Search engine optimization (SEO) has long been a trusted and bankable part of most (if not all) successful Marketing campaigns. But as the industry evolves, the gap between the what of SEO and the how seems to be widening. Many people understand the importance of SEO and even the basic mechanics — use the right tools to find the right keywords and then put those keywords in the right places. Right?

But with a growing emphasis on technically brilliant content and heavily focused on user experience, brands need to find new ways to marry SEO best practices and people-first content.

Here’s a look at how brands are learning to leverage marketing technology for surprisingly non-technical reasons and how serving up content that thrills your audience can result in some majorly impressive ROI.

SEO: The Modern-Day MarTech of the People

Initially, SEO centered heavily on the more technical aspects of search. Keywords were superstars, and website designers and content creators quickly learned how to game the system.

1. Step one: Stuff a webpage with every relevant keyword possible.
2. Step two: Conquer the search engine result pages (SERPs).

But Google’s Everyday Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) update saw the search giant further formalize its commitment to people-first content that prioritizes Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. If you want your content to rank, you need to create it so that Google understands you’re honoring EEAT — and the algorithm can smell a lie.

But it’s not that difficult to make EEAT a way of life.

• Prove your authenticity/authority by having a well-developed About Us page and bylining articles using authors that have a proven track record of industry expertise and lots of published content
• Have a user-friendly website that loads quickly and is easy to navigate
• Share well-written content that seeks to answer the questions posed by searchers — in other words, will people who find your site be satisfied with what they read?

Of course, those are just the highlights. Digging into EEAT and incorporating those tenets within every level of your content takes time and resources.

Marketing Tech/Tools for a People-First Content Strategy

Every brand’s MarTech stack is going to look a little different. Some tools focus on experience, some on creation, and some on distribution. When you look for where MarTech and people-first content overlap, you may find the following tools:

• SEO research and page optimization – SEO tools like Semrush and Yoast are integral to content creation when the goal is to rank high and outsmart the competition. Depending on the tool, marketers and writers can research keywords, build links, and understand how their content will rank, with content already sitting pretty on SERPs.
• Content creation platforms – People don’t always think of content creation platforms as MarTech, but depending on how the platform is set up, tech can drive some very impressive results. Imagine swapping out clunky email attachments and in-software editing for zipped downloads of content that’s already been proofed and formatted for publication. With companies like Crowd Content, technology is driving efficiency to streamline content creation from order placement to approval and beyond.
• Marketing automation – Marketing tech can help you get your content in the hands (or in the faces) of the people who most need to read it. For instance, Hootsuite offers a central dashboard from which marketers can create, schedule, and post social media content at the right time, eliminating the need to be on the clock distributing content 24/7.

Other tools, such as Mailchimp and CoSchedule, can help with email marketing, generating content briefs, constructing editorial calendars, and assigning tasks to your team. But the key here is to use tech to support a people-first content strategy, not replace it. You’ll still need touchpoints where humans check the process and refine as needed. You can’t create content for real people without real people being involved.

The Three Key Ingredients of People-First Content

To fully understand people-first content, we need to look at three key ingredients of that content and how tech-driven platforms help bring those ingredients together. When FHE Health needed to generate a high-volume run of quality content in the medical and science spaces, the company turned to Crowd Content to stay competitive while also staying true to its customer base.

Here’s how their partnership with Crowd Content drew on the basics of people-first content as part of a far-reaching content solution.

1. Quality – FHE has its own innovative SEO operation but only a single in-house writer to act on SEO recommendations. That’s one person to conduct interviews, learn about the home facility, and generate tons of content based on those facts. It’s simply not feasible for a single writer to tick all those boxes without seriously sacrificing quality.
   
   Crowd Content has thousands of freelancers specializing in writing, editing, and quality assurance, and FHE had access to that pool. The project was facilitated by content managers who handled project implementation, QA, and team briefing so FHE reaped all the results with very little responsibility. The workflow included not only proofreading but fact-checking, too, and content is guaranteed to meet Google’s standard for quality, meaning it’s helpful, human-centric, engaging, empathetic, written by experts, and easy to consume.
   
2. Reader Experience – When focusing on reader experience, you aim to create and share content that offers value to the consumers investing their time in your brand. Writing with inclusivity in mind and crafting content that helps consumers solve problems or answer essential questions can provide a superior experience for new and established followers alike.
   
   FHE offers mental health and substance abuse support to over 100 people monthly. It, therefore, stands to reason that many of the individuals reading FHE content arrived there due to a mental health or substance abuse-related query. Will they be happy with the information that they find? Can they understand what’s being shared, or is it sprinkled with confusing medical jargon?
   
   Crowd Content’s team used contracted SEO services to inform content briefs, then relied on its talented pool of writers to act on them and create content that gives consumers — and FHE — exactly what they were looking for. Assets like buyer personas and customer feedback can help fine-tune writing and improve reader experience.
   
3. Expertise – Another issue facing FHE was that its lone in-house writer couldn’t possibly be an expert in all the varied mental health and substance abuse topics the company wanted to touch on. But Crowd Content had an already vetted and onboarded team of subject matter experts with verifiable experience in healthcare — think nurses and doctors with credentials proving their education and professional expertise, all recruited using Crowd Content’s robust content management system.

Google already had 943 billion search requests in 2023, and we’re barely into the year’s second quarter. Now consider that each Google search’s first five organic results account for nearly 70% of total clicks. Ranking matters — but so does ensure searchers find what they’re hoping for once the page loads.

Marrying MarTech and a people-first approach to content could very well be your ticket to connecting and converting with your target customer base. It certainly worked for FHE.

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