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Do you want to make sure your content marketing positively impacts your business? Are you looking for ways to bring more traffic to your company website and increase customer engagement?
If this sounds like something you’re trying to accomplish, it’s time to talk about search engine optimization (SEO). In the past, SEO was an afterthought in content marketing. This attitude led to a lot of poorly written and unhelpful (and often untracked) content on websites across the internet.
Today, SEO is an integral part of any successful content strategy—from blog posts and videos to infographics and webinars—which is why more and more online marketers are incorporating it into their content marketing and website building strategies.
To ensure it’s done right, you need to start thinking about your SEO strategy as soon as you begin writing or creating any other type of content that will eventually end up on your company website. And that means getting a deeper understanding of how the two work together.
In this post, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about the relationship between content marketing and SEO, including how they work together and some of the best ways to implement both strategies together.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a collection of techniques that ensure all web pages and good content are visible to the target audience, searching organically for the information they provide.
In other words, SEO improves the positioning and appearance of relevant content in organic search results based on the search engine’s algorithm. As far as SEO is concerned, organic traffic is the name of the game.
On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical SEO
SEO is comprised of three divisions:
- On-page SEO is where you format your page correctly so that search engines and users can easily understand your content. It incorporates things like title tags, meta descriptions, proper headings, and specific keywords, to name a few.
- Off-page SEO focuses on proper link-building techniques to build diverse backlinks and domain authority.
- Technical SEO focuses on the coding side of the equation. Things like image optimization, CSS and JavaScript code condensing and minimization, and the like.
Since organic search is the most effective way of accessing great content across the web, utilizing SEO increases website traffic and potential customers to your small business website.
SEO Content
Without content, SEO cannot work. Online content like blog posts, web pages, product reviews, videos, and images are the platform within which SEO can work its magic. Many people think that SEO is all about the search engine algorithm and the target keywords, so they ignore how a searcher will read and consume the content. That would be a big mistake.
When developing a website or content, it’s critical to focus on the end-user and user experience. The quality of the content and the user experience is as much of a ranking factor as other more technical SEO considerations.
However, the content creation should have SEO baked into the process at the outset to maximize your marketing efforts. Striking that balance is the sign of a great SEO campaign.
What is Content Marketing?
Before we get into the specifics of how content marketing and SEO work together, let’s talk a little bit more about what it means to do content marketing.
Content marketing is a type of online digital marketing focused on creating and distributing relevant, valuable, and engaging content to acquire new customers or increase engagement and conversions among current customers.
The Importance of Content Marketing
Content marketing work has been around for as long as people have been writing—it’s not a new idea by any means—but it’s only in the past few years that it has become one of the most talked-about online marketing strategies in any industry.
Why? Because in today’s market, with so much information available at our fingertips, the only way to stand out is with quality content that provides value to your customers and helps you build brand awareness. Of course, there are other benefits too.
Blog posts, videos, infographics, eBooks, podcasts, webinars—these are all types of content that help you reach your target audience by providing valuable information they can use to improve their personal or professional lives.
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How Content Marketing and SEO Work Together
Now that we know what content marketing is (and why it’s so effective) let’s talk about how to create an effective SEO content strategy–getting your content marketing and SEO working together to improve your website’s search engine rankings and bottom line.
Keyword Research
SEO demands keywords, while content marketing requires the use of keywords. The goal of a content marketer is to get their content to top the search engine rankings.
Suppose you want your website’s content to be found (and ranked) by search engines like Google on their search engine results pages (SERPS) for the relevant search query. In that case, it’s essential to include relevant keywords in your posts about your product, service, or business.
Keyword Tools
Effective keyword research requires tools to help you decide and identify the best opportunities available.
SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs help you to review the following:
- Variations, synonyms, and related keywords to cover a topic.
- Monthly traffic search to help you understand the market interest.
- Keyword difficulty to help you estimate the chances of success.
- Click potential through estimation of the click-through rate.
Proper Keyword Implementation
Of course, this is where many people stumble. Even if they can do proper keyword research, they often don’t know how or where to incorporate these keywords into their posts without making them sound unnatural or spammy.
The only way to correctly use your keywords is by employing them strategically throughout your content. Use keyword variations, synonyms, and semantically related terms throughout your material.
