Experienced business leaders and marketing experts will tell you that one SEO strategy does not work for every company. SEO has a few different forms, just like other marketing channels, and you can use both types of SEO to increase the amount of organic traffic to your website.
But if you have a constrained budget, you do not need to spend it on both right away. One of the SEO channels is likely to be more effective for your business than the other. It will depend on your brand’s position, existing resources, and ultimate business goals.
You can hire a professional SEO company to understand which SEO pillar will work better for you. Alternatively, you can also try to find that out using some of these methods. But before we discuss those methods, let us first explore them individually.
Content SEO
Always remember that content that is useful for users is always good for SEO. Therefore, your content SEO strategy should always focus on both users and search bots. However, your website will probably contain a lot of content, so how do you decide which ones must be optimized for SEO? The answer is all of them.
Google and other search engines use a few key elements to determine website ranking on search engine results pages. They are as follows:
- URLs
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Headlines and headers ( H1, H2, H3, etc.)
- Content body
- Anchor text and hyperlinks
- Page structure and layout
Technical SEO
Technical SEO techniques can optimize the usability of your website and facilitate search crawling and indexing. In other words, technical SEO methods can assist search engine crawlers in finding your website pages and understand their content.
You can think of technical SEO as the behind-the-scenes efforts that allow Google or other search engines to find your website content and rank it on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Some of the most common technical SEO techniques are:
- Robots.txt file that acts as a site map for search engine crawlers
- XML Sitemaps for larger websites with a lot of URLs
- Search engine crawling
- Website indexing
- Websites speed and performance
- Canonical tags to direct search engines to send SEO juice for similar queries
- Structured data
- Server-side or client-side website rendering
Ways to Determine the Right SEO Pillar
Now that you have understood the crucial aspects of both content SEO and technical SEO, you need to decide which one is best for your business. Obviously, your company will benefit the most if you can use both of them.
But since most companies do not have an endless marketing budget, they tend to choose one that offers better results. The following ways can help you determine which SEO pillar will provide better returns for your business.
Competitor Content
A marketing expert should be able to tell which content would be more effective by looking at it. It should have a superior design with great depth of information and should be written creatively. An ideal content should also have good internal and external linking, which will provide better SEO results in the long term.
Comparing content with your competitors should be an easy way to choose the right SEO pillar. That is because your competitors would probably have similar content and website pages as yours. Go through your competitors’ websites and content to see their approaches. Also, crosscheck whether their SEO strategy is working on not using an SEO tool.
You should also compare your Google rankings with those of your competitors. Several SEO tools can give you details of your ranking against your competitors. If you notice that you have better content quality than your competitors, yet your Google rankings are lower, you should invest in technical SEO.
On the other hand, if you find that your competitors have better content quality than yours, you should put more effort into content SEO. Once you have a pool of better content than your competitors, you can switch to optimize technical SEO.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console can give you a detailed indexing report about your website, including statistics like website traffic, click-through rate, website speed, site maps, and others. You can use this report to check how your website is performing and understand whether the web pages are getting indexed by Google or not.
The Google Search Console will highlight any web pages that are excluded or not getting indexed for some reason. If you notice that more than 20% of your website URLs are in the excluded segment, you definitely need to concentrate on technical SEO efforts. You can also check whether those pages are not getting indexed due to duplicate content.
Core Web Vitals
According to Google’s announcement last year, website performance and speed will become official ranking factors from May 2021 onwards. Google announced the update almost a year ago to give website owners ample time to optimize their websites.
The new update that is due to roll out in May 2021 focuses on Core Web Vitals that will measure the loading speed and performance of the web pages. You can read about the three Core Web Vitals metrics on this blog for more information. Alternatively, you can also check Google PageSpeed Insights to get more data than the Google Search Console regarding your website URLs.
You may have to put in some manual labor to audit your entire website, but it can also get you better results regarding your website performance and speed issues, which can help you decide if you need to focus on technical SEO. You should also check your robot.txt files to understand if you need some SEO efforts to optimize them.
We hope that this article has provided a better understanding of how to choose between content SEO and technical SEO. You should also examine your existing resources to decide which one you should focus on. Remember that SEO is a long-term exercise, so it is okay to switch between content SEO and technical SEO from time to time, depending on your requirements.