Great SEO and content marketing should go hand-in-hand. What is content marketing, you ask? A content marketing strategy focuses on creating “content” to share with your audience. Content examples are nearly endless. If presented correctly, almost anything can be content. Popular content marketing strategy examples include blogs, e-newsletters, memes, infographics, white pages, podcasts, instructional/educational videos, and entertaining videos.
Content marketing aims not to simply advertise your product or service to your audience but to create a community centered around your brand. When organizations create quality content that resonates with their community, they deepen their customer base’s trust, awareness, and retention. Consumers want to do business with organizations that value them as individuals and don’t only see them as potential profit. One of the ways a company can show a customer or client that they value them is through their content. SEO content marketing is a strategy that organizations can utilize to A) make sure their content is seen and B) show their product to new prospects. If an organization is creating great content, but no one sees it, it’s a wasted effort.
A solid and prolific content strategy is essential to a healthy SEO strategy. But you may be asking, how? Content helps SEO strategy by being its lifeblood. Without content marketing, SEO strategy has to rely on web copy and landing pages. With a content marketing strategy such as a blog, it’s possible to publish a plethora of content frequently. Publishing a higher quantity of SEO content is rewarded by SEO crawlers that rank search results. However, it’s not enough to publish a ton of performance SEO and hope for the best. In order to get the most out of an SEO strategy, there should be a good balance of quality and performance content.
There are a few different types of SEO content, but the ones discussed most frequently are performance content vs quality content or “brand” SEO content. Examples of quality content are pieces that tell your brand story, that inspire or educate your audience, and “thought leadership” content. Quality content takes a lot of time and effort to create and may use little to no keywords associated with SEO. Content marketing is made up of both quality content and performance content. Content that is written mainly for the purpose of ranking well on search engines is known as performance content. Creating a large quantity of performance content can help increase your rankings on search engines as long as that content is still readable, trustworthy, and contains relevant keywords.
You may be wondering how to improve SEO content. Creating content & SEO strategy goals is key. Create specific, actionable, attainable, and measurable goals for your strategy. What are you hoping to achieve and why? When do you hope to achieve those results? How are you going to measure the success of your efforts? After you’ve created your goals, you can begin to craft the rest of your content strategy, such as channels, distribution, topics, and more. Another important aspect of content strategy is testing and reporting. You don’t want to throw all of your eggs in one basket. Try out small batches of content in specific and measured campaigns. Measure the results of that campaign. Try A/B testing. Armed with the data from your testing, you can continue to craft a more robust strategy for bigger projects.
Finding the right content marketing tactics for your business requires testing. While you should use previously held data and customer insights to inform your content marketing strategy framework, it’s still important to test content performance to determine what is yielding the best results. Some content strategy examples include a series of blog posts, newsletters, and others. An innovative way of repurposing content that is not usually written could be by transcribing audio and visual content into written text. Not only does this mean that the content is reaching an audience it usually wouldn’t have (blog-readers vs podcast listeners), but it’s also an opportunity to marry content marketing and SEO in an unusual way. If you find that those tactics don’t help you achieve your goals, there is good news! You don’t have to do them anymore. That’s another part of the importance of setting specific and measurable goals. When you discover that a piece of content or SEO strategy isn’t working towards achieving your goal, you can stop using it and find something else that will work.
The best content marketing strategy is one that balances performance and quality content and reaches your community where they already are.