Everyone agrees that content is king, but few people realize that content is more than just writing a good piece. Your content plays a huge role in how your website ranks and gains traffic.
SEO has evolved well beyond on-page optimization and link building. Other drivers such as social media, guest blogging, etc., have suddenly come into play. However, it’s important to understand that no single solution will get you the results you’re looking for in today’s fiercely competitive digital world. You need to work on multiple channels and stay consistent before you start seeing the results.
Yet, there’s one strategy that will boost your online presence and search engine rankings more than others. It’s none other than content marketing. After all, there’s a reason why 96% of marketers in the 2019 Content Marketing Survey said that content marketing has been effective for their brand.
So how does content marketing have such a strong impact on SEO? Simply because of the strong connection between the two! Not only do they go hand in hand but there’s a lot of overlap between the two, which is why they must be integrated with each other.
In this article, you’ll learn how content marketing boosts SEO, but before that, let’s find out how the two things connect and the differences between them:
The Overlap Between SEO and Content Marketing
If you have a clear understanding of each concept, you shouldn’t find any problems understanding the difference between SEO and content marketing. But just to make sure, let’s recall the basic definitions of the two:
SEO: Efforts to boost your organic search engine traffic.
Content Marketing: Producing and circulating valuable content to attract traffic.
Just by looking at these simple definitions, you can see the connection. SEO relies on content to boost search engine traffic, while content marketing has to do with the content itself.
There has been some change in that relationship though. In the beginning, you could rank well with different types of content, for instance, through small, 500-word blog posts containing your targeted keywords. It’s not that short blogs/articles don’t work anymore, but long-form, informative, and dynamic articles are believed to add more value nowadays. Since Google is constantly looking for ways to improve the user search experience by providing high-value content in search results, it’s no wonder that long-form posts are proving more useful than shorter ones.
But it’s not just the length of the blog posts that matters. A long blog post that makes no sense, doesn’t discuss the pain points of your audiences and solves their problems, or doesn’t read well won’t prove valuable for users and attract traffic. For your content marketing efforts to garner search engine traffic, quantity and quality need to go hand in hand.
In fact, value and quality are the two top priorities, for which you’ll need to provide in-depth insights, making your content piece lengthier.
Your website’s SEO performance also depends on the use of relevant, well- researched keywords as well as on links from high-authority sites, both of which are there in the content you add on your site.
While SEO and content marketing can effectively build web traffic, you can take this integration to a higher level by leveraging social media. An awesome piece of content optimized for and shared on the biggest social media platforms can double or triple your web traffic.
That’s where social media SEO connects with content marketing. Instead of just relying on search engine traffic, you can achieve massive results by sharing high-quality content on social media too.
Differences Between SEO and Content Marketing
No doubt there’s plenty of overlap between SEO and content marketing, but you can’t say they’re exactly the same. SEO is a lot more than looking for the right keywords. While many on-page and off-page aspects of SEO form part of content marketing, technical SEO has nothing to do with content marketing.
Technical SEO involves backend work aimed at ensuring that search engine spiders easily and quickly crawl your website and index your content. Hence, technical SEO improves your search engine rankings independently from website content.
Now that we have discussed SEO and content marketing in detail, let’s discuss how content marketing boosts SEO:
How Content Marketing Boosts SEO
Keyword Ranking
If you’ve developed an informative guide, you’ll want to incorporate the right keywords in it for SEO reasons. There are two ways of doing this. You can either develop content first and then search for keywords relevant to that content or adopt the SEO- first approach, which involves doing keyword research first and then creating content around the chosen keywords. The good news is both the techniques work!
Creating Content First
When you choose to create content first, you’ll focus on ideas that your targeted users are interested in. You’ll need to identify the pain points of your audience and product content that solves those problems for users. Once you’ve developed the content, you’ll search for keywords related to the topic that you believe your content should rank for.
This approach provides a lot of flexibility in terms of what content you include. If you choose keywords first, you’ll have to restrict the content to details related to those keywords.
When you choose the SEO first approach and conduct a keyword search, in the beginning, you look for keywords with the highest search volumes. What most people don’t realize here is that search volume doesn’t add any value for the reader, while Google wants to provide value to users.
Let’s take an example to clarify this. Marketers often search the term ‘what is content marketing’. It’s not surprising that the keyword gets massive searches every month. However, people searching for this term are not looking for anything more than a simple definition. No matter how great or accurate your definition is, it’s not going to make any significant impact on the users’ lives.
