Content Marketers Should Know More About Search

In contrast to content marketing, SEO is an extremely new discipline. It has been around for only a couple decades, and it rapidly turned into the primary digital focus for many marketers.

However, SEO can't exist without content. Presently, with SEO developing so rapidly, there are still numerous misguided judgments and misunderstanding around it. Those misinterpretations may affect the content marketing process in a not so positive manner.

Let’s clear things up a bit:

1. SEO Has Become Much More Integrated and Different

Many SEOs would ignore very important digital marketing perspective, including user experience, brand building, etc. The main reason for existing was to get a page ranked in search engines.

Nowadays it's finally different: SEO is only one component of achievement. It's next to difficult to accomplish high rankings without building authority and brand awareness, or without ensuring users will have a better experience using the website. Google has taken the majority of that in the record: they monitor how users interact with a site, how fulfilled they are, and how rapidly they find answers when landing on a page from search results.

Most companies are offering full-package internet marketing services that include video production, social media marketing and usability. Some companies even go beyond that by giving “integrated marketing services”. 

2. SEO Is No Longer Focused on Exact-Match Strings

Remember the days when writers were given one phase and compelled to use it a specific number of times in content?

Well, those days are joyfully finished.

Search engines have moved past supposed "keyword strings". They would now be able to get ideas, entities and topics. After updating in algorithm, now Google understands all kinds of phrases that can satisfy the initial query of the user and focuses on the quality of the results rather than matching the exact match strings. Quality and depth of content have turned out to be considerably more significant than the exact keyword you put on the page. When you start working on content, make sure you understand related subtopics and subcategories that need to be included in your site or article.

3. Search Gives Us Lots of Cues

Search has developed. Google has become to be more brilliant at distinguishing search intent and giving their users precisely what they need. They have turned out to be better at distinguishing peoples' struggles and serving the best answer within search results. They have figured out how to discover inquiries behind questions and show their users more options for researching a topic.

The fact that all of that comes up in search results makes it workable for writers to become familiar with any point they are writing for. The key is to figure out how to see and interpret those cues to make progressively valuable and better-optimized content.

Let’s see how it gives cues:

1) When searching, look at all kinds of search results that come up.

·       Is there a video carousel? If you found videos search result that means Google has found users engage with videos more, so maybe you need to put video for that particular keyword.

·      Are there image results? It means Google has seen its users look for visual content when searching.

·       Are there shopping results? This signal of high commercial intent, so your article may not do so well here.

2) When searching, check out “People Also Ask” results.

Google's "People Also Ask" boxes show prominent inquiries based on your query. These give a goldmine of content motivation. Click on some of those questions to see more questions.

3) When searching, pay attention to Google’s Featured Snippets.

Google has gone far at figuring out how to see any web copy and extracting useful information.

·        Define concepts

·        Focus on facts and numbers (e.g. if you are describing a tool, explain its pricing)

·        Use subheadings (especially if you are using questions from the step above)

Nowadays, rather than compelling artificial copy, Google improves your content by instructing you to research more, structure better and use a more varied vocabulary.