Follow these five tips and tricks to improve your businesses organic search placement.

Marketers spend so much time creating content, but content is meaningless if it does not yield results.

For many businesses, a big goal of content marketing is to create content that gets found. One of the most popular questions we get asked is: How can I use content marketing to boost organic search?

Here are 5 things you can do to achieve that goal.

1. Create content that focuses on your target audience with keywords in mind.

While keywords don’t play as big of a big role in content marketing as they once did, it’s still important to research and consider keywords that revolve around your target audience as you develop content. In considering your target audience, having Buyer Personas laid out that you can cater to is ideal. With Buyer Personas, answer:

• In which age range is my target audience?
• What are the interests of my target audience?
• What problems do they have?
• What’s keeping them from overcoming challenges in business?

In creating content that is focused on your target audience, keywords will flow naturally.

 2. Use video on social media and integrate it into your website. 

As noted by Sprout Social, Facebook gets more than 8 billion average daily video views. Facebook Live works wonders in getting content found organically, but you need to give it a boost:

• Embed your Facebook Live video onto your website.
• Add a user-friendly, search engine friendly description to your Facebook Live post that tells users what the video is about. Consider which relevant, long-tail search terms you could use. For example, let’s say you sell vacuums and create a video about cleaning, your video and post description may read: How to clean your living room carpet in 5 minutes or less.

While it’s possible for your Facebook Live videos to get found organically on Facebook itself, boosting it is recommended and will increase its likelihood of getting found.

For information on how to use Facebook Live for business, check out these tips on our sister site Business News Daily.

3. Generate high quality links back to your website. 

Editors and writers get bombarded with pitches from businesses that want press and they could always use great new content ideas. Identify the most relevant content creators who cover content that’s relevant to your industry and put together a pitch they can’t refuse. Some editors and writers will naturally link back to their source’s content, but it’s certainly OK to ask them to do so.

Here’s a little secret: when applicable, create a study of some sort and publish it to your website. When you submit your pitch, send the link to the study, which could be cited as a source.

Another way to generate high quality links is to guest post, as Business.com’s expert contributors do. Connect and build relationships with like-minded people, then offer to write a blog post for their website in exchange for a byline with a link back to your content.

 4. Optimize your content for featured snippets. 

Search Engine Watch defines a featured snippet as: a summary of an answer to a user’s query, which is displayed on top of Google Search results. The snippets are pulled in from a web page and include the title and URL of the page. Also, as noted by Search Engine Watch, featured snippets could increase a website’s traffic by as much as 30 percent. Featured snippets come in three different forms:

• Paragraph
• List
• Table

Neil Patel goes in depth on how to get content ranked in Google’s featured snippets which includes but is not limited to:

• Use Google to uncover snippet opportunities.
• Do keyword research.
• Answer multiple questions.

5. Optimize images for search.

Every single image on your website or blog needs to be search engine friendly within its name, alt text and areas surrounding it. For more information Allbusiness.com goes into depth on how to optimize website images for SEO.

All of these efforts combined can help you boost your organic search. They may not work right away, but be patient and don’t give up.

Article written by: Marisa Sanfilippo