Once they’ve understood what content marketing means, they have a bigger concern, that is, how to execute it. Thus, their next query is likely to be ‘how to create a content marketing strategy’ or something similar to that. That’s when they’ll find a comprehensive guide that will shape their marketing efforts for years to come. In other words, the post that best answers that query will prove truly valuable for the reader.
Ironically, though, long-tail keywords like these get much lower search volumes than ones like ‘what is content marketing’. But when they do, they earn loyal visitors and boosts conversions.
The point of this discussion is that if you choose to conduct keyword research first, pick the most popular terms, and tailor your content based on those terms only, you’ll miss on developing content that hits your target audience’s biggest pain points.
Thus, when you find the most popular keywords and create content around it, think of the next few queries that might come to the users mind and address them in your content. When you provide the visitors with everything they need, they won’t have to go to another site to get their next answer. Also, this establishes you as an expert in your field, prompting users to do business with you later.
If your content solves more critical problems of your audience than just answering basic one-time queries, the visitors will be more likely to remember you, subscribe for emails, choose you over others for subsequent queries, and ultimately become your customers when the time comes to place an order.
Hence, marketers need to stop overestimating the value of high-volume terms and underestimating the value of good, long-tail keywords.
Focusing on SEO First
After going through the ‘content first’ approach, you may have already made up your mind to start with content, but selecting keywords first has its own benefits.
No matter how familiar you are with the interests of your target audience, when you develop content first, it can become a challenge to incorporate keywords that you later identify. Even if you manage to add the chosen keywords, it may look unnatural. The problem will be more complicated if you want to include one or more long-tail keywords.
Originally, you did your best to ensure that the content reads well, but by trying to incorporate the keywords now, you’re disrupting the natural flow. Now, the sentences and titles where you add the keywords may not be as captivating as they initially were and may even look awkward.
When you have the keyword in mind from the start, you’ll look for ways to incorporate it in an organic and natural manner and have perfect control of the message you’re trying to deliver.
Evergreen Content
Oftentimes, you spend time creating highly informative, valuable content, but it gets you nothing more than quick bursts of traffic that die down when the post becomes irrelevant or outdated. To ensure that your overall traffic keeps growing and that content builds upon itself, focus on developing evergreen content.
Evergreen content is the content that remains relevant and useful for a long time. Your blog posts should not just trigger short-term traffic boost but also accelerate the steady, long-term traffic from search engines.
Evergreen content requires evergreen topics. Ask yourself whether the topics you’re writing on will remain useful or even relevant a year from now, 2 years from now, and 5 years from now. Simply google your chosen topics and check how old the search results are. Any query that gets many old search results is certainly an evergreen topic.
However, in some fast-paced niches, you will never be able to find a topic that stays relevant for too long. Hence, simply figure out what topics will remain relevant one or two years from now and develop content on it. This also means keep updating it with any changes that come up. Making small updates to content is not just easier than writing a new post every time but also ensures that your original content stays evergreen.
Link building
External Links
When you produce high-value content, you want it to be read by a maximum number of users. These users can come from social media, email marketing, and via links on other webpages.
The links that attract the highest number of users are obviously the most powerful links. As it turns out, the exact same links that bring users from other webpages to your blog posts prove to be the most valuable for SEO purposes too. When we talk about external links (those on other websites), there are two types: Guest post links and Contextual links.
Guest Post Links
These are links included in a guest post, that is, the content you posted on other websites. When you share guest posts on high-authority sites, the links in them (usually one or two in the author bio section) send considerable traffic to your website as well as improve your ranking for your targeted keywords. You may also be able to add links to the content in some cases.
Contextual Links
Contextual links are links you include in the content and naturally form part of sentences in the blog post. The more value your content offers using facts and stats, the more contextual links your content will gain. These links will both send traffic through clicks as well as enhance your SEO performance.
Internal Links
Internal links are links that are included in different pieces of content within your website, connecting them together like a web. Besides the content, these links may even be included in the navigation elements of the site. Not only do internal links expose visitors to more of your content, but they also transfer link juice among different pieces, thus improving SEO.
To understand what your website is about, Google checks the anchor texts of internal links and the surrounding content. If your content contains ample internal links, it should give positive signals to the search engine, which should then rank your site better.
To sum it up, while SEO and content marketing are two different concepts, there’s a lot of overlap between them. The discussion above should have given you a fair idea about how content marketing boosts SEO. If you want to learn more about how you can generate search engine traffic, book a free 15-minute consultation with Nora Kramer Designs.
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