How to Use SEO With Content Marketing for Better Results
How to Use SEO With Content Marketing for Better Results
Individually, SEO and content marketing are both synonymous with the titans in this era of digital marketing. And although people are generally known to complement each other well, they are rarely mentioned in the same breath.
Because anyone who has tried both together will tell you, SEO and content marketing are a lethal when cross-combo that can knock out your competition.
But if they’re really good together, why aren’t more businesses adopting this approach?
Let’s take a deeper look at SEO and content marketing objectives. And while we’re at it, we’ll try to analyze what the risk of the problem is..
Goals of SEO and Content Marketing
The biggest problem here is that people understand SEO and content marketing as both completely separate and individual aspects of digital marketing. They believe that the two are two very different things, but they are not.
There is an important warlap between the two. I would even go on saying they have two personalities of the same animal.
In fact, according to a recent survey, on-page content is the most effective SEO tactic that marketers rely on. And if content marketing isn’t part, what’s content on the page?
Let’s break down the objectives of both SEO and content marketing to understand it better.
People, on average, use SEO techniques:
- Optimize your site around the desired word about your business
- Get new, valuable, and reliable backlinks from top authority web domains
Their main purpose behind doing so is:
- Improve their ratings of services for some needed words
- Increase their brand awareness and visibility
- Attack more website traffic
In short, they use SEO to increase website traffic in hopes of increasing their revenue and business.
But what about content marketing? Includes:
- Creating relevant, compelling, engaging, and informative content
- Using an effective call to action
- Create high value content which risks going viral
Marketers do it all with intent:
- Increasing brand awareness and visibility.
- Promoting brand loyalty by establishing industry thinking and leadership
- Increase time spent on site by target audience
- Finally improving the sell and exchange rates
To put things in perspective, SEO helps you attract customers to your site while content marketing keeps them there and helps them convert. So, while SEO has a narrower and more technical approach. Content marketing in this perspective is more comprehensive.
Bringing out the best in another one
We’ve established that SEO and content marketing strategies are working toward the same goal.. The next question is, how can everyone work to improve each other?
How can CEOs boost content marketing?
The most beautiful and captivating piece of content you will ever write. But what if no one is around to read it and appreciate it? If a content creation team doesn’t yield search query results, they simply can’t produce outstanding content.
This is where SEO can boost your content marketing, by getting your content discovered more. It focuses on your business (content restoration) matter and improves search rankings.
Simply, content that is created around desired words that are business-related will rank high in appropriate search results.
And it will go public in front of the right audience. But don’t limit yourself only to relevant desired words. Research other aspects related to SEO like:
- Content titles that rank well for specific required words
- Customer feedback to know what your audience expects from you
- Content Types That Are Performing Well For Your Competitors
How can content marketing improve SEO?
Content consumers are looking to engage in content that gives them value. They will easily see any kind of stuff you’re writing in your content. Especially if you’re creating content for the sole reason to improve your search rankings for certain required words.
Once they get a grip on your “dummy” content, they’ll see your brand unreliable and of little or no importance to them. They should have taken their business elsewhere happily. SEO Team Dreams Are Made Of.
But with content marketing, you can make sure your SEO efforts don’t go to waste.
By generating valuable and informative content around relevant desired words, you can kill two birds with one stone. Not only will you rank better on search engines but also ensure brand loyalty and higher conversions rates with the content included.
Putting things in perspective:
- SEO explains the demands. Content marketing meets these demands.
- SEO needs content. Content marketing provides the content.
- SEO needs the right wording. Content marketing uses these sought-after terms.
- SEO is dependent on backlinks. Content marketing is one way to get those backlinks.
- SEO Calls for Site Improvement. Content marketing demands a great user experience.
The fact is, the more integrated SEO and content marketing you do, the smoother and effectively they will work together. Despite their differences, they overlap. They are so much better off being separated.
How to compete with SEO and content marketing
We cover in length, why and how SEO and content marketing combined can benefit your business. It’s time we focus on how you can reap the benefits of this double-edged sword.
Let’s take a look at different ways you can combine your SEO and content marketing efforts for maximum profit:
1. Set correct goals, measure results, and Iterate
The first step to integrating SEO and content marketing is to set common goals and objectives for your marketing efforts.
Find out what activities lie in the warlap between the two and set a worthwhile, meticulous goal for them accordingly. Usually, it involves things that can increase web traffic and conversion rates.
After deciding your goals, you need to decide your key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will help you measure the success of your efforts.
The best way to harmonize SEO and content marketing is to use KPIs that apply to both techniques..
The goal here is to consistently measure your marketing efforts, and optimize your strategy to consistently grow your business.
You can learn a ton of things from your marketing campaigns:
- Achievements – Understand what you stand for and try to replicate those efforts. Turn the irregularities into regular events.
- FAILURE – Compare your low performing content to more successful efforts to see where you went wrong.. Pay attention to details like traffic, conversions, revenue, etc. through this piece of content.
2. Get Understanding of Your Target Audience.
It goes without saying that a brand has to revolve around its target customer – products, experience and marketing strategy.
