Content and SEO go hand-in-hand. Without one, your efforts on the other are seriously diminished. For example, your keyword research won't do much good unless you then use those keywords in your content. And, creating content without knowing what your audience is looking for will leave you without any significant traffic. Beyond that, high quality content is what earns you backlinks, and it's also what search engines crawl when they arrive at your site.
Ready to get strategic? Read the SEO's Guide to Content Strategy.
This page is your home base for learning about content and its role in SEO. The resources here are useful for learners of all skill levels.
Content Planning for Local SEO
What types of content should local businesses create? Learn in this article.
MozCon Video Bundle
Did you miss this year's MozCon? Now is your chance to experience what everyone has been talking about! We have over 19 hours of actionable inbound marketing knowledge.
Google Penguin
Learn about Google's Penguin algorithm update and it's impact on search visibility.
Google Panda
What is Google's Panda algorithm update, and what did it do to affect ranking and search visibility? How can you avoid "Panda penalties?" Learn in this article.
On-Site SEO
Learn what "on-site SEO" is all about – and how it contributes to the search visibility of a webpage or website as a whole.
Constant Content: The Silver Bullet for Failing Content Marketing Strategy
The State of Content Marketing Survey told us that 92% of marketers don't have a clear plan for content marketing. The only answer: the constant content approach.
How Content Is Evolving Thanks to AI — Whiteboard Friday
There's no question that AI has already started to have a meaningful impact on organizations that create content every single day. In this video, Ross shares how our workflows, processes, and content creation will positively evolve thanks to AI.
Google vs. AI — Whiteboard Friday
In today’s episode, Tom goes over some of the new threats to Google from recent advances in machine learning models like ChatGPT, and how Google might react to those threats.
AI for SEO and Content Marketing: A Friend, Not a Foe (for Now, at Least)
Now, there are endless ways to use AI for all kinds of tasks, but as a marketer and an SEO, Ann shares the ways you can benefit from it for blogging, social media, and SEO tasks.
Pillar Pages: Why and How You Should Add Them to Your Content Strategy
Content mapping and internal linking are the primary tactics we employed to see massive SEO success from our pillar pages. Read on to learn how to implement a pillar page content strategy for yourself.
How to Align Your Blog with Your Organic Search Conversion Funnel
Business blogging is a good way to achieve “accidental rankings” (those you didn’t necessarily plan for) and discover more search-driven sales channels. And yet, many business owners or marketing managers have no idea what their blogs are ranking for. Consequently, there’s no buying journey set up for anyone who lands on a blog post. Clicks may come, but a blog remains an island. So, how can you include your blog in your overall marketing strategy?
Link Relevance vs. Content Relevance in Link Building
Relevance is talked about a lot in the context of link building, yet none of us know exactly how Google measures it. When it comes to link building, and specifically the part that relevance plays, the potential answers are a lot more complex than we think. Let’s start by splitting out link relevance and content relevance.
Humans vs. Robots: Picking the Best Audience for Your SEO Content
When writing for search engines, should you create content for the algorithm or for your human readers? The answer is both. Here’s how you can do it.
How to Know When You Need a Dedicated Paid Landing Page
Creating custom, campaign-specific landing pages is resource-intensive, and not every team has the necessary tools, expertise, or personnel to build the content. So, how do you know if you need a custom page, or if you can safely send paid traffic to an organic page and still achieve your KPIs? This three-step, data-driven evaluation helps answer this question.
9 Ways to Design Inclusive Content
Inclusivity is about understanding diversity and ensuring everyone can be involved to the greatest extent possible. It's an important consideration for every business owner and content creator, and should be at the heart of your ongoing design efforts — not something you look at after a website or content goes live.
Case Study: The ROI of Re-optimizing Content (Plus Bonus How-To)
You know it’s important to keep your content up to date, but exactly how much does it matter? Lauren shows you the actual ROI she and her team at Brafton have seen from regularly re-optimizing blog posts over the last several years.
Commercial vs. Functional vs. Emotional: A Case Study on Page Title SEO Testing
In our fast-paced day-to-day lives, we can often underestimate the power of copy, even though it’s the only thing between our business and our customers. To that end, Marty used SEO Testing to trial different copy types in product page titles, and want shares the results of that test in this blog.
