9 Easy SEO Content Marketing Hacks For 2020

Are you looking for strategies to take your content marketing to the next level with the new year upon us?

Since 1997 I have been building and tweaking hundreds of website’s (over the years) to fight for the upper hand in the search engine rankings. I have spent countless days and nights fine tuning my knowledge to understand as many SEO tactics, link building techniques, conversion improvements and content marketing methodologies to outrank the competition.

I took a several year hiatus from Dataflurry working on other projects, but am excited to apply my main focus back on into this niche of providing SEO.

We were listed #4 in the Top 25 SEO firms to adapt your SEO in 2019 by DesignRush.

Now, I can easily say that website optimization and link building are no longer the 2 main factors to SEO. Now, there are a few other elements – with the primary 3rd element being content marketing.

I link to several of my favorite SEO experts that share their knowledge in a simple format throughout this article, because I genuinely want anyone landing here to skip the noise and find the right resources.

I have come up with 9 items you must take into consideration during 2012.

A large number of website owners are not paying enough attention to items on this list. Let’s get to it!

1. Mobile First Indexing

When you log into Google Search Console and add a new website to their system, you will get a green popup saying “Your Website is Now Switched to Mobile First Indexing” – or something similar.

So, it’s easy to say with Google’s friendly note, they are trying to be kind and give you a huge hint. It’s mobile 1st indexing, and this leads me to think (confirmed by Google) that the mobile version is their primary ranking resource when indexing.

What is Mobile 1st Indexing and How Does it Affect Content Marketing?

Mobile 1st indexing means that they are going to give the majority of your website ranking value – to your mobile website!

So when you are optimizing your website and you’re staring at the desktop version to analyze SEO, stop looking there – and move your eyes to the mobile version of the website!

In the past few months I have ran analysis’ on probably 10 websites that were well optimized for the desktop version of the website. However, they were missing extremely valuable elements for search friendliness on the mobile version. You must include all basic SEO tactics on your mobile website just like your regular desktop version. This is a huge mistake and you (me alike) need to apply focus to the right areas.

I found myself this morning doing some A/B testing on a websites on-page SEO and realized I almost didn’t verify to include the new search friendly content on the mobile version that I just implemented on the regular version.

Your content marketing strategy won’t work with a website that’s not properly optimized on mobile.

Now, let’s move on to the 2nd item on our list to improve your content marketing in 2020!

2. Update Old Content To Boost Website Traffic

Have you noticed your blog posts will shoot up initially, and then come down over time?

Three things play into this:

Google takes your new content and places it as high as your site authority allows when posted for a short time, evaluates click thru rates, bounce rates, etc.
Then, Google will evaluate your websites internal linking structure to this page and determine how trusted the page should be.
Then Google will naturally reduce a page rankings over time to always have fresh content. Unless the page link value is still flowing to this page and new fresh links are constantly pointing to the content at a higher rate than the other ranking competitors pages.

With that said, over time your page will still reduce over time without updates. Because Google takes into consideration: Outdated Content | Current Link Value and Consistency pointing to a page | Host website’s relevance of page

After a few weeks, months or years – you notice that the page ranking starts declining for your blog post since this has been sitting and not being actively promoted. The initial excitement for Google has worn off. Main website pages (service and product pages) typically stay at their primary location more steadily because we are consistently building links to them for our main keyword and they were with your website since you started without authority… So they grew slowly over time.. So the growth is gradual and constantly fought to push higher.

However, when you have a hundred (or hundreds) of blog articles – it’s really not feasible to build links to a hundred pages all the time and maintain the aggressive fight to rank.

The easiest tactic to increase traffic with a lot of pages, is updating outdated content.

You can review your Google Analytics settings and determine the best traffic producing terms that have lost strength. Once you determine the article you want to update, make sure to go into Google Search Console “performance” section for that specific page, and find more keywords that you should incorporate into your page to increase the traffic the next time around!

So now, we need to find out the best content to update first… You may know off the top of your head, or else you need to do some evaluation of your historical analytics.

Now, let’s get the most out of your article

Once you determine the article you want to update, go into Google Search Console “performance” section for that specific page.

In this section you will find more keywords that you should incorporate into your page to increase the traffic the next time around!

Search console shows pages you are viable for which you may be sitting lower on Google for… Because you don’t use the keywords enough on your page, or don’t use the exact phrase. Adding these terms into your page could grab you more traffic!

