4 Simple Free SEO Study Resources For Content Marketers
Content marketing and SEO are very interrelated. Every marketer is aware of this truth, as well as the fact that if you know the basics of SEO, you can success. However, not everyone is ready (or able) to allocate time to study it. This article will hopefully stimulate you to drop all excuses and increase your knowledge on this important subject. It includes 4 free study resources, but starts with why you need to learn SEO and some mistakes you should avoid.
Why Content Marketers Need SEO
The list of reasons why Content Marketers need SEO is limitless. I decided to highlight what I think is the main and generalized it. That is how these three sections below appeared.
SEO helps Content Marketers to understand their field and get new ideas
Keyword research and analysis must always be the part of the content planning and preparation. While researching, you get to know your niche’s requirements better, and convert your audience into customers with less effort and cost. Moreover, keywords research allows us to find out what is gaining popularity at the moment.
Use keyword research tools like Serpstat, Moz or Keywordtool.io to make the process easier. And of course, don’t forget about Google Trends.
All these will help you to build the efficient content marketing strategy.
SEO knowledge enables attracting traffic to the website
This point is again about keywords. Even if you know your subject well, but don’t use the proper keywords in your posts, you will be unlikely get the traffic you deserve. Or you can just spoil everything with an Ill-conceived heading.
Understanding the algorithms of the search engine allows creating better content
Of course people (readers) should be your primary consideration, before you consider SEO. So sure the first thing you should care about must be the user experience. Meanwhile, knowing such Google algorithms as LSI enables creating the texts of better quality.
LSI-texts are the texts containing natural word forms related to the keywords. For example, if there are the words like “a ball” and “a goalkeeper” in the text, then Google understands that the material is about football (soccer to Americans!).
5 Simple SEO Mistakes Killing Your Rankings
The lack of elementary knowledge of SEO can lead to good content going unnoticed. Pay attention to this brief guide of the simplest points of SEO-optimization, and start avoiding these mistakes.
A small amount of text
Research confirms that the longer an article is, the more chances it has to get to the top of the search results. It’s connected with the fact that short texts are unlikely to fully disclose the issue for the reader, and Google tries to satisfy a user from the first click. I suggest that you read the Yoast’s article on how long the blog post should be.
Eye-catching material layout
According to the Daily Telegraph, people have shorter attention span than goldfish. I hope that it’s really not that bad! However, it’s impossible to deny that continuous long texts scare us. But easy breaks in the content make it easier on the eye. So it’s crucial to use paragraphs, subheadings, and other engaging moments, such as pictures and illustrations. Besides everything else, all these will keep the reader on the page longer, and such user behavior will influence the page’s rankings positively.
It’s not advisable though, to randomly select outdated images from free photo stocks, as some do:
Poor content
Ultimately, the quality of the content is still the most important aspect. It should be relevant and contain no spelling or grammatical errors. Errors don’t influence the rankings themselves, but if there are plenty of them in the text, they may prevent the search engines from perceiving your page in the way you’d like to. I use Grammarly every time I create content to avoid this issue.
Metatag optimization
This is one of the main stages of the on-page SEO. Title and Description tags describe the names of site’s pages and their summary. Search engines use these tags to find out the information about the page in the SERP. Correctly used meta tags mean a lot for the site’s position in the search results. To find out if you didn’t make mistakes, use tools like Serpstat, or Netpeak Spider.
Lack of links to other sources
No matter how experienced you are in your field, unless you are Mark Zuckerberg or some other guy from the list of the 100 most influential people, try to reinforce your materials with links to other opinions. In order not to seem as if the whole text is based only on what you think. This will increase the trust of users to the information provided on the page. And Google knows this, and as a rule, it gives some extra points to the website while distributing places in SERP.
4 Brilliant Free SEO Study Resources
Fortunately, we live in a time when people have access to any knowledge. And, moreover, often free of charge. If the above has motivated you to start learning SEO, you will find the links to these 4 resources will be useful. Of course, there are a lot more of them, but, in my opinion, these 4 are all you need to firmly orient yourself in the subject of SEO.
How Search Works
It is Google’s intro to the world of its algorithms and how the search engine works in general. The first thing everybody starting to learn SEO should study.
Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO
The marketing team of Moz is awesome, and lots of materials they create is worth paying attention to. This SEO guide is not the exception. If you’d like to get acquainted with SEO, then this is the excellent source of knowledge.
Serpstat Academy
A distinctive feature of Serpstat courses is that the training is based directly on their all-in-one SEO tool. Very convenient for beginners.
Search Engine Land’s Guide To SEO
This concise and accessible SEO guide from Search Engines Land is represented in the original form of periodic table. This table and its 9-chapter explanation contain all you need to know about the on- and off-page SEO at the first stage.
Summing up
In this article, I tried to explain the benefits that Content Marketers can achieve from increasing their knowledge in the field of SEO. I believe that it allows working much more effectively:
- Their traffic will increase
- It will be easier to convert leads into customers
- The process of creating new content will be simplified
For those who share this opinion, I proposed the free SEO courses I consider as being the best currently available.
Would you add any resources to those I’ve mentioned above? I’m happy to listen to feedback in the comments below.
Additional reading: This article from Hubspot – https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo-analysis-tools
Featured image: Copyright: ‘https://www.123rf.com/profile_maxxyustas‘ / 123RF Stock Photo
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Eleonora Zolotaryova
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