Following the launch of Hummingbird and Google’s improvements to semantic search, content marketers are no longer bound by keywords, it’s all about relevance.

You need to find a moment that’s relevant to your audience and create content that taps into this. Smart content marketers will use SEO insights and data to do this and to inform, enhance and grow what they do.

Also, identify your audience’s key influencers and tailor your content to appeal to them as this will widen your reach and you’ll gain real SEO value as a result. Give them something customised that they can use straight away and you’ll see even higher success levels. And finally, you must have the confidence to reject prescriptive, keyword-focused SEO briefs. This is an outdated approach.

Stick to your guns because great, relevant content, not just keywords, is what really matters when it comes to SEO.

People absorb information in different ways. They listen, they watch, they read, they view. Aim to appeal broadly by mixing up your content. Step away from basic blog posts and look to create diverse content such as testimonials, white papers, videos, widgets, quizzes, calculators and infographics. Web-based services such as Piktochart allow you to create simple, free infographics to give your content more character.

Collaborate whenever possible. This is key and one of the most frequent mistakes. Whenever you can, engage with your existing or your target audience and ask them what they want to see from you, how often and through which channel they discover and share content. Again, use social to ask the right questions at the right time

Three years ago, content marketers needed a reasonable level of ‘technical’ SEO expertise. For example, an understanding of keyword research to better inform article titles, and some knowledge of page rank to determine how to structure links within content.

As the algorithm has evolved, technical knowledge has been supplanted by a broader recognition of consumer engagement. SEO teams include content experts, tasked with understanding brands, their consumers, where meaningful points of intersection exist, and crafting content that naturally creates attention, engagement, interaction and amplification.

Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2014/10/31/seo-tips-content-marketers-tailor-your-content-collaborate-and-mix-it