Why You Need An SEO Strategy, And SEO Needs Copy

It’s not just about keywords anymore.

SEO has been around for a long time. The moment search engines were invented, Search Engine Optimisation strategies followed quickly after. As search engine algorithms became more sophisticated, so too did SEO. 

In the early 2000s, most SEO strategies focused heavily on aggressive keywording, known as keyword stuffing, and low quality link acquisition. So, for a time, SEO relied heavily on keyword laden content, and copywriters could boldly proclaim that they could get your website to the top of a Google search page on keywords and underwhelming link building alone. 

Over the last ten years content across the internet has grown exponentially, and users have become more savvy in their researching habits; identifying high quality content that meets their needs, and dispensing with content that doesn’t. 

In response to this growth, and as we head into the twilight of web 2, search engines have focused on ensuring SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) are as organically user orientated as possible. In response, current SEO trends focus on developing content that suits users, rather than attracting bulk traffic. Search engines now look at a range of factors – both on and off the page, to determine the quality of your content and where it should rank in search results.

Why You Need An SEO Strategy

Ensuring your customers can find you online goes beyond building a website and dropping in SEO content. In-step with Google’s strategy to ensure search results are user-orientated, its algorithm recognises a swathe of factors: website-user experience, content and media, and backlinks. It assess the quality of all these factors, and how well they interlink. These elements have to be synergistic to work effectively, which is why you don’t need SEO, you need an SEO strategy.

Today, successful SEO strategies focus on off-page and on-page SEO that prioritises user experience, invests in good networks, and champions quality, customer-centric copy.

Effective SEO Prioritises The User Experience

Organic SEO strategy is user-focused — championing page experience, long-form customer-centric copy, and high quality backlinks from high authority sites.

Page experience is surmised by your site’s Core Web Vitals. These are a set of ranking factors that measure speed and interaction, used by Google to determine the overall page experience a user has on your website.

Core Web Vitals are comprised of three metrics – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

LCP is a verbose way of referring to how quickly the main piece of content, above the fold, loads. FID measures how long it takes the site to respond to a user’s first reaction, i.e., how long it takes for the browser to respond to the user clicking a link or tapping a button, and helps Google weed out unresponsive pages. CLS is how often the content on your site moves or shifts as content downloads, affecting visibility. The more content reshuffles (think ads and pop-ups) as a page loads, the lower the CLS score.

These elements are known as on-page SEO, and are best left in the hands of those with an in-depth understanding of back-end website development.

Core Web Vitals are increasingly considered one of strongest ranking factors in SEO – and are often well served by good website development and fast hosting. A good way to ensure your Core Web Vitals are optimal (beyond professional beta testing), is too do it the old fashioned way – check out your site from your desktop and mobile, and have a third party do the same.

Want Traffic? Invest In Quality Backlinks

Before we talk about backlinks, we have to talk about Authority. Authority (also known as Topical Authority) is the importance given to a page in relation to a search query. A page on Apple’s website, for example, will hold more Authority in relation to a search about iPhones, than a local electronics store in a small country town in Nebraska. No shade to Bill’s Electronics.

A lot of SEO strategy is about building and maintaining Authority, to ensure Google identifies your content as a trustworthy expert in the subject being searched. This brings us back to backlinks.

Essentially, a backlink is any link from an external website to yours. It only goes one way (from the outside website to your website), and the higher the Authority of the referring domain, the higher the value of the backlink. The more high value backlinks you have, the more it contributes to your site’s Authority.

How to Acquire Backlinks

There are many ways to build backlinks (known as link acquisition), but essentially, the higher the value of the referring site, the more time intensive it is to get, and just like in real life, it’s based on a genuine desire to share your content with their users.

There are many ways to accumulative backlinks - reaching out to industry journalists, courting social media influencers, publishing interviews with industry experts in the hope they link to it on their site, but the most effective method is to develop high value, well-researched, relevant content.

Good Copy = Good SEO

Where the user experience and high authority backlinks support page rankings, it’s content that drives traffic, maintains traffic, and ensures traffic converts. As Google Senior Search Analyst, John Mueller, confirmed at the 2020 Chrome Development Summit:   

“In general, we prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are sub-par. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content.”

As the internet experiences exponential growth upon exponential growth, the harder search engine algorithms have to work to identify quality content. With the considerable evolution of Chatbot software, more organisations and media departments are looking at ways ChatGPT can create a continuous, low cost/low resource avenue to create mass content that generates traffic. To combat this, Google crawlers are becoming increasingly good at identifying and rewarding quality customer-centric content that satisfying their E-A-T-T principles. Broken down, Google rewards content that includes original research, analysis, sourcing and citations, and user relevance.

How Long-Form Content Drives Social Shares and Traffic

It’s not that high word count content performs better, it’s that content with a high word count often includes the research, analysis and citations Google identifies as quality. According to market research performed by Hubspot, articles with a word count between 2,250 and 2,500 earn the most organic traffic.

From the same study, articles with a word count over 2,500 were found to earn the most backlinks, and were shared more across social media than shorter content. Again, this isn’t to say that word count alone is responsible for creating organic traffic, just that long form content tends to be better researched, better written, and highly user centric.

In short – while page experience and backlinks are king, content is still god.

Is your current SEO strategy working for you? Are your customers finding your website? Engage a skilled copywriter to create and elevate your SEO solution.