Avoid Keyword Cannibalization
When a few of your content pages fight for an appearance on page 1, it is called keyword cannibalization. You must ensure that you cover each of your ideas only once. Remember, you compete with billions of content marketers out there, so you do not need to compete with yourself.
Be sure to review your existing content and determine which pages or blog posts have covered the topic before. If any, all you need is probably to update it to meet the current market needs.
Note that it is wise to turn medium-performing content into something competitive. If you find out that you have several posts on a single topic, you can merge them into a single page. Consider using them as the foundation for new content.
Quality Content Increases Backlinks
SEO and content marketing should be a symbiotic relationship that benefits the company. So, while high-quality content benefits from an infusion of SEO tactics by getting it found, your overall SEO improves from great content as well.
How? One way is by generating backlinks.
Backlinks are very crucial to your SEO ranking. Google analyzes this as an authoritative source when many websites link to your web page. It then pushes it up in the search engine rankings. The more authoritative a linking website is, the more worthwhile it is to your website.
The best way to get backlinks from authoritative sources is through producing high-quality content that others will want to reference and link back to you naturally.
That’s why it’s essential to know how to do content marketing right—from the planning stage to creating content, promoting your content, and measuring results.
How to Plan Your Content Marketing Strategy
Before you do anything else, you need a game plan for how you’re going to implement your content marketing strategy.
From the makeup of personas who determine your target audience, what types of content to create for them, to who will be responsible for publishing it, all of this should be agreed upon before you get started. Who is handling your company’s content marketing strategy?
When creating a plan, don’t forget about including the resources your business needs to make sure your blog posts, infographics, videos, and other content are optimized to help you get the best results.
Factors to Consider When Coming Up with Your Content
To be successful in content marketing and SEO ranking, you need to consider the following factors:
- What you intend to communicate: Write about what your business stands for and is passionate about. Define your vision, topics, value proposition, and more.
- What people are looking for: Consider using keyword research to study your target audience and learn about the market demand and online interest.
- What Google Favors: Find out what Google finds most relevant regarding your content and replicate something competitive.
Once you have a plan in place, it’s time to start creating your actual content. Determine the purpose and goals of each piece before you begin writing (or producing) it, and make sure it aligns with what you’re trying to discuss in terms of SEO.
Types of Content to Use
As mentioned earlier, you can use several types of content as part of your content marketing strategy.
The best way to start is by determining the purpose behind each piece before you begin writing it—this will help ensure that you hit all your SEO goals without forgetting about them or letting them slip into second place.
For example, maybe you want to publish a blog post about the best ways to write high-quality content and then use that to promote your infographic about how to create better SEO headlines.
In addition to blogs posts and videos, there are several other types of content you can use as part of your strategy:
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Mobile-friendly content
- eBooks or whitepapers
- Social media posts, including on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter
There are so many different types of content you can use as part of your marketing campaign, but it all depends on what you feel best conveys your message to customers. Once you have a plan in place for how you’re going to mix and match these different types of content, it’s time to start creating.
This plan should give you a better idea of creating content that will help you reach your company’s goals most effectively.
Now that you’ve created your content, it’s time to promote it. I’ll go into this more in another post, but for now, remember…
Promoting Content is Just as Important as Creating It
When it comes to content marketing, the saying “content is king” might be cliché—but in this case, it’s also true. Your content can’t reach its full potential without being seen by your target audience, so don’t just publish a blog post and expect people to find it magically.
You need to work hard to promote your content and get it in front of your target audience. The best way to do this is by using social media, blogging, and other marketing strategies to drive traffic back to your website and increase awareness of what you’re trying to achieve.
Remember: People need to know who you are and what you have to offer before they can buy from you—so it’s your job to share this information with them. Figure out where your target audience hangs out online and be sure to share it with them there.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing is an excellent way for your business to get noticed by the right people. With SEO baked into the process, you’ll have a much easier time reaching this audience and getting them to take notice of what your business has to offer.
However, it’s essential not to forget about SEO while planning and creating content—that could result in it not doing as well as it could. Once you have the basics down, you can go ahead and start creating content that will help increase awareness of your company—and drive more traffic to your website.