SEO-driven storytelling isn’t an entirely new concept. Yet, it has become a new competitive edge lately as more and more businesses leverage it to boost online visibility and speak to their audiences.
When it comes to serious and complex businesses, such as architecture firms, digital storytelling offers an engaging way to speak about complicated things and differentiate your brand from others. This type of content marketing offers you an opportunity to:
- Humanize your brand.
- Create a deeper emotional connection with your audience.
- Boost engagement.
- Ensure shareability of your content.
- Stand out from the crowd.
- Rank high in search engines.
This guide was created to help you achieve all these goals! Read on to learn:
- What is digital storytelling.
- What it consists of.
- How to use it effectively in marketing for architects.
Understanding SEO-Driven Storytelling
SEO is the practice of optimizing your site and content aimed at increasing its position in organic search results.
Storytelling is all about painting an imagery through words. From the marketing perspective, brand storytelling is a powerful promotion technique that implies sharing your business’ path, vision, values, and customer success stories in an engaging manner to become more memorable and evoke deeper emotions in your target audience.
When brought together, these two concepts shape SEO-driven storytelling. It implies merging the art of creating engaging narratives with the technical aspects of SEO.
Compared to other digital marketing strategies, this tactic has a few tangible benefits:
- It makes your content more relatable to prospects.
- It makes your message more persuasive.
- It makes you memorable.
At the same time, an engaging story is always share-worthy, meaning that it can help you expand your outreach. And it appeals to prospects’ emotions rather than minds, which creates a deeper sense of trust and boosts your chances of converting them.
From the SEO perspective, storytelling can bring you more clicks, engagement, backlinks, and trust. Compliment it with the right keywords and phrases, and it can become a strategic tool to bring you to the top of search results.
When it comes to architectural narratives, in particular, there are some tangible challenges, such as a lack of clarity, authenticity, and emotion. Also, there is often a problem of oversimplifying complex issues.
At the same time, with the right narrative architecture tactic, this method of digital marketing for architecture can help you communicate their problem-solving capabilities and make their processes more engaging, relatable, and easy to understand for their clients. Eventually, it’s a great chance to gain recognition and stand out from the pack.
Identifying Key Narrative Elements
Before we move on to specific storytelling SEO tips, let’s go through the key narrative elements that are there:
- Theme.
- Setting.
- Plot.
- Characters.
To align these elements with your objectives, you must determine your brand’s mission/values and unique selling proposition. Integrating these three points into the plot will help you showcase your strongest sides and capture prospects. Also, you must take time to understand your target audience better to make sure that your content is relatable to them.
Leveraging Keywords in Your SEO Strategy
Leveraging Keywords in Your SEO StrategySEO keywords are always at the heart of search engine optimization. They help search engines comprehend your content and its relevance to users’ queries. Hence, they are there to help you drive more organic traffic.
Moreover, detecting relevant keywords for your niche can inform your overall content planning strategy by revealing topics that are the most relevant to your audience. It’s about attracting the right traffic that has the potential to convert.
Start with keyword research. Determine a broader topic for your story. For example, it might be content about a successful project or your firm’s path. Then, brainstorm related topics and look for related search terms for every key topic covered in your story.
To simplify your research, rely on time-tested SEO Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner. It will let you tap into dozens of relevant keywords with insights on their volume and competition.
Pro Tip: If you aren’t sure which keywords to use, consider running a competitor analysis to see which search terms work best for your niche. You can find a compelling Competitive Research Tool on Ninjareports.com. As a bonus, this platform also offers you a wealth of other SEO Tools for different purposes, such as free SEO analysis, backlink analysis, etc.
Once you have a list of keywords, integrate them into your content following two simple rules:
- Integrate terms naturally.
- Avoid stuffing.
Optimizing Visual Content for SEO-Driven Storytelling Marketing
Visual content is essential in architecture marketing as it captures attention and showcases your work. At the same time, it’s also crucial in search engine optimization. It’s proven that articles with visuals gain 94% more views and are 40 times more likely to be shared.
Not to mention, visuals are known for their emotions evoking and storytelling properties. One way or another, you should integrate visuals into your content.
Apart from ensuring that photos, videos, and infographics you share look appealing and eye-catching, you also need to optimize them for search engines:
- Use responsive images that easily adjust to users’ screens;
- Minimize file size to prevent damage to your site loading speed;
- Provide clear and relevant alt text;
- Optimize the file name to let search engines understand what’s in your visuals.
Integrating SEO Techniques into Architectural Storytelling
To use storytelling marketing for architects to the maximum, integrate the following SEO techniques:
- Meta tags – Add concise, descriptive, and intriguing meta tags for your content, keep your descriptions between 120-150 characters, include your primary keyword, and align them with your prospects’ search intent.
- Internal links – In your articles, provide links to other relevant content on your website to add value and ensure that visitors stick around for longer. Use varied and descriptive anchor texts for your links and make them look natural in the story.
- Schema markup – It is code added to webpages to help search engines understand the content on them and match it to the most relevant search queries. You can add a product, review, article, organization, or local business markup. Leverage the Structured Data Markup Helper Tool by Google to add the desired markup to your site.
In order to take your brand visibility further, also optimize the navigation and structure of your website and improve user experience. All these tactics will help you make the most out of your SEO-driven storytelling and get noticed by your prospects.
Conclusion
“People do not buy goods & services. They buy relations, stories & magic.” – Seth Godin, entrepreneur
The importance of digital storytelling is hard to undervalue today, just like the value of SEO. Hence, leveraging these two concepts together can help you ensure brand visibility, trust, and conversions.
The key SEO-driven digital storytelling techniques you should try including:
- Keyword research and integration.
- Visual content optimization.
- Optimization of meta tags.
- Internal link-building.
- Schema markup.
- User experience, site structure, and navigation optimization.
Start using these tactics to create perfect architectural narratives that resonate with your audience and bring you higher in search results.