Clearly describing your target audience will help your content team create suitable pieces for their use. Surprisingly, only 20% of companies claim to know their customer fully.
You need to have a deep understanding of your audience’s motives, pain points, experiences and process. Only then will you be able to provide more engaging and effective content to achieve long-term business growth.
What you need to do to understand the “work” your audience is hiring you to do:
- Map Their Customer Journey – Consider how different customer is interacting with your content across channels at different stages of the sales chimney. Customer conversions and purchasing behavior are important aspects that you need to understand.
- Customer Analysis – Customer preferences are constantly changing. You need to keep your ear to the ground and constantly monitor consumer behavior. Analyze regular consumer brand interactions to ensure they meet these insights and maintain consumer trends.
3. Make search engines better content
Once you identify your target audience and marketing plan, you need to start optimizing for maximum brand presentation.
As I’ve mentioned before, if people aren’t finding your content, however great it might be, it’s not doing anything for your business. This is why you need to optimize your content for search engines to physically grow your audience.
Here’s a list of things you can do to ensure your content efforts aren’t wasted:
- Write on relevant headlines – Content should always be customer-focused and never business or brand-centric.
- Well needed words – forget business and corporate jargon. Focus on creating content using the desired terms that relates to your business.
- Mobile last year – Improve for mobile devices, which accounted for 49 percent of global internet usage last year. This means that more and more people are finding your business on their mobile, not on their desktop. If your site isn’t better for mobile, your customers will have a poor experience using it and are much more likely to jump ship.
- Map your content to specific customer personalities and sales chimney stages – Maximize your customer insights and map your journey. Make sure you’re providing the right content they need to move to the next stage in the sales chimney and ultimately transform.
4. Guest statement posting and expert roundup
I can think of two really simple ways you can reap the benefits of a combined SEO and content marketing strategy. They’re quite quick to implement and you don’t need a lot of reorganization to take advantage of them.
The first is that guests on other sites as well as on both of you – start posting. Get your content in front of a new audience. Being a value provider, you stand to gain their trust and turn them into regular customers.
Similarly, if you’re posting expert roundup posts, you’re exposing your audience to the views and opinions of other industry experts. This will show how well connected you are in the industry and will improve your reputation.
Reach out to industry influencers with just a relevant topic or question and share your thoughts on it. Encourage them to share the final roundup post with their readers to expose themselves to their audience.
From an SEO perspective, these two techniques will do a lot for your link building efforts, thus improving your search rankings. By linking and getting backlinks from these top authority sites, you increase your reputation.
Now consider that Google gives utmost importance to content and connections when deciding to rank search. These two tactics are very effective resources to take advantage of this fact. However, they combine SEO and content marketing with great influence beautifully.
5. Keywords
Keywords is very important for SEO and content marketing.. Without keywords, it’s hard to rank high in search engine results. However, the only way to use desired words on your website is through content marketing.
Good content marketing consists of writing high-quality content without the required wording. When you create exceptional content that naturally uses keywords, it helps your SEO automatically.
As a result, search results can lead you to top notch help.. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner to find relevant needed words for your website.
6. User Experience
SEO aims to improve the experience of your website visitors. Websites that offer a better user experience are preferred by search engines and rank high in SERPs. Here’s why it’s so important to design your website to be user-friendly.
Even if you manage to ace all your technical parameters, such as error codes and broken links, you still need to produce high-quality content.
The goal of SEO and content marketing is to create a good user experience.
When you produce valuable content, visitors will be more interested. These two factors affect your SEO positively.
7. Backlinks
Backlinks are important to your website’s SEO. Each backlink link counts as an upvote or downvote on your website’s authenticity.
One of the best ways to get backlinks is through guest posting, as mentioned above. It requires both SEO and content marketing.
Although you can zero in on a website by testing the parameters to improve your SEO, guest posts will only be accepted when it’s well-written. For this, you need to get your content marketing game up.
Alternatively, you can have natural backlinks for the content you write. If it’s an informative piece of content and optimized for search, it will attract more visitors.
A lot of these visitors can relate to. Thus, SEO and content marketing can give you loads of natural backlinks.
8. Consistency
To get the most out of SEO and content marketing, you need to be consistent. You should regularly come up with high quality and unique content.
Here’s why Google prefers fresh content and it helps it rank in search results.
Even with a lower domain authority (DA), your content can start ranking higher because of its grandeur.
SEO and content marketing both complement each other in this regard. Good SEO means consistently coming up with authentic unique content.. This also means that you’re going out on your content marketing by producing the best content..
With this consistency, you will be able to score higher in SERPs..
Conclusion
The methods we discussed above are in no way easy or fast to implement.. But they do represent what I’d like to call the silver bullet of digital marketing: SEO and content marketing working in tandem.
SEO and content marketing can help you bring high authority backlinks, maintain consistency, and improve your customer experience.
If you’ve tried any of these strategies before, I’d love to hear from you how they worked for your business. Feel free to share your integrated SEO and content marketing experiences with us in the comment section..