You've built the perfect content article. It’s a brilliant summary of a solution that your clients will resonate with and relate to because it contains a real personal story. It even includes something to tug at the heart strings. The content is solid. It should be as viral as a TED talk that includes a bevy of beagle puppies, but it falls flat. Why aren’t your shares and likes through the roof?

The answer could be in your SEO. SEO, aka Search Engine Optimization, is just a fancy way to say tagging your HTML pages with keywords and links. Google has written many ebooks on the subject if you wish to delve deep into the topic, but rather than worry about the activity and algorithms of webcrawlers and searchbots that knit together links, hashtags and other content, stick to these tricks to consistently tag your content so that it surfaces reliably. Storytelling includes the where and the what; so before we examine SEO, let’s ensure we hit the right platform and media first.

Listen to your Customers' Clicks

Listening is as important as consistent messaging. If you listen on your channels via analytics, you will gain an understanding of what type of content piques your consumers’ interest. Avoid the shot gun approach across too many categories – having too many varied items just to “hit” each category. Analytics can show you which media channels are worth adding more content to, and where you might consider branching out to next. Use analytics to define your target market and their preferred social platforms, including which target groups are most likely to share.

Blend Content Types

Re-purposing content might sound like recycling, but it's an important step in the social media sphere. A YouTube video can live on an article page as well as on the corporate YouTube channel or shared as a direct link on X (Twitter) or Facebook. This isn't news for most, but it does mean putting a strategy in place to mix and blend a variety of media options. Video, animation, infographics, articles, blogs and links can all pleasantly coexist on a single web page in addition to posting the content on their respective channels, creating multiple points of entry. Spreading the wealth of your message over a number of media increases the engagement and time spent digesting the content.

The New SEO Basics

Now that we covered off the where and the what, we need a roadmap of SEO. The best way to boost the views of your content is to make sure that it has basic SEO. Keywords in metatags have been exploited, so most SEO algorithms search based on real content. Make sure that your titles, links and other content include words and phrases of typical searches.

• Title: Keep the page title clear and use the h1 tag. Keep URLs of articles simple and clear. For example, “10 Mortgage Tips for Every First Time Home Buyer”.
• Alt tags: Use ALT tags for images because this description can help with both text searches and image searches as well as improving accessibility.
• Internal links: Links appearing in the body of your content to other articles and pages rate higher than links in the header and footer.
• Research Google Adwords: Dig into your Google Adwords and look for high-click and low-competition words and place them in page titles, article headings and links for maximum ranking effect.