7 Insights to Improve Your Content Marketing SEO in 2022

With consumer behavior evolving and the sheer volume of content being produced, content marketers cannot rely solely on historical SEO performance data as indicators of future success.

Google’s mission hasn’t changed – it just wants to provide the best answer for every query. However, its ability to provide the best answer has evolved so it can provide the best option more often.

And since 71% of marketers say organic search plays a role in their business intelligence, we come down to seven in-depth ways you can help your content deliver better search results (and search results) more often.

1. Market insights

In HubSpot’s Not Another State of Marketing Report 2021, 83% of marketers say they do market research, and 88% of that group use this research to make business decisions. Of those surveyed, 67% of marketers plan to increase their research spend in the next year.

Understanding your market in detail will help you better understand the ranking and traffic potential of content assets. Keyword research is an essential granular activity here as it helps determine the terms and phrases that customers will use to find content, products, and services like yours.

If you understand your market in detail, you can better identify the ranking and traffic potential of your content assets, @JimYu says of @CMIContent. #SEO Click to tweet

You also need to know the websites that appear at the top of the results for those search terms. It cannot be a traditional competitor. For example, the top content could come from a major media publication, educational institution, or government agency that is creating relevant content on your topic.

Ranking and market insights analysis can help you identify macro market trends and category-level opportunities to optimize content for more specific intentions, longer-tailed keywords, and less competitive SERPs.

2. Search intent

knowledge why Your audience searches allow you to serve content that they want to consume.

Knowing why your target audience is looking can help you deliver #content they want to consume, @JimYu says about @CMIContent. #SEO Click to tweet

Assign your existing content to the journey of your customers. Look at the gaps in your coverage. Perhaps you do an excellent job creating top of funnel awareness and informational content, but you don’t have content that addresses inquiries about commercial or transactional intent. (Or maybe this resource is there, but it’s not ranking well and could use another round of tweaking.)

You can also evaluate queries that users use to find your content. Understanding the reasons behind the targeted searches can help ensure that the content continues to provide the best, most comprehensive answer.

Finally, you can go deeper to look at the micro-moments – the mindset of the person at the time of the search. In 2015, Google published a series of white papers on four critical micro-moments of search behavior – know, go, do, and buy.

Fast forward to 2021, micro-moment strategies are still hyper-relevant. Analyzing SERP results through a micro-moment lens can help you align content better with customer journeys and your content marketing strategy by:

• Understand how videos, images, and quick-read content should be used
• Knowing how the audiences and keywords differ in every micro-moment
• Improve the alignment of keywords with your customer journey faster
• Identify how paid content strategies can complement SEO for multiple microns to dominate targeted keywords and categories
• We’ll help you prioritize content spend closer to conversions.

3. Search types

How does your target audience search for the content? This can make a huge difference in the format and even the information to be included.

How your audience searches for #content can make a difference in how your content is formatted, @JimYu says of @CMIContent. #SEO Click to tweet

For example, if you find that 85% of your blog traffic is from a mobile device, you should give serious priority to providing a high quality mobile page experience. The impact of rank-contributing factors such as page speed, external links, technical elements, and on-page factors vary by industry:

For example, if you are in the financial sector, external links are most important to the rank and position of content in search results. When it comes to travel, page loading speed is an important factor in ranking content.

4. SERP positioning

Search engine results pages do not look the same for every search. In addition to the traditional title, search snippet and link results, they can now include dozens of features including rich snippets, video and image results, card packs, people-asked questions and answers, etc.

It is important that you understand the types of results that will appear in the SERPs for the searches you are targeting. For example, if the results page has a Listicle-style Featured Snippet that contains older, less authoritative content, this could be an excellent opportunity for your brand to create and tweak a better Listicle article that is more topic-centric. Or, if you’re following a topic that has a video appearing in the SERP, you can create and optimize a video to gain a placement in the rich search results that appear in that valuable property above the window.

In many cases, as I’ll show below, trends in your industry can learn from trends in healthcare, education, home improvement, finance, travel, and e-commerce. For example, in healthcare and education, there is a segment of searchers who value quick answers, but this type of content doesn’t even show up as a love for home improvement, finance, or e-commerce.

5. Content types

SEO insights can also help decide which content types and platforms make the most sense for specific keywords and audiences.

For example, a searcher who clicks on a detailed B2B buyer’s guide might expect an e-book on top of a blog post. While a searcher wanting a high-level overview would likely expect a high level blog post on the topic, not a closed download.

You may also find that the original content type is not well suited to attracting searchers. For example, your market and keyword research tells you that the guide published last month should do a lot better than it is. However, your search results indicate that it is not deploying as expected. To make it even more appealing, repackage it into different types of content resource – a YouTube video, a SlideShare presentation, or a series of blog articles.

Use your on-site analytics and industry trend reports to learn what types of content are arriving and working best to meet different user needs. Use these SEO insights to inform new content and to ensure that each existing piece is reaching its full potential.

Use # seo insights to inform new #content and ensure that each existing piece is reaching its full potential, @JimYu says of @CMIContent. Click to tweet

6. Real-time user behavior and automation

This advice gets a little trickier because you can’t necessarily optimize the content in response to what people are doing on your website in real time. However, research by Segment, Accenture, and others shows that consumers get frustrated when content feels impersonal, and most are more likely to buy from brands that give them personalized offers and recommendations.

AI-enabled SEO technology can be of great help here. After all, if you check out the site analytics and find out exactly what the visitor was looking for, you will be long gone.

We have worked with Campbell’s where recipe content is an important factor in product awareness and sales. With our company’s tool, their site automatically generated relevant internal links in the footer, which were marked on all recipe pages as “Members also viewed …”. Within a few weeks, Campbell’s content with 4,000 keywords was moved to page one.

7. Insights into engagement and conversion

It’s important to know which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tell you whether a piece of content is doing its job. For example, ranking reports and site traffic are great, but are visitors interacting with or just walking by your content?

Set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics to keep an eye on whether visitors are achieving their intended goal.

You can also check your social media platforms to see which content is getting the most engagement. Can you replicate that quest success by targeting a different intent or subject area?

Bring everything together

SEO is an ongoing process; there is no end to good results. Your SEO content strategy needs to keep track of changes in consumer behavior, from targeted keywords to mobile optimization and from search intent to content types.

Are you making the most of the SEO opportunity? If you plan for 2022, prepare to go deeper as well. Look for areas where you can tweak content optimization, fine-tune your personalization, and scale your efforts with smart automation.

Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski / Content Marketing Institute