Do you also believe that content marketing is synonymous with content writing? And you do not need SEO with your content marketing strategies? If you have answered these favorably, you might want to know that these are among the most common misconceptions.
In simple terms, content marketing is the marketing of content. Content can refer to various things such as blogs, emails, infographics, videos, articles, guides, and the like. However, the ultimate goal of all content marketing strategies is unified- engage with a highly targeted audience as they progress through the enterprise’s sales funnel.
Your content must perform to usher toward this goal of profitable user action. And for your content to perform, it has to rank on the search engine so it can drive traffic to the website and, in turn, generate leads. To achieve this, SEO and content marketing must work in sync.
As you read this blog further, we will discuss that SEO and content marketing are not mutually exclusive concepts and how you can develop a content marketing strategy that is also SEO-friendly and ready to derive results.
The Role of SEO in Content Marketing
It wouldn’t be overstating to say that SEO and content marketing are linked intimately. So, both must collaborate to rank a piece of content on the top in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
While content strategy and content creation are essential components of content marketing, the entire package requires SEO and content marketing. Consider SEO the fuel your content needs to become visible for a specific keyword your target audience searches for. Without it, your content will not rank and thus will not be discovered by your target audience. As a result, you must package your content with SEO.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is shortened as SEO, a marketing technique that increases your website traffic through a combination of on-page and off-page methods. One of the preliminary functions of SEO is to optimize the content of a website or webpage so that it ranks higher in search engine results, attracting more traffic and leads. Now, let’s understand how Google search operates:
Crawling: It is the algorithmic process by which Google discovers the existence of your page. Google spiders that crawl various pages via internal links find billions of pages that go live on the internet.
Indexing – During this process, Google attempts to understand what each page is about using various elements such as page title, metadata, alt attributes, images, infographics, videos, and so on.
Search Engine Results – This is the process by which Google returns the most relevant search results to a user’s query. Google employs hundreds of ranking factors to determine whether a page is relevant enough to be displayed for a specific search query.
Now, let’s see what role SEO plays in this. The goal of SEO is to assist Google in doing all of the above, mainly to enable your website or its web pages to rank high in Google’s search results and to obtain free organic traffic. Of course, you cannot pay Google to have your website ranked. And that is why it is necessary to understand and use SEO and SEO trends efficiently. Whether you do it with the help of an expert agency or enterprise SEO tools can be based on your needs.
However, by implementing the right SEO trends with the right SEO agency, you can increase your website’s chances of ranking for relevant keywords to your target audience. When you start ranking for a specific keyword, organic traffic and leads flow into your website, leading you to convert leads and generate profits.
How Are SEO Campaigns Done?
SEO campaigns include the following activities to achieve rankings on Google’s search results.
On-Page SEO
Optimizing your website & web page content and other aspects of the website that you can control is covered under on-page SEO. This includes:
The Title Tag: As the name says, the title tag is the title of your blog post or webpage. It can be optimized with topic-related high-volume keywords.
URL: Your web page’s URL should be short and relevant to the content’s topic and include the main keyword with which you want it to be found.
Meta Description: In SERPs, this is a brief description that appears under the title. It has to be optimized with the primary keywords in a way that it explains briefly and precisely to the reader what the web page or content piece is about.
Images and Infographics: Add multiple relevant images to your content piece. You can include simple pictures, infographics, or even descriptive images. Additionally, use relevant keywords in the alt text and file name for these images to increase your chances of high ranking on Google images.
Titles and Subheadings: It is imperative to divide your content piece into headings (h1, h2, h3) and subheadings to improve readability, formatting, and SEO. This is crucial to get better rankings because Google primarily emphasizes user experience.
