Great content is a cost effective and clever way to drive traffic to your website. In Part 2 of this series, we discussed that creating and writing your Optimised Content should be the major focus of your SEO efforts.

Just creating the content is not enough though. Publishing and sharing extends your content to as many people as possible, amplifying your message along the way.

PUBLISH & SHARE

Share your content wherever you have a public presence. Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and any other social platforms or industry forums you are involved with provide fantastic sharing opportunities. Engage in conversations with others on the topics you’re writing about. If you are honest and always try to add value for others, rather than blatantly self promote, you might end up with a group of people will find, read and share your content for you.

Publishing and sharing should make up about 10% of your SEO efforts.

MEASURE & IMPROVE

You can’t just create content, publish it once, and hope for the best. In order to implement an Optimised Content Marketing plan you must measure and then improve upon your efforts. This final level should make up the last 5 – 10% of your SEO efforts and includes measuring and subsequently trying to better your metrics.

So what does this mean for your search engine optimisation strategy? Well, it means that you should be looking at new ways of using social media to boost your rankings.

Traditional onsite SEO and backlinks are still fundamental. But if you really want to get competitive with your SEO strategy, you need to send search engines the right ‘social signals’ that your site and pages deserve to rank well. Search engines value people engaging with content.

In order to improve a content marketing campaign for further execution, not only must you master the previous tiers, but you must measure, benchmark, tweak and repeat. This is the final and ultimate tier – the remaining 5 percent of your SEO effort.

IMPROVE YOUR METRICS

  • Impressions
  • Click-throughs
  • Bounce rate
  • Conversions
  • New visitors
  • Social signals
  • Keyword rank
  • Organic traffic
  • Backlink profile

As organic optimisation and the services required to ‘get found’ evolve, so too must our tools, techniques and tactics. The Hierarchy of Web Presence Optimisation can be used by marketers to guide their in-house SEO efforts, as well as by agencies in their sales conversations and implementation processes.