Content Strategy + SEO: Friends & (Occasional) Foes

Creating and managing content---what we like to call “owned” media—requires a combination of disciplines ranging from editorial to design to technical. This content should be driven by a coherent content strategy that defines the W’s of journalism: who, what, when, where, and why are we creating this content.

But after defining this broad foundation, things get trickier fast. As content is being created it’s also being designed into digital experiences, built into user experiences that have visual and interactive components. This stage of content creation, we believe, needs to be done in close collaboration and in rapid iterations in order to see the effects that each has upon the other.

While this construction of the user experience goes on there is another layer of meaning that has to be artfully constructed—search engine optimization. And while the collaboration and trade-offs between editorial and design seems clear enough, the tricky relationship between content strategy and SEO strategy is less apparent and more difficult to manage.

SEO is all about telling search engines what the content and page experience is about so that it can be give an appropriate ranking in organic search engine results. How a page communicates its value to a search engine is similar—but different—from how it communicates with a human being who encounters and begins to take in the page.

One key SEO strategy is keyword density. The first step in an effective content strategy is to define the taxonomy of keywords that will live throughout content created within that strategy. Google, for example, looks at a page and tries to understand what it’s about through keywords. Some of these are proactively inserted by the content creator, who says “here’s what my page is about.” That’s a start, but search engines don’t run on the honor system.

Google analyzes keyword density on a page. How often do which words appear, and in what sentence and headline contexts? Keyword density operates on some subtle analysis—it’s not just a matter of jamming the same keyword a million times on a page. To the contrary, nothing will get your content sunk to page 29 of the search engine results pages (SERPs) than “keyword stuffing.” But the right keywords need to appear in the right amount of density in a way Google recognizes as valid. And Google is getting very, very good at judging this validity.

But here’s where SEO and content strategy bump into each other. Great content for SEO might not be the optimal content for a human being. Personally when I write content I try to gauge the degree of engagement a user is going to bring to a page. If they’re coming to a new product Website for probably the first time the headlines are going to be few, short and very clear. The messaging hierarchy will be simple, the paragraphs will be short and graphics will be a much bigger role. (Versus something like this blog post, where I assume you’re here for some friendly, free advice on a professional subject like content strategy)