Here’s a sample screenshot for a client I’m working on right now:

You will notice on a snapshot above, I have a breakdown of the exact terms for this exact page that I need to be properly optimized for. Then, the more keywords I look at – the more ideas I obtain for optimization!

I can easily add Lawsuit Settlement Loans in to this page a few times and increase that ranking and capture some good traffic. I can also outwit the competition and get some good links with similar anchor text as well and possibly capture a good chunk of that traffic!

If I am already optimized appropriately for a term and not ranking… Do 2 things:

Increase internal link building to that page to boost authority to it.
Increase external link building to that page to boost authority to it.

This section should tell us something about Google – Google want fresh content… So if you’ve been trying to rank for a page you haven’t updated lately – add new content or boost internal/external links to the page. Also make sure you properly optimized the page title and meta description.

3. Optimize for Responsiveness, Compatibility & Speed

We should always be focusing on conversions! This should be a HUGE focus for any website owner.

Speed up your website

Every website owner should run their website through Google Search Insights to evaluate page speed.

This will show you your desktop speed and mobile speed. Realistically you should have a speed of 50 or higher on mobile. Desktop is almost ALWAYS faster since mobile websites and desktop versions typically pull from the same templates, and Google wants mobile to load faster since they aren’t always on fast connections.

There are a ton of great wordpress apps if you use that platform to consolidate CSS, Javascript, lazy load, cache files, shrink images and more that can make a tremendous impact. If you don’t use wordpress, you can still research how to accomplish all these tasks with a simple google search. The below plugins took one of my websites from 35 mobile speed to 73 on WordPress.

WordPress speed plugins:

AMP or AMP for WP / Autoptimize / A3 Lazy Load / WP Super Cache / ShortPixel Image Optimizer / Query Monitor – which can help find problematic plugins.

Use fast wordpress templates.

If you are starting a new website design, we found a lot of luck with the Neve template (which is very versatile) being fast and relatively responsive and also compatible with mobile, tablet and desktop.

Remember the basics like checking across a variety of web browsers and avoiding non search-browsing friendly elements such as flash.

Utilize the AMP Plugin

The AMP plugin is very beneficial for many content marketers if you aren’t already using it. This simply is designed to consolidate coding and scripting into a faster processing format.

A website that is fast can give you that added boost to outrank your competition, especially once you start battling for highly competitive search phrases.

We also provide a blog post, how to sell your visitors – plain and simple, from A-Z. This has some good insight into improving your conversions.

4. Increase Conversions – Maintain the KISS Methodology

What’s the KISS Methodology? Keep it simple stupid (-:

Who would open a store and let hundreds or even thousands of people walk in and not even say hi, or offer some of your products or services? You would be surprised how many website owners do just this…

If you decide you need to completely redesign your website, consider our website redesign checklist with 30+ items you must watch for during your redesign to avoid losing rankings and SEO.

Increasing conversions should also include SEO elements such as increasing time on site increasing click thru rates and decreasing bounce rates. However, all these show a sign of healthy conversion rates so they go hand in hand.

Focus on Clients and Not SEO all the time:

Sometimes when we work in content marketing and search engine optimization it’s very easy to lose focus on the most important aspect of our traffic. The most important part is converting a visitor into a paying customer or revenue generating prospect.

I have seen way too many website owners that spend 99% of their time working to increase traffic and barely ever look at methods to increase their website conversions. Or even the basics, click thru fundamentals.

You need great meta titles and descriptions to increase your click through rate on Google. This in turn can noticeably increase your rankings!

Push Notifications | SMS Marketing

New technologies you should be using, or at least considering are SMS marketing and push notifications. You need to open up any possible communication channel with as many customers as possible.

Offer Free – Trials, Consultations, E-Books, Stuff

If you run a SaaS or service company, you can always offer a free trial or something of value to get customer sign ups or contact information!

Popups

Even if you own a law firm needing marketing and conversion improvements, you could create a pop up mentioning you can offer a fast and easy free consultation regarding the visitors legal needs. We have a blog post tied to improving law firm internet marketing you should consider, as well as an attorney social media guide on how to attract clients for lawyers.

You can look into tools like the HelloBar to increase the availability of call to actions. You can offer popups and exit popups to increase your chances of converting. As long as we aren’t harassing website visitors and following a basic oath to be courteous – you worked hard to obtain this traffic and should try to capitalize on it! Someone gave me a hard time about this, I didn’t really care. It was making me money, and not annoying to users.

There are some great popup plugins for wordpress, or website’s (even HelloBar) you can use without WordPress.

