Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. Business owners who want to surpass their competitors in the race to rank high on Google and other search engines should develop content that is useful for their audience and therefore for SEO. Most businesses tend to focus on one, not both, which then becomes detrimental to their success. To obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the importance of content marketing for SEO, knowing the objectives of both is crucial.
The Objectives of Content Marketing and SEO
Let us take a look at the objects of content marketing and SEO to gain a better understanding of both.
SEO Techniques
- Optimise your website around keywords and phrases relevant to your business.
- Obtain new and valuable backlinks from high authority and credible website domains.
Primary Goals behind These SEO Techniques
- Improve your Search Earning Result Page (SERP) rankings for specific keywords.
- Increase your brand awareness and visibility online among your audience.
- Attract more website traffic.
Businesses focus on SEO to increase the number of users who land on their website via Google search. Their aim is to grow their business by increasing sales and generating revenue.
Content Marketing Strategies
- Create relevant, engaging, informative, and compelling content.
- Use effective call-to-action to encourage users into becoming purchasing customers.
- Generate highly-shareable content that is likely to go viral.
Primary Goals behind These Content Marketing Strategies
- Increase visibility and brand awareness
- Promote brand loyalty by developing thought-leadership in your industry.
- Increase the time target audiences spend on your website.
- Improve sales and conversion rates.
Here is what you need to know – SEO helps business owners attract users, drawing them to their website, while content marketing keeps them on their website and helps convert them into buying customers. SEO has a narrower and technical approach, while content marketing has a holistic approach.
While both SEO and content marketing serve to accomplish the same goal, you need to know how SEO can improve content marketing and how content marketing improves SEO.
How Can SEO Improve Content Marketing?
Creating engaging and brilliant content does not mean your potential target market will find you. You want the content you create to come up in the search results when your target audience searches something pertaining to the products and services you provide on Google.
You will need to perform an SEO Audit including keyword research to come up with relevant keywords and phrases to include in the content you create and enhance your content marketing. SEO makes your content more discoverable among your target audience.
You can hire the services of an experienced SEO Agency to optimise your content and market it to the right target market. SEO addresses content relevancy – how relevant the topic is to your business, and improves your rank on search engines.
The content creation team you hired will develop content, based on the relevant keywords. In return, your website will become more discoverable and rank higher on search engines. However, you should not stick to using just relevant keywords, but you can also use the following SEO tactics to rank higher:
- Find content topics that will rank well for certain keywords and phrases.
- Learn what your target market expects from you via customer feedback.
- Find the various content types that are performing well for your competition.
How Can Content Marketing Improves SEO?
Users looking for content to learn more about the product and service they are looking to purchase, will be likely to read content that engages them, answers their questions, and adds value to their existing knowledge.
They will see through fluff and irrelevant information in the content and not stick around to read anymore. If you are developing content to only improve your rankings on search engines, your target audience will be able to tell.
Once your target audience understands what you are up to, they will be quick to label your business as untrustworthy, producing content that is not meaningful or deem it as unimportant. You can expect them to subscribe to content and buy from another business.
If you are not sure if the issue is with the content you created for your target audience, have a discussion with an SEO specialists at the SEO Agency. They can go over the current content of your website and let you know if you need to increase your content marketing efforts by creating better content.
You need to create informative and valuable content based on the keywords and phrases you selected. This will result in a better rank on Google and ensure high conversion rates and brand loyalty with engaging content. In short, here is what you need to know:
- SEO tells the demands and content marketing needs to meet those demands.
- SEO needs content and content marketing delivers the content.
- SEO requires keywords and content marketing uses those keywords.
- SEO relies on backlinks and content marketing obtains those backlinks.
- SEO demands website optimisation and content marketing demands an excellent user experience.
By integrating content marketing and SEO with each other, your search engine ranking strategy will work seamlessly and effectively to rank you on Google. Even with the slight differences that exist between the two, both still heavily depend on each other, as being apart does not fulfil either of their purpose well.
The Best Method to Combine Content Marketing and SEO
Here is a list of different ways you can combine content marketing with SEO:
-
Establish Goals, Measure Results, and Repeat
Set common goals and objectives for both SEO and content marketing. Find out the activities that overlap between SEO and content marketing and then set an achievable and measurable goal for both. For instance, two common goals include conversion rates and website traffic.
With the goals decided, decide the key performance indicators or KPIs, which will assist you to measure the success of your SEO and content marketing strategy. Use KPIs that apply to both SEO and content marketing such as user engagement, CTA conversion rates, content sharing, content links, and more.
You need to constantly measure the progress of your marketing efforts and then optimise your strategy to grow your business on a consistent basis. Here are the two things that you will learn from running your marketing campaign:
Know what made you stand out from your competitors and replicate those efforts.
- Convert anomalies into daily occurrences.
- Compare underperforming content with over-performing content to find out what you are doing wrong.
- Focus on things like conversions, revenues generated, traffic, and more by the content piece.
-
Understand Your Target Market
Focus your content marketing and SEO efforts around your target audience. This includes experience, marketing strategy, and product and/or service. It is essential to define your target market because that will help the SEO Agency understand the type of content they need to create.
You need to understand their pain points, motivations, processes of the target market, and experiences. In return, this will allow you to deliver meaningful, impactful, and engaging content to them to help you obtain long-term business growth. The following tips will help you understand your target market better:
- Consider how various users interact with your content across various mediums in the different phases of the sales funnel.
- Constantly keep track of customer behaviour by performing regular customer and brand interaction analysis to comprehend these insights while monitoring the latest trends in your industry and your target market.
-
Develop Content Optimised for Search Engine
Begin optimising your content for increased brand visibility. Optimise your content for Google and other search engines for organic growth. Do the following things to ensure your content marketing efforts do not go to waste:
- Develop customer-centric, not brand or business-centric content.
- Write on topics that will appeal to your target market based on their interests, behaviours, and demographics.
- Create content using keywords and phrases relevant to your business.
- Develop a mobile-friendly website by adopting a responsive website design.
- Map your content to certain user personas and sales funnel, which will lead them to convert into loyal and purchasing customers.
-
Take Advantage of Guest Posting and Expert Write-ups
Guest posting on other people’s websites and requesting others to write a guest post on your website is a good way to expose content to your target audience. Guest posting establishes thought-leadership and turns you into a valuable provider to help you gain the trust of your target audience and convert them into regular and loyal customers.
Expert roundups can expose your target market to the views and opinions of industry experts and also show how well connected you are to people in your industry, therefore improving your credibility.
You can contact an SEO Agency that will assign a team of SEO specialties to you. From there, they will develop keywords and incorporate them into your well-written content. A more holistic approach to SEO will enhance your visibility against your competitors and ultimately translate to new business growth derived from online marketing channels.
