How Content Experience Impacts Engagement SEO

As a modern marketer, there’s a lot on your plate to consider—lead generation, ABM, search engine optimization, customer advocacy, and we wouldn’t let you forget about content experience. With all these things to think about at once, wouldn’t it be nice if you could kill two birds with one stone every once in a while?

Good news! If you’ve been working on improving your website’s overall content experience, you’re well on your way to seeing improvements in your SEO.

When it comes to SEO, our friends at Propecta recommend taking an 80/20 approach: 80 percent of your focus should be on engagement SEO (content that is helpful, popular, and engaging) and 20 percent of your focus should be on technical SEO (mobile usability, keyword use, XML sitemap, image alt tags, etc.).

Technical SEO is highly important—neglecting even one key element can prevent the best content from appearing on the first page of Google’s search results. As an example, it’s essential to ensure you’re doing keyword research to get your content the exposure it deserves. But arguably more critical is your engagement SEO. This includes what we put into our content plans, how we strategize the best possible content for our audiences, and how we deliver it in ways that make sense for both people and search engines. No amount of technical SEO will drive traffic to your site if the content on it fails to engage your visitors.

Here are some ways your content experience will help your engagement SEO:

Thoughtfully Curated Experiences

Many brands are guilty of having their content spread across multiple platforms: videos on YouTube, blogs on their website, presentations on SlideShare, and promotions across social media. While it’s certainly important to create content in different formats (and have a presence on all these third-party platforms), at the end of the day, savvy marketers don’t want to send their hard-earned visitors away from their website to consume all of these different types of content.

Check out the example below from Blackbaud. You’ll see that all of their videos, blogs, and PDFs have been pulled together in one curated stream instead of sending visitors away to YouTube to watch videos or forcing them to download those PDFs.

Content Organized by Topic  

How often do you go to a website and see that it’s organized by resource type rather than topic? It’s unlikely that your readers care about whether or not they find the answer to their question in a blog post, infographic, or video—what they really care about is having their needs met.

By putting all of these resource types in one place, your visitors are more likely to find the answer to their question in a format that suits their interests and preferred learning method, which gets you a thumbs up from Google.

Facilitate Content Bingeing

When all of your content is centralized in one place, you’ll probably find that it’s harder to get your visitors to leave because of all the content they have to consume! Tools like Uberflip’s AI-powered recommendation engine help facilitate content bingeing because they recommend other relevant pieces of content that will keep visitors on your site for longer. Contextualizing your CTAs is another way to ensure that once people are finished engaging with one item, they’ll move on to the next.

Both of these strategies typically contribute to improvements in key engagement metrics like time-on-page and bounce rates, signaling to Google that you’ve got quality content that’s worth reading.

Create Customized Experiences

It’s no secret that personalization is a crucial part of modern marketing. When an experience is specifically designed to cater to a particular user’s (or user group’s) interests, it’s more likely to satisfy user intent, which is important for your SEO. If a demand generation marketer visits your site and is immediately met with a piece of content that will help them generate more quality leads, they’re going to engage.

You can see below that our friends at Trimble allow visitors to select their job title from a drop-down menu to see resources that are specifically tailored to their interests.  

Using a platform like Uberflip allows marketers to create experiences that are tailored to each user group or persona while keeping them in one place. This makes them more likely to find what they’re looking for—and oftentimes, engage with even more.

Visit Uberflip Help to access more how-to guides and troubleshooting articles, or to contact Uberflip Support.