Page 129 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

There were checklists with standardized tasks to help Google find you. But the
field is far more complicated today. How should you approach this, even if you
don’t have a large budget for link-building strategies?

“I do think there are still categories of standard activities that persist,” Odden
says, “but the SEO checklists are quite different and fairly limited. I think of
SEO as marketing performance optimization relative to search, advertising,
email, content … anything you’re using to build your business.

“You’re collecting data. You’re collecting key performance indicators as
evidence that you’re on the right track toward your goals, and you use those
data-based insights to course correct and optimize the performance of your
content strategy.

“With SEO, of course, there are still traditional things one can do to help
Google do its job because Google is far from perfect! Google has made some
choices that have drastically affected websites that had relied heavily on organic
search as the source of new business. Those businesses had to make substantial
changes, especially when it comes to links and link sources. Many of the link-
building strategies have been killed off by Google. Companies used to pay an
SEO to get the most links. Now, they’re paying those SEOs to remove those
links.

“There are things we can do technically and from a content alignment
perspective that make it easier for Google to understand who we are, what we
stand for, and whether we’re the best choice for the thing that somebody is
searching for.

“SEO today is much more focused on content and relationships. We will
always need keyword strategies and research but first and foremost, content
moves because we’re creating something cool that people will want to see and
share. Everything starts with the quality of the content. We need to make it easy
for people who are involved in the content to share. The content has to make
them feel something and make them proud to share it because they love to share
it, not because somebody is asking them.

“Obviously, we’re going to promote the content. We look for ways to
repurpose content. For the conference we worked with, we had an infographic
that was created from e-books. We had tweetable quotes in this infographic. We
had graphical illustrations of great influencer quotes as another piece of quality
content that was easy to share. We made Twitter lists of the speakers and
profiles of the speakers which will be brought into Pinterest and other things that
deconstruct the eBook content. We published interviews with the speakers as
additional promotion. The day the eBook went live, we provided tweets and
embed codes for the slide deck to the participants as well as our broader