Content-led SEO
SEOs are an opinionated bunch, but they tend to agree on two things:
- Backlinks aren't as important as they used to be, and
- keywords aren't either
That's good news. It means you don't have to compete on the same dimensions as the big players in your industry.
From the start, Google's goal has been to serve users the most relevant results on the web. But the algorithm has fundamentally changed in the last few years—for the better.
The days of spamming your way to the front page are ending, and high-quality content is finally starting to get the respect it deserves SEO.
How does SEO work in 2022
Google's mission is to give searchers the information they're looking for, presented in the most helpful way, as quickly as possible.
The nuances of Google's algorithm are too complex to dig into here, but we've distilled the process we believe Google uses to rank webpages into three phases:
Phase 1. Technical SEO helps Google access, understand, and serve your content.
Google can't rank your content if they can't find your content.
Healthy technical SEO makes it easier for Google-bot (Google's webpage crawler) to crawl your site, find important pages, and give them greater visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Starting from a baseline of good technical health means your site loads fast, is free of errors, and has a logical site structure.
Phase 2. Topical authority helps Google determine where your content initially ranks.
Google associates websites with topics that are related to their site's identity and overall business objectives. The strength of these associations is commonly known as topical authority.
Google rewards sites with stronger associations (topical authority) with greater visibility in the SERP.
To build topical authority in your niche, Google needs proof that you're a credible subject matter expert.
There are two main ways to demonstrate this kind of expertise:
- Content helps Google understand what topics a page should rank for and whether it fulfills the search intent for those keywords.
- Links have been an important ranking factor since the beginning. They help Google determine the relative authority of domains and specific pages. The more links, the more authoritative the page or site is.
Phase 3. User engagement helps Google determine whether your content should continue ranking.
This idea is controversial, but many experts now believe the algorithm looks at user engagement metrics to determine which pages are helpful to users and which aren't.
We believe the most important indicator is whether a user has to return to Google to perform a subsequent search.
Let's look at two common scenarios to see how this works.
- Scenario 1. You Google [email marketing], and click into the first result for a "what is" guide to email marketing. It's exactly what you're looking for. So helpful that you poke around the site for more insights.
- Scenario 2. You open the same article but this time the content isn't quite what you're looking for. So you click "back" and search for something more specific: [how to do email marketing].
The behavior in Scenario 1 tells Google the first article was relevant to the search—it fulfilled the searcher's intent. Mission complete in Google's playbook.
The behavior in scenario 2—returning to Google to perform another search—makes Google lose confidence in how relevant the page is to the original query (email marketing). As a result, Google questions whether a more relevant page should take its place.
Key point: User behavior impacts rankings
Before, you could rank generic "SEO content" provided you had enough links and on-page optimization.
Now, unless you provide a premium content experience that ends the searcher's journey, you don't stand a chance of ranking for your target keyword in the top three positions.
This is a fundamental shift in SEO because people are now the final judge of whether content is valuable or not, not just algorithms. Let that sink in.
To succeed, your content has to appease the algorithm first (near-term ranking), then please the reader (long-term ranking).
In this playbook, we'll teach you how to produce premium content for search. The kind that's engineered to rank, resonate, and convert—the kind your prospects actually enjoy reading, not justg tolerate.
Before we dive into the strategy, let's dispel a few common myths.
SEO myths and misconceptions
"More search volume means more conversions"
Most companies still fixate on driving as much search traffic as possible. Usually, this means targeting competitive, high-search volume keywords with low conversion intent (top-funnel content).
This approach is logical if you're a media company subsisting on page views and ad revenue. But for most businesses, it's an incredibly inefficient way to generate ROI from SEO. You'll drive more conversions targeting lower search volume, high intent keywords towards the bottom of the funnel.
"Bigger budgets drive better results"
Big companies tend to scale as fast as possible, usually by investing in a high quantity of posts at the expense of quality. This strategy worked well when backlinks were the dominant ranking factor, but it's starting to lose its effectiveness.
Today's dominant ranking factors are relevance and quality—the core of content-led SEO.
With the right content strategy, you can use your limited resources to produce less content and likely drive better business results.
"You'll never outrank the big players in the SERP"
Many businesses assume they'll never outrank sites with big, scary domain ratings. This assumption is false. In many cases, current rankings reflect past strategies that are now outdated.
You can often dethrone the incumbents by competing on dimensions with less competition—content and user experience.
Three things marketers need to know about content-led SEO
1. Think niche
Your goal of content-led SEO is to demonstrate topical authority in the core topics your website is—and should be—known for. In practice, this means focusing on product-related keywords with clear search intent.
To build defensible topical authority, cover the specific topic you want to be associated with from all angles and search intents.
2. Topics are the new keywords
It used to be best practice to target one keyword per page, and you could expect that page to rank regardless of other content on your site.
Now, it's best practice to target one topic per page—one unique search intent—and include relevant keywords (sub-topics and search perspectives) within that content.
3. Context is king
Your content needs to fit the particular context associated with your target keywords. But context isn't limited to words on a page—you must create content experiences that engage users on multiple dimensions (e.g., video, images, widgets, testimonials) to fulfill search intent.
What this playbook covers
This playbook teaches you how to execute a modern content-led SEO strategy. The nuances may evolve over time, but this strategy is evergreen.
We interviewed some of the best SEO's on the planet to bring you the most concise, actionable, and up-to-date playbook possible—the 80/20 of modern-day SEO.
And we sourced proven insights from SEO professionals at Grow and Convert, Minuttia, Graphite, and Clearscope, among others, to get as close as possible to the source of truth.
If you implement what we teach in the playbook, you'll get most of the results by doing less but better.
You'll walk away knowing how to prioritize the next best action to take, whether that's performing targeted keyword research, creating original content, performing a content audit, or dialing in your site architecture—we teach it all. No fluff. Nothing that doesn't move the needle forward.
The best SEO content strategy prioritizes quality and depth, not volume and breadth. When successful, SEO, just like great content marketing, can:
- Drive consistent, ongoing traffic and leads
- Develop brand reputation and authority
- Generate compounding results
You'll need to work diligently to build strong topical authority in your niche to achieve these kinds of results for your business.
Two kinds of topical authority to build:
- External topical authority: Involves activities that happen outside of your website. Also called "off-site SEO." Building external topical authority is an uphill battle; you don't have much control over the actions or the outcomes.
- Internal topical authority: Involves activities that happen on your website. Also called "on-site SEO." Building internal topical authority is high-leverage; you have complete control over the actions and, to a lesser degree, the outcomes.
This playbook teaches you how to build internal topical authority with content.
Content-led SEO is a quality-first, content-driven approach to building internal topical authority. And topical authority, as we discuss throughout the piece, is the key that unlocks rankings, search traffic, and ideally, conversions.
The strategy and examples we share are specific to B2B SaaS SEO, but they can generally work for B2C as well.
