How To Use Content Marketing to Help Your SEO

SEO and content marketing go hand in hand, but what exactly is content marketing? People often have trouble understanding the difference between the two, especially if you’re just starting out in the online marketing world.

Content marketing should be an integral part of any SEO strategy. If you’re not factoring it in, then this is even more of a reason to read this article to find out how you can better utilize content and simultaneously improve your SEO.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a combination of all types of marketing activities that focus on creating and sharing information including (but not limited to) blog posts, email newsletters, social media posts, core content on your website, and images. It is also crucial for the branding element of digital marketing, as it is the process of getting your content in front of your potential audience.

Say you owned a new boutique coffee shop, for example. As well as looking at optimizing your local SEO so that coffee lovers can find your new spot, you could utilize content marketing by sharing some images of your new coffee shop through social media platforms such as Facebook & Instagram. (You could also publish blog posts providing specific about your different roasts, instructions on how to brew the perfect cup of coffee, the story of the founding of your coffee shop, or profiles of your customers and their preferences.)

People will want to share valuable content because it’s funny, interesting, newsworthy or powerful. So try to create something unique even if you are just putting a new spin on something dated. Also, by incorporating a story that people can relate to you will personalize the experience, thus enabling a deeper understanding 0f your business from your audience.

As well as creating a brand awareness, if you choose to link Facebook/Instagram images back to your site, you will start driving relevant traffic and if the website incorporates a good UX, this will have a positive impact on your SEO, as Google will deem your website as more relevant. Plus, if your content starts to get shared by other platforms, this will continue to build up more links to your website.

What is the goal of content marketing?

For effective content marketing, you should be creating high-quality & engaging content for your visitors. The creation of high-quality content refers to anything that can be of value to the user; whether that is entertaining, informative or useful.

Through the efforts of content marketing, the goal is to naturally attract your audience and then entice them to convert. You can do this by using a call to action on the website, which can help persuade your audience to take the next step by offering a discount or limited time offer to buy your products or inquire for your services.

For example, if you operate a yoga studio and you’re looking to gain new clients you could write a blog post about tips on what to do during your first yoga class. Then, when people go to your site to read the post, you can offer them a discount on their first class. You attract them to your site with content they find valuable, and then use it as an opportunity to get them into your sales funnel.

Can it be any type of content?

The content could be in the form of photos, videos, blog posts, infographics etc. As long as the content provides some sort of value and engages your audience, then it doesn’t really matter what type you choose.

You should carefully devise your social media strategy to ensure maximum engagement with the content that you share. Curating your Instagram feed and leveraging great content is the key to helping to build a community and generate leads and sales via Instagram. If you’re focusing your efforts on disseminating content on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, you might adjust the type of content in order to meet the interests of the various audiences.

Why does content marketing help SEO?

1. Textual content is a key element of SEO. Google crawls the website and the content, indexes the web pages, and ranks pages accordingly.

Effective content marketing includes writing quality copy that is related to the terms your audience is searching for. Therefore, the more blog posts you write that have a keyword focus, the more likely your website will start driving in increased organic traffic. The key is to make sure that your content is relevant to the keyword but avoids bad SEO practices like keyword stuffing. Write naturally and include quality, high-value information.

2. Content provides the basis for keyword optimization. It allows you to optimize keywords throughout the relevant pages on your website. When creating content, try to implement a keyword phrase. Google has improved search accuracy by writing algorithms to understand the searcher’s intent and the contextual meaning of terms.

Therefore, you should ensure that you have a variety of closely related phrases being targeted within the content, as opposed to just the singular phrase you think your audience is using.

3. After you start building quality content and marketing it correctly, your rankings can see a positive effect. New visitors to your website as a result of content marketing are potential consumers. Therefore, in addition to increasing traffic to the website, it can also increase your leads/sales.

4. Each new piece of content you create on your website is another page that Google can index. Although content alone won’t increase your traffic, it gives the opportunity to target new and different phrases that may engage potential customers.

5. Valuable content increases your authority. If your content is high quality, it is likely to attract more links and shares throughout social media and other blogs. Valuable content will also influence a good user experience, and the metrics will give Google positive ranking signals.

Conclusion

Content marketing and SEO work together. Time spent doing keyword research for SEO is pretty much useless unless those keywords are used in the content! A healthy balance of both is key to success.

Ensure that you don’t focus purely on content and that your technical SEO is up to speed too. You could create the best content in the world, but if Google can’t crawl your website or there are technical issues, the content won’t have its maximum reach.