You can’t talk about digital marketing without hearing words like “search engine optimisation” (SEO) and content marketing. That’s because these are two extremely important facets of a successful digital marketing strategy.
In fact, if you own a business and use digital marketing, you’re probably already utilising both of them. SEO helps push traffic to your website, while content marketing boosts your blogs and social media profiles. But, did you know that SEO and content marketing actually work together?
It’s true! In combination, these two essentials can decide the fate of a business’s online presence. In this blog, we’ll tell you what you need to know about SEO and Content Marketing, and how to use them to boost your business.
SEO vs Content Marketing
Before we get into their synergy, let’s clear the air. Though SEO and Content Marketing work together hand-in-hand, they’re not the same thing. Here’s a concise explanation of what they are separately:
– Content Marketing:
Content marketing, by definition, is “focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.”. Simply put, content marketing is a tool you use to encourage customers to follow your brand and buy your products/services.
Unlike traditional marketing, content marketing takes a more indirect approach to consumers. What it does is stimulate your audience’s interest in your services by educating them on information they may not have known before. Content marketing means talking about content that matters and answering questions, not just promoting a product or service. It helps your audience find answers and builds their trust in your brand.
With the right content marketing strategy, you can build long-lasting relationships and maintain customer loyalty. When you provide your audience with the advice they’re looking for, you become so much more than just a business selling products/services.
– SEO:
Bringing in traffic to your website is an important step to helping your business grow. SEO is the key to this step. What SEO does is, it organises and optimises content from all over the internet, for search engines like Google. With the right SEO strategy, search engines will read your content and boost your ranking on results pages for certain keywords. SEO is a process for generating website traffic via “free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines.”
SEO has become an unavoidable component of any brand’s digital marketing strategy that relies on website traffic for success. Without it, even the best-designed website may never be discovered by the right people.
Based on these clarifications, the relationship between content marketing and search engine optimization is clear.
How To Use SEO & Content Marketing In Synergy
Content marketing and SEO must work in tandem to maximize the benefits to your brand. You should produce content as a new brand keeping search engine requirements in mind. As a brand with an existing content library, it is worthwhile to review your content to ensure it benefits your search engine.
Here’s how you can use SEO and Content Marketing together:
– Getting Started & Developing SEO-Friendly Content:
Only a few years ago, creating SEO-friendly content meant stuffing keywords into otherwise well-written articles. As a result, many websites have become unreadable and useless to their visitors. Search engine operators have recognized this and have begun to modify their algorithms. Today, search engines strive to provide users with the most relevant content.
So, how do you convince Google that your content is valuable? The solution is straightforward: be specific with your content. Search engines crawl websites, and the easier it is for search engines to identify the focus of your content, the higher it will rank on search engine results pages.
Staying focused is essential for creating successful content. That may sound simple, but it can be surprisingly difficult to put into practice at times. For example, if you offer separate online courses for languages and personal finance, don’t put them on the same page. Instead, make a separate page for language courses and another for personal finance. You could even divide the language courses into individual languages.
The same is true for blog posts. It is possible to blog about the general benefits of online courses. Individual pieces of content for online language courses and personal finance courses, on the other hand, almost always drive more content to the relevant pages.
It is essential to start with target keywords in mind when creating content from scratch.
– Optimising The Content Your Already Have:
Creating entirely new content may provide an advantage in SEO, but it does take a lot of time. Most established businesses and brands already have a content library, which should be updated and optimized to improve search engine rankings.
It helps to think like a search engine. Websites with constantly updated content rank higher than those with static content. Updating existing content is a great way to meet that requirement and save time.
It would be impossible to optimize existing content without first reviewing internal and external links. Internal linking informs search engines about your website’s structure and reveals content that belongs together. Search engines struggle to find orphaned content or pages that are not linked together.
– Where Content Marketing Comes In:
With both your old content and new content being optimised, you already have an SEO boost. When you start utilising content marketing on your SEO-friendly posts, you get the extra boