Finding the Perfect Balance Between Technical SEO and Content Marketing
Technical SEO is a collective noun used for all the nuts and bolts holding up your website, AKA the on-page elements of your website. The better the page speed, responsiveness, readability, and mutual interactivity, the more popular it’ll be among users and search engines, and the higher it’ll rank.
On the other hand, content marketing is the practice of attracting traffic and leads via relevant and high-quality content.
Here’s how you should balance the two digital marketing aspects.
Scope Out the Competition
It’s quite easy to know your weak link once you compare your pages to the competitors’. Pick out the top three currently leading on search engines, and compare the pages you have in common in this order:
Does their content answer more questions than yours?
Does it have better readability?
Is it linked better to other content?
Do the pages have a better conversion path?
If they’re better than you at one of the above, you need to revisit your text design, tone, accuracy, and internal and external links.
However, if your content is unquestionably superior to your competition, you might want to verify the rankings first. This can be done through SEMrush, a beginner-friendly site with ranking tools used for improving online visibility and discovering insights.
In the event your official rank is still lower than the competition’s, you’ll have to turn to the technical aspects of your site. Check whether your robots.txt file isn’t stopping Google from crawling important pages, see if the page speed is up to scratch, make sure the canonicals are working fine, the rendering’s up to scratch, and more.
If found lacking, invest in that particular SEO, but keep working on the content end as well.
Look Up Your Google Search Control Report
Google Search Control (GSC) is an analysis that Google sends website owners to keep them in the loop about traffic, click-through, sitemaps, and as many other technical aspects as it can. Among other things, the search engine also tells you which of your pages it’s indexing—whether they’re valid, barely valid, showing errors—and not indexing.
A failure to index more than 25% of your website pages means you’re more than likely facing a technical SEO-related issue. If it’s less than 25%, you should focus on the content. Check for duplicate content and make valuable additions to it.