How to Measure the Impact of Content Based on Intent
When it comes to measuring the impact of content, you might think of KPIs like “sitewide conversion rate”, or picture an upward graph that shows an increase in traffic. But are those metrics really meaningful? In this piece, Kelly argues that, no, they’re not. Instead, focus on getting actionable insights that can help your content flourish, by measuring its impact in a meaningful way.
The Four Pillars of Relevancy: How Digital PR Campaigns Can Lead to Gains in Every Sector
Rebecca explains how a relevant digital PR campaign can lead to commercial gain, and takes you through the steps to get there.
How Contextualizing Topics can Lead to Press-worthy Content for Your Brand
The team at Stacker has mastered how to create newsworthy, data-driven stories for their newswire. Contextualizing topics, statistics, and events serves as a core part of their content ideation process. Today, Amanda shares their winning strategy so you can create content that has real news value.
How to Improve Organic Clickthrough for Your Content
SERPs are becoming more diverse and interactive, making any CTR study out there much less reliable, because no two sets of search results are ever the same. So, how much control do content creators have over how their work is represented in search? As it turns out, quite a bit!
The Core Elements of Storytelling that B2B Can Learn from B2C
For those in the B2B world, you’ve probably heard B2B referred to as “Boring 2 Boring.” It’s time to end that perception and spice things up a bit by exploring marketing storytelling techniques that can take your B2B marketing strategy to the next level.
How We Increased a Law Firm’s Leads by 174% With Content Optimization [Case Study]
In this case study, walk through the steps the Tao Digital team took to achieve increased leads, impressions, and clicks for their client. By making strategic content optimizations at the right time, you can do the same.
How to Use Keyword Clustering to Seamlessly Optimize Your SEO Content
Keyword clustering is the SEO tactic to use if you want to seamlessly optimize your SEO content and streamline your workflow at the same time. The best part? It’s fairly simple, and SERPs give you all the information you need to make an informed decision on exactly how to do it.
Why SEOs Need to Invest More in Long-Form Content (and How to Do It)
Long-form content can often be overshadowed by other forms of execution that may be considered more visually engaging. The truth is that the value of long-form content shouldn’t be overlooked because it can do so many things for a brand, including driving traffic, building authority, and building links.
Magento SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Magento Websites
If you’re an SEO in the e-commerce space, it’s important to learn how to work with Magento. Today, Chris walks you through seven areas for SEO adjustments that are unique to the Magento platform.
How to Choose Pillar Page Topics
With the growth of conversational search intent, pillar page strategies have entered the scene to fulfill those queries. Like anything in the SEO space, pillar page strategies take time and a great deal of planning to do correctly. Let’s break down this process.
How to Carry Out Content Audits — Yes, Plural
A content audit done once to highlight current website issues will have a short shelf-life of usefulness. However, a content audit that is continuously updated offers multiple uses for analyzing and reporting on strategies. Here’s how to conduct that ongoing audit.
3 Powerful On-Page Optimizations to Power Up Your Content
It’s not easy to write content that ranks in Google and drives conversions, but if you follow a few simple steps, you’ll be well on your way to ranking, and to engaging customers on all types of devices.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: What They Are and Why SEOs Should Care
In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and outline the steps you can take to meet its standards. We’ll also touch on the reasons why accessible websites typically rank higher in search engines — making accessibility the right choice all around!
How to Calibrate Your Brand Voice to Your SEO Advantage
One of the best ways to stand out from the herd of businesses in your niche is to develop a unique brand voice for your company – one that will appeal to customers and get noticed via SEO. This article will show you a few tricks to help develop a unique voice, structure your content, and turn Google’s algorithms to your advantage at the same time.
How to Use Surveys to Tap into Trending Conversations (and Build Links)
Most brands aren’t operating full newsrooms and don’t have the capacity to cover breaking news, but there are still ways to participate in relevant, newsworthy conversations — and surveys are a great option. See how you can utilize surveys to add value to conversations, and earn the interest of writers at top publications.