When making improvements to your website content for conversions, we created a great resource full of free stock photography here.

Here are some great guides on increasing conversions.

Conversion Rate Optimization: The Definitive Guide

Conversion Optimization Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

5. Content Marketing Goes Hand-in-Hand With Email Marketing

Yes, growing your SEO involves growing your audience! If you have more people following you – you will obtain more links and better networking to grow even further!

Tidbit: I use Google Docs to draft my blog posts. This helps you will grammar, and also has autosave. You can also insert pictures with Google Docs and paste into WordPress without manually uploading!

You shouldn’t plan on relying on always being able to tweak search results, it’s a lot of work.. You need to figure out how to grow your own communication channels with potential clients. Especially because rarely do people buy on the first time around from a service or product provider!

Email Marketing is an amazing tool to substantially grow your traffic and audience.

If you aren’t currently doing email marketing, check out this great resource.

If you are currently doing email marketing, check out this great resource.

6. If you do anything right, create quality content!

The number one focus of content marketing strategy (if nothing else) should be quality content.

Like we said above, the pages that typically rank at the top for competitive search queries aren’t 400 word pages – they are close to 2,000 words or more!

If you were to blog with great content, eventually your blog will earn it’s place – but you will just waste a lot of time if you aren’t promoting that content and being as effective as possible!

7. Every Post You Create, Obtain Easy Links To It

Even if you are simply grabbing a link from something bigger like Slashdot, Reddit or super basic like Folkd.com. We want google to crawl the web and say, wow – something’s pointing to this resource.

The best idea is to create a powerful blog post, and create some basic follow up guest posts or article/press release elsewhere with a link pointing back to your main website and the blog post.

The more links (quality if possible) to your blog post the better! Neil Patel has some great link building resources on this topic

You could even create a simple visual story on a website like VisualStory.com and get a decent link to your blog post externally on one of their network sites.

8. Start getting involved in Social media websites

Use large and industry specific social media sites to promote your content as well. Don’t pick a ton, pick a few and actually get involved in them to obtain more power to your profile. Then publish your content on those resources.

This needs to be a long term strategy of yours to produce a powerful social media presence as well. There are SEO studies showing that this works.

Click here for the Definitive guide to viral marketing by Backlinko’s Brian Dean..

9. Conclusion – Keep an Eye On The Fundamentals

Content Marketing depends heavily on content, however – the content itself means little. You need to promote that content with link building, optimization and building relationships to share content and knowledge with other website owners.

You should be creative in your link building and content marketing methods and you can learn a lot from people like Neil Patel and Brian Dean (links at post footer).

Make sure to spend a lot of your time on keyword research to find the right long tail search phrases. Sometimes we are way too eager to pound the pavement and write content – however, if you are going to cut down a tree – spend a lot of time sharpening your Axe (stole this idea from Abraham Lincoln).

Be aggressive in optimizing your keyword density throughout the page, not full of spam – but creatively.

Apply a lot of emphasis to using great page titles and meta descriptions, because your content marketing will absolutely fail if your page title and description snippets don’t get clicks!

We have researched heavily competitive search queries relating to content marketing and the top ranking sites typically came in right under 2,000 words per page on average!

You should apply a lot of focus on SEO, but before your pages go live – they MUST be catered around the website visitor.. If they aren’t, you will have high bounce rates, low time on site and your website won’t rank!

I took a decent break from SEO in my last 22 years of marketing. I have been crash learning once again recently to make sure I am not missing anything, following the individuals that are really making an impact and willing to share their knowledge.

Below are a few great resources:

Also, when you have learned all you can from these few resources.

SEOMoz Blog – They offer an array of great blog posts, tools and more!

SearchEngineLand.com – Phenomenal resource you should subscribe to or use to keep up on the latest search trends and unique insights and ideas from the community.

SearchEngineJournal.com – Contains a large number of quality posts from leading S.E.O/S.E.M. experts. Numerous great authors!

seroundtable.com – I have been an avid fan of Barry Schwartz for quite some time! Great content here!

Neil Patel : Incredible at link building, SEO and content marketing.

Where to follow:

Brian Dean : Same as Neil Patel. Great at link building, SEO and content marketing.

Where to follow:

There are a few hidden gems we love such as : SEO By the Sea that don’t appear as often because it’s a niche for advanced SEO studying search patents.

Tools I Use:

Tools I use: aHrefs | SEOMoz | Neil Patels tools (mentioned about) and Link Building tools from Brian Deans list. Obviously Google Search Console plays a big part along with Google Analytics.