How Content Marketing Helps Improve Your SEO

Content Marketing seems to be everywhere nowadays. Everyone is promoting their ebook, podcast, and online courses. You’ve heard about the benefits of creating relevant content for your audience, but the problem is you have no audience yet. Maybe your website doesn’t get enough traffic, and when you look at your Adwords campaign, it makes you feel like you are just throwing away your money.

There are over one billion websites out there, and while you’re not competing against all of them, chances are there are at least one or two companies that are ranking better than your website on some crucial keywords you desire. Improving your search engine ranking would help your business grow.

Content Marketing as a Solution

Content Marketing is the most powerful way to be found by search engines and people. Industry data shows that companies that blog get 55% more visits, 97% more links to their websites and their page get indexed 434% more. That’s the power of content marketing!

Another report by Hubspot shows that 84% of companies who invested in content marketing, specifically blogging, got a customer when posting articles daily. 57% of those that published content monthly got a new client. Still impressive and more efficient than online paid ads.

Content Marketing is a lot more than blogging. For example, podcast listening has grown 23% in the U.S. from 2015 to 2016. That’s 57 million users, which is the same amount of people that actively use Twitter and almost double the people that listen to Spotify every day.

On top of these overwhelming numbers that support Content Marketing as a powerful promotion strategy, you have other options to create content such as videos, interviews, ebooks, infographics or online courses; all of these materials yield greater ROI the longer you invest in creating content.

How to Be Found Online

How do you decide where to spend your digital marketing budget? It seems there are so many options and no certainty about what yields the best results.

Some experts advocate for a Search Engine Marketing campaign. Others will tell you that you should put your bet on social media or that your website needs a new design to be successful.

Who is right? What is the best approach? Better question, what is the best approach for your business?

While there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to optimize your search engine ranking, we believe a solid content marketing strategy incorporates the best practices that will help your website get found.

Content Marketing Is What SEO Asks ForWorking with digital marketing needs dedication

SEO is all about fulfilling the search engine’s requirements: Get your keywords right, build great backlinks,  optimize your loading speed, increase user’s engagement with your website.

There is an excellent article by Kissmetrics that goes over the connection between Content Marketing and SEO. They use a helpful illustration where they ask you to think of SEO and Content Marketing as two different people having a conversation.

Content Marketing is the one speaking (creating content), and SEO is listening (web crawling). Every once in a while, someone will ask SEO about a subject (search query), and SEO will speak (search results) about the conversation he had with Content Marketing.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that, but this image helps us see that the only way search engines have to find you is if you feed them new information about your business. Search Engines need to know what you are all about, and Content Marketing gives them vital information. Content Marketing is about constantly giving search engines new ways to find you.

Get Started with Content Marketing

The days of keyword stuffing are long gone. You cannot expect any positive results for your website if all you are doing is stacking keywords on your sections and articles. In fact, you can get penalized for spamming keywords.

An effective Content Marketing strategy begins with these four basic principles:

•    Find out what people are looking for
•    Create a lot of great new content and distribute it around many channels
•    Focus on building a relationship between your brand and your customers
•    Revise what is working and what isn’t; amplify and adjust accordingly

One of the goals of Content Marketing is to position your product in your client’s research and purchase cycle. The more useful and relevant content you have available, the more trust, and authority you will gain in the eyes of your customer.

Ultimately, as more people engage with your brand, your website will get more clicks, more time on page, more shares on social media and more comments and backlinks on other sites. All of these seemingly small steps will increase the relevance and authority of your website, improving its search rank.

SEO Shapes Great Content

SEO practices influence the best Content Marketing you produce. Remember, Content Marketing for SEO is about creating new paths for search engines to find you, but those routes need to be well built and optimized.

Keyword Research. Blogging is the easiest way to start creating new content for your website. You can write about anything related to your business, but you can improve this by researching some keywords to get you on the right track.

Researching keywords for your niche will give you interesting topics for content creation. Those keywords will tell you what your potential customers are looking for and may even give you new insights into what they are not looking for, which is just as important.

Also, during your research, you will find what’s called long-tail keywords. These are longer and specific search queries that will tell you precise terms to target.

Once you find a right amount of keywords and long-tail keywords, you will have enough good ideas to start writing blog posts, creating videos or infographics you can share to the world.

Quality over Quantity. The number one rule for good SEO is to make sure you are creating content for people, not computers. Your best Content Marketing Strategy is to build great content that is useful for people. If it requires that you create fewer pieces than you may have planned for, that’s fine. Let your strategy inform and influence the rest of your project.

If it takes you a couple of weeks to create a great 5,000-word article about your product, complete with supporting images, videos, and great outbound links, so be it. Search Engines are not expecting you to be a content mill. Focus on creating great content and don’t worry about the rest.

Focus on Distribution. While SEO loves your great content, it also needs to know your content is being looked at and distributed. Think of it as recommendations. If you need a mechanic, you’ll probably go with whoever your friends who know a lot about cars recommend.

Search Engines treat websites the same way. You can have a great website with great content, but unless other people and reputable sites support it (backlink to your site), your search ranking will struggle to improve.

Here are some ideas to help you distribute your content:

• Make sure your website has social sharing buttons that allow users to share, tweet, pin, comment and bookmark your content.
• Keep your social media channels up to date and find the best time of the day to share your new content.
• Look for other marketers, bloggers, and influencers that might be interested in your content and try to connect. These connections will lead you to backlinks, other articles, and shares that will multiply the audience reach of your content.
• Email marketing is still one of the most powerful marketing channels available. Use your website to build an email newsletter list and use it to promote more valuable content. Be ready to make your email newsletters mobile-optimized.

Measure Twice, Cut Once. Then Do It Again.

Great Content Marketing and great SEO need you to look at the numbers and figure out what works and what doesn’t. You expand on what is working, and you adjust or cut what isn’t.

As you can imagine, there isn’t a metric to look that matters for every business. Some websites need to generate thousands of visitors a week to get a sale while others won’t mind if they’re only getting a few hits as long they’re clicking on that video they created. Others will be looking for conversions like email signups or RSVPs.

The important thing for any business looking to improve its search engine ranking is to define a goal and adjust the Content Marketing strategy accordingly.

If you need visitors, maybe you need some viral content like a well-researched article or a powerful video. Perhaps you are looking to increase your conversion rate; in that case, design a landing page and do some A/B testing with different headlines and call to actions and see what gives you the results you crave. Others will need to write an ebook to promote your name or brand as an authority on the subject.

Content marketing for search engine optimization is a giant task, but it’s worth every penny and every second you invest in it. Creating new content for your business is a win-win strategy. Not only will you extend the reach of your firm for being online, but you are also creating new ways for people to connect with your product, and that is always a victory. Content is king and will continue to be king.

Want to find out more? Take a look at our Cloud-based business solutions and start your winning Content Marketing strategy today!