SEO and Content: Best Practices From the Adobe Summit

At the Adobe Summit this week, digital marketing professionals are sharing practical tips and real-world examples of how to tackle SEO and content. Dave Lloyd, senior manager of global search marketing at Adobe, gave a great presentation on optimizing content for search throughout the customer journey, and I’d like to share some of the tips that came out of that session with you now.

Delivering a three-part approach to SEO and content, Dave says to focus on three things:

1. Ensuring best practices are in place
2. Mapping content strategy to customer needs
3. Creating alignment through collaboration

Let’s look a little closer at those now.

Best practices for optimization are still key, as they’re a part of what makes content be found. In his presentations, Dave showed how key SEO tactics feed into the pillars of how Google finds and ranks content:

Source: Adobe Summit Session, Dave Lloyd

That said, employing those best practices for optimization is key, and being able to rely on analytics platforms to help you assess the current state of your SEO friendliness is also important as a starting point.

Mapping content strategy to customer needs is the next step in Dave’s formula. As he points out, different types of content in the search results serve different purposes when answering the intent of the customer.

Source: Adobe Summit Session, Dave Lloyd

SEO strategy often suffers inside an organization because practitioners do not work through process issues to overcome friction caused by adding SEO steps into the Web workflow. Make it easier on your stakeholders by evangelizing a predictable, scalable, and repeatable process. His seven-step plan for content optimization includes:

1. Identifying keywords
2. Organizing content
3. Optimizing content
4. Creating content
5. Localizing content
6. Testing content
7. Measuring content

Source: Adobe Summit Session, Dave Lloyd

Aligning this content optimization strategy with the current publishing process enables organizations to position content better for users and search engines. Dave covered these concepts in detail when he addressed sequencing marketing content and the search marketing impact lifecycle.

Collaboration across teams and the alignment of goals is also key, as Dave points out. Speaking from my own experience, teams across enterprise businesses sometimes have competing goals, but often have goals that are in alignment that SEO and content strategies can support. Businesses must consistently communicate the value of how content can help the entire organization achieve its goal.

In addition to showing teams how they can equally benefit from SEO and content, establishing workflow and processes for content and optimization is key.

Content is also never done being optimized, which is why measuring performance and acting on insights is the last step in the initial content optimization cycle.

Co-presenter Ken Foster, director of digital media at McGladrey LLP, shared the importance of picking key performance indicators that align with the appropriate stakeholders. Then, pick those metrics to that tell the story that matters to them.

It’s been a fun week so far at the Summit and sessions like these remind us that the foundations of SEO and content optimization are foundational to know, stay current on, and execute effectively.