The truth is that content marketing strategy and SEO (search engine optimization) should be used in unity to achieve the best possible growth for any business brand. Content marketing strategy places users’ needs and interest first and also leverages your brand’s strength. While SEO is the process of optimizing a website so that it can be found by people in search engines like Google, Bing when they initiate a search query related to your niche.
Any content that is created with the aim of attracting search engine traffic can be termed an SEO content strategy. This means a content strategy that guarantees the SEO growth of your website. Integration of these two can get you the best results in your digital content marketing campaign. This means getting content marketing and SEO working together to help one another.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SEO AND CONTENT MARKETING
Many business brands rely on social media marketing and email marketing to promote their content. These are important channels in digital marketing, but the truth is using these channels may not always give you the guarantee that your promoted content will find the right customers on time. This is where SEO plays a vital role. It helps to improve your chances of promoting your brand directly to customers in their moment of need.
A practical example is that when customers have any question on a product or service. They easily ask their search engines to find the information they require. Providing the right content and reaching them at that time of need is what makes content marketing and SEO the ultimate combination.
WHAT EFFECT DOES CONTENT HAVE ON YOUR SEO?
One of the best ways of improving your search engine optimization is by content marketing. When you create content that is focused around targeted keywords that your leads are searching for online, then you automatically improve your online visibility on the search engines. This means that when a customer searches a query that is related to your brand, they find your content on Google and the process helps in easily building a relationship between you and prospective customers. An increase in your rankings means that there is a boost in your brand awareness and relevant traffic is generated to your website and this gives you a greater opportunity of converting leads to customers.
Realistically, you cannot improve your search engine optimization without creating good quality content and the audience you need for your content is gotten through SEO. To ensure a successful content marketing strategy, then SEO should be applied to every content marketing task you do. Below are steps to create a great content strategy that will as well improve the SEO growth of business brands.
1. Draw the outcome by setting your goals:
The first step you should take is to know what the outcome of your strategy would look like by defining and setting your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you looking for an increase in the number of sales? Do you want to increase the percentage of leads? These questions when asked and answered help you to figure out the type of content you want to create and what the call-to-Action should be.
2. Get to know your audience:
Precisely knowing your target audience is the next task to be accomplished. This can only be achieved when you answer the question, who is my average customer? Analyze customer-related information to know some personal traits like; age and gender of your customer, academic background, income and job title, lifestyle, and sales funnel position.
3. Do your keyword research:
After knowing your audience and having a target of topics you want to be known for. It is important to do keyword research to help you figure out the best keyword targets around those topics. Google keyword planner is a great online tool that can help you analyze and filter items to give you a list of useful keyword combinations. This means you get a data-driven result that promises to boost the ranking of your content.
4. Create high-quality content:
If you intend to achieve your targeted SEO goals, content creation is the key. Be mindful that every content you post should be targeted at fulfilling some requirements such as:
- Solving a problem: Guest post that is highly ranked always deal with customer’s practical problems. Make sure your content provides a solution to a common problem by offering a step-by-step procedure to get it solved.
- It should engage the audience: Every post should include a clear call-to-action that tells the readers the next step to take. You can encourage them to subscribe to a newsletter or register for a free trial.
- Deliver perfect content: Avoid content with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Make sure you reread, rewrite, and cross-check every little piece of content before you publish it.
5. Create an editorial calendar:
An editorial calendar is necessary and helps a lot. It is simply a schedule that dictates when and what type of content to publish. The advantages are, you regularly create new content especially if you have a blog or you are guest posting and it also prevents you from scrambling for last-minute new content that isn’t the best of ideas.
6. Keep your contents updated over time:
As far as SEO content marketing is concerned, then updates are a core part of it. It is good that some blog posts or web pages have the potential to keep on attracting visitors to your website but for effectiveness, the contents need to be updated to remain effective. Here are ways to update your contents:
- Added content provides additional value for readers.
- Statistics and facts might be outdated and they should be updated.
- Languages can be refreshed to make it more interesting.
- Optimization creates room for new keyword opportunities.
Develop the habit of reviewing your content periodically to get them updated especially for blog posts that have continued to drive traffic to your site even after a couple of years.
7. Analysis and reassessment are important:
To prove the success of your SEO content strategy, you need to measure the results. How has your link building process grown over time? Are your backlinks generating the right traffic and what is your current ranking in Google’s SERPs (search engine page rankings), Are you getting a positive result from your guest posting processes?.
These are some of the questions you need to answer to know the progress you have made over time. Google Analytics is a good tool that helps you in answering some of these questions. If your answers to these questions are positive then you are on the right path, else you need to consider changing and upgrading your SEO content strategy and also look at areas you performed poorly to help you improve on them.
