, when conducting your keyword research, you have to now consider not just the keywords but the intent behind them. The exact response the searcher is hoping to get with the search. For example when someone types, "best CRM tool" into google, it is obvious that they are not looking for a specific tool. They are not ready to commit. Rather, they want to peruse the options, preferably from someone that has not just listed the tools but made comparisons between them. Since Google algorithms have learned to do what you haven't, producing content that markets a particular CRM tool in response to this set of keywords will be a colossal failure. This new face of SEO is not a particularly forgiving one. So, how does this affect your website, your business and your content strategy? Let's see. What It Means For Your Content Strategy Value. That is what the new face of SEO is saying and your content strategy has to say it. This is not exactly an extreme change, not if you have been doing what you should do. However, it is an extremely important one. Your content strategy, more than ever, has to focus on providing value to your audience in all and every way. Not selling, not advertising, not making requests, simply providing value. Your sales copy should be accompanied by informative blog posts, your emails should not only sell but also inform. Your content should address actual issues, and provide solutions. SEO is no longer about you. It's about your audience and what they want. Giving this to them, even if it does not benefit you immediately, will engender trust and a feeling of indebtedness that will create long-term value for you. Quid pro quo. Central to your ability to provide value to your audience is the ability to properly define your audience. This is something you have to reevaluate while revamping your content strategy. Defining your audience with a loose general metric such as age or gender is no longer enough. You have to get into the details because these details could be the difference between your content being relevant or not. For example in a niche such as fishing, where geographical differences may have a big effect on what works and what does not, a content piece on "best fishing practices" is a big miss. While it may provide some value, the geographical differences are varied enough that some of your entries will be useless for most of your audience. A better content piece might be "best fishing practices in fast-flowing rivers." This has defined your audience to people who fish in fast-flowing rivers, and ensured that it will be useful to everyone in that category. Define your audience, down to the tiniest details and your content will be more relevant than ever. You might be wondering, " do I really have to do all this?" Yes, you have to. There was a time when you could get away with ignoring SEO, but that time is long gone. Now, if you want people to see your content and you want a share of the 67% of total organic traffic that comes from search engines, you have to take SEO seriously. Since you can't avoid it, it's better that you do it properly. That means reorganizing your content strategy to reflect the value stance, redefining your audience, and generally taking the new SEO guidelines as your 10 Commandments for content creation and distribution. That way lies marketing contentment, sales bliss, and lead conversion paradise.