How to Turn One Piece of Content into Multiple for SEO
As people consume more and more content each day, they become less receptive to basic content that doesn't provide a new perspective. To counter this issue, you must make sure that your content is native to each platform you publish on. However, that doesn’t mean that you need to start from scratch. There's a way to take one content idea and turn it into multiple, which can scale across multiple platforms and improve your brand awareness.
Google E-A-T SEO: How to Create Content Google Wants
Over the past few months, you’ve probably seen the buzzword (or acronym, rather) “E-A-T” floating around. While this term has been in the lexicon of many SEOs for quite a while now, since the major Google algorithm update in August 2018 (AKA “the medic update”), a big bright spotlight has been shone on Google’s “E-A-T”.
5 Real Examples of Advanced Content Promotion Strategies
If you're looking to grow, your content promotion needs to move beyond mere social promotion. See how advanced content promotion strategies are working for successful companies and take away solid strategies you can emulate for improved growth.
Should SEOs & Content Marketers Play to the Social Networks' "Stay-On-Our-Site" Algorithms?
Increasingly, social networks are tweaking their algorithms to favor content that remains on their site, rather than send users to an outside source. This spells trouble for those trying to drive traffic and visitors to external pages, but what's an SEO or content marketer to do? This edition of Whiteboard Friday goes into detail on the pros and cons of each approach, then gives Rand's recommendations on how to balance your efforts going forward.
Google Hummingbird
What is Google's "Hummingbird" algorithm update? What influence did this update have on how search results are built? Learn in this article.
Advanced Content Analysis in Google Analytics
With the right setup, Google Analytics offers far more than the standard built-in metrics for your content. This post shows how to use content groupings and custom dimensions to maximize your insights.
How to Build Links to Your Blog - A Case Study
After a month or so of development, my site was finally ready and I wanted to start thinking about how to get some traffic going on the website. Whilst paid advertising and social media were a huge part of the strategy, I knew that appearing in the search engines for a wide selection of long-tail phrases was going to be instrumental to the blog's success. This is when I began developing my link building strategy and, after trialing out some very successful approaches, I've decided to now share my link building tactics with you all.
12 Things That Will Kill Your Blog Post Every Time
When you look around at successful blogs -- whatever industry or topic -- there are several undeniable basics to success. And it starts with blog posts that kill it…rather than get killed. But what kills a blog post? Here’s a list of 12 things. Ignore them and you will have a tough time being successful.
Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World
In a land ravaged by pandas, one man will teach you everything you need to know about duplicate content. Learn how to spot duplicates in the wild and stop them in their tracks.
8 Can't-Miss Off-Page SEO Strategies to Build Your Online Reputation
Earn brand mentions, rankings, traffic to your site, and conversions using these off-page SEO strategies: building your brand, leveraging social media, playing around with content types, and more.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing focuses on delivering your brand message to a targeted set of industry influencers rather than to the market at large, relying on those influencers to amplify your voice to a relevant and pre-qualified audience. Learn more about it in this article.
The Best Types of Content for Local Businesses: Building Geo-Topical Authority
What's the best way to show local searchers that you're an authority in your niche? You guessed it — through your content. But that can be a pretty vague and overwhelming term; what are some actual ways to make a difference, conversions-wise? Miriam Ellis explains.
5 Steps to Content Marketing Success
Content marketing isn't easy when it's done right, but when you have a solid process in place, you've got a much better chance of hitting a home run. Paddy Moogan takes us through his own 5-step process for making sure your content marketing campaign starts off right.
Illustrated Guide to Advanced On-Page Topic Targeting for SEO
The concepts of advanced on-page SEO are dizzying: LDA, co-occurrence, and entity salience. The question is "How can I easily incorporate these techniques into my content for higher rankings?" The truth is, you can create optimized pages that rank well without understanding complex algorithms.
12 Ways to Increase Traffic From Google Without Building Links
The job of the Technical SEO becomes more complex each year, but we also have more opportunities now than ever. Here are 12 ways you can improve your rankings without relying on link building.
Personas: The Art and Science of Understanding the Person Behind the Visit
With the erosion of keyword intelligence and the move to strings-not-things for the user, Google is pushing all marketers to focus more on their target audience. This post will teach you how to understand that audience, the future of Google, and how to build data-driven personas step by step.