Internal hyperlinks: To improve your website and web page ranking, ensure that you link to other pages on your website, as it assists Google in understanding the overall structure of your website.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO focuses on increasing your website’s authority and popularity and promoting your content through backlinks. To better understand off-page SEO, let’s look at a few popular off-page SEO strategies:
Posting Guest Content: Guest posting can be defined as writing content pieces for websites with high authority and linking them back to your website and web pages. This can increase your search engine ranking as guest posting helps you get exposure and authority.
Local Listing: Local Listings are frequently indexed by search engines; therefore, listing your business on prevalent directories can help you enhance your search engine rankings and your chances of being found by prospective buyers.
Building Useful Backlinks: Backlinks are links on one website that take the reader to another website or web page. Backlinks are commonly used to determine a website’s popularity and authority. However, Google scans the quality and relevance of the backlink website to ensure its trustworthiness. Therefore, a high-quality, high-ranking website link will be much more valuable than a low-quality, irrelevant one.
Keywords
Aside from the on-page and off-page SEO activities, keyword research is also an unmissable and imperative part of SEO. The key is understanding and connecting with your target audience’s needs and knowing what they search for and type on Google. This will assist an enterprise in curating strategies with the latest SEO trends.
Keywords- The Most Essential Component of SEO
Finding the apt keywords and using them correctly in your content pieces is critical when it comes to increasing your SEO rankings. Content and SEO must be balanced for the best results.
Let’s say you are a clothing company that offers sustainable fashion pieces. Naturally, you would want to rank your website and web pages for all sustainable fashion clothing-related keywords your target audience might search for. But additionally, you should also rank for any related keywords that people are likely to search for when looking for sustainable and fashionable clothing.
The following factors usually influence keyword selection:
- Keywords also have types such as navigational keywords, awareness keywords, or transactional keywords. What kind of keyword you focus your content on will depend on the level of sales funnel you are aiming for
- The keyword difficulty
- High-ranking keywords for your competitors
- Your SEO plans
- The domain rating of your website
When you have listed the keywords for which to rank, you must determine which will increase our website’s traffic. All the above information has to be covered under your keyword strategy.
What is Content Marketing?
To understand the connection between content marketing and SEO, what is of primary importance is to under the meaning and implementation of content marketing.
Content marketing comes under the umbrella of digital marketing. It includes creating valuable content for your target audience in alignment with a content strategy. Additionally, promoting that content to bring user action resulting in profits is also a part of content marketing.
Content marketing aims to target a specific audience, raise brand awareness, build trust, and take the buyer through levels of the buyer journey until they convert.
The following are inevitable components of a content marketing strategy:
Content Strategy: Who is your target audience? What category of content should you create to attract them? What do you wish to achieve with this campaign? Which content formats align the best with your campaign strategy? Which channels will be the best for you to publish and promote your content? How do you intend to promote the content? Finally, how will you track the performance and success of your content? An efficient content strategy will answer the above questions.
Content Creation: After creating a content strategy, you know all the details about your content type and target buyers. The reasonable step is to choose the right keywords and apt titles to get traffic. As you get the content written and proofread by the best content writer, make sure you either consult an expert content writing agency or use the right enterprise SEO tools to optimize the content for ranking per SEO trends and then publish it.
Content Promotion/Distribution: Content promotion/distribution is what differentiates content creation from content marketing. It gets as much value from your content as possible by obtaining backlinks from high authority sites and promoting it on various platforms, helping it reach the intended audience.
How SEO and Content Marketing Work Together?
Without SEO, content marketing will be nothing more than just content floating around on the internet. But your content is meant to drive traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, and convert that traffic into leads. So, in simple terms, content marketing should raise your sales.
And SEO helps you achieve that by optimizing your content piece for Google, ranking it higher, matching the user intent, and attracting your target audience’s attention. That being said, SEO and content marketing are not mutually exclusive concepts. Instead, their collaboration is essential for either of them to achieve results.
Therefore, choosing between SEO and content marketing is not a matter. It is a matter of how you intend to increase the visibility of your already excellent content through solid SEO. Let’s look at how SEO and content marketing works together for better results:
Perform Keyword Research
We discussed at length the importance of keywords in SEO and content marketing. Finding out what keywords your target audience is looking for is critical for increasing traffic to your web pages on SERPs. And for this, keyword research is necessary. It will also help you determine your competitors’ keywords to rank higher on Google. It would help if you also used enterprise SEO tools to concentrate on the proper keyword research metrics.
However, ensure that your website and web pages are not stuffed with these keywords. They should be naturally visible in the content piece and fulfill the ultimate motive of adding value to your readers.
Focus on Search Engines Strategies While Designing Your Content
This entails being aware of how a search engine operates. To excel at SEO and content marketing strategies, you must understand how the search engine algorithm works.
A search engine attempts to specify the topic of a page or blog before categorizing it. In content marketing, this could imply segmenting your content into individual topic areas, each as narrowly focused as possible. But, of course, the narrower your focus, the easier it is for a search engine to determine where it belongs in the larger scheme. And as for SEO, you must ensure that you use the apt keywords for your audience to find your content easily.
Create Content Continuously
Although this is mainly a content marketing strategy, SEO is included. How frequently you publish new content is one of the factors that search engines consider. This is great for a website or blog content that gets regular updates, but if you have been lagging or are just beginning to create content, establishing a content publication schedule per SEO trends can be highly beneficial.
Each new piece not only indicates that you are still publishing and relevant but adds more potential topics and SEO-optimized keywords to your list of traffic-generating searches. Your website will gain authority with more articles written on various topics and subtopics.
Here, SEO ensures that your website content is balanced and that you do not depend much on one part of your business while overlooking others requiring attention.
Analyze Your Link Value
SEO can assist you in determining which neighborhoods are most desirable for your needs and which you should avoid. It is not only about link monitoring, though it is an integral part of the process. After all, a link to your sustainable fashion blog from an auto dealership website is unlikely to be highly relevant. Therefore, good content marketing combined with reasonable SEO can quickly get you into a better neighborhood.
User Experience - Aim to Help Your Audience
Having well-researched content will not persuade Google to move your content to the top of the search results. What matters is user experience. And to do this correctly, you must first try to understand your buyer’s journey and map it to your content through these questions. What type of content will pique your target audience’s interest? What kind of content will help them make a purchasing decision? What content do you need to entice them to buy?
Once you understand that, it is much easier to create an SEO-friendly site structure that allows your audience to find any content they require, regardless of where they are in their journey.
Another aspect of user experience to consider is site speed. Nothing will drive away your audience faster than a painfully slow website.
Analyze SERPs for Content Relevance
After you have conducted the keyword research, you are not yet done with keyword optimization. There is one key aspect that you must get right- relevance. Your content must be relevant to the user’s search intent. Now, achieving relevance is relatively simple. Enter your primary keyword into Google and see what comes up. Google will place the most relevant content to the user’s search query at the top of the search results.
Consider what kind of content is ranking on your target results pages. For instance, is the intent of the results navigational or commercial? Is there any content in all of the top results? What stage of the buyer’s funnel does the content address? Answering these will make it simpler to create content that Google considers to be of high quality and relevant to your audience.
This entails learning to create relevant content by analyzing top-ranking content and creating something better and more beneficial for your target audience.
Create High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks that redirect visitors to your website are required to deliver content that ranks well on Google. Your rank may be higher with more relevant links from high-quality sources. The phrase to focus on here is high-quality. Links to low-quality website directories created for link building are not trust-worthy and will not benefit your business in the long run.
Create SEO-Optimized Content Marketing Strategy with One Digital Land
SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand. And once you have understood the algorithms, you can create much better content that is ready to rank higher on SERPs.
Even if you have just started or are looking to expand to a better, more suitable SEO and content marketing strategy, One Digital Land can help you. We thoroughly understand your business’s uniqueness and goals and exclusively curate a plan that will derive results for you.