On Tuesday the 19th of February, we hosted our ninth #LEARNbyVERB on how to establish a successful SEO content strategy. The workshop was hosted by Verb’s very own SEO Account Director, Jade Taylor and Account Manager, Tess Werling.

Original post published on Verb Brands website.

We welcomed brands such as Alexa Chung, The Corinthia Hotel, Clive Christian and The Lanesborough, who joined us for breakfast at a private members club in Shoreditch. Here are the top takeaways from our latest LEARN event:

SEO is key for a brand’s long term strategy

SEO has become a buzz word in the digital marketing industry as of late. The main goal of SEO is to drive users to your site. Often referred to as a ‘long term strategy’, it can take months for any positive results to show. However, as Jade demonstrated, it is an incredibly important source of traffic which is often overlooked by many brands; making up 51% of all traffic on average (SEMrush).

There are 3 core types of SEO that are needed to achieve the best results: Technical, content and offsite.

To achieve the best SEO results, you should always use a consumer first approach

It’s estimated that there are over 200 ranking signals Google uses to determine where a page will be placed in the SERPs. The top ranking signals include high-quality content, mobile friendliness, page speed and relevant, authoritative backlinks. However, Google’s algorithm updates mean that brands need to stay aware of any changes that may influence their place in Google’s results page. During our workshop, we ran through the most impactful changes in the last few years.

We concluded from this that SEO today was centred around 3 pillars: expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. However, facing forwards, we see several key trends which brands should watch out for. These include mobile first indexing, artificial intelligence, voice search and content optimisation. We’ve previously written about the SEO Trends to look out for in 2019 – check out our advice.

Always organise your types of content

In terms of content optimisation, it is important to manage each of the core types of SEO and provide content that meets user needs at every stage of your conversion funnel. An easy way to achieve this is by creating content that falls into 3 subcategories; Hero, Hub and Hygiene.

Regularly analyse your content’s performance

We recommended several tools to help you achieve SEO success including the full Google Suite made up of Search Console, Analytics, Keyword Planner and Tag manager. We also outlined the key metrics of success for your brand. Watch out for:

Organic traffic
Organic bounce rate
Organic conversion rate
Top exit pages for organic traffic
Keywords ranked in Google
Local visibility
Click-through rate (CTR)
Pages indexed in Google Search Console
Pages crawled per day
Duplicate title and descriptions
Crawl errors

From LEARN, we derived that there many different aspects of SEO to consider in order to truly optimise your online content. Remaining commercially aware, ensuring you have enough hero and hygiene content and putting your user first when writing your copy, are just some of the ways in which you can improve your Google ranking.

If you need any help refining your SEO strategy, please get in contact with us! Our team of experts are happy to help navigate this digital marketing channel.

Original post published on Verb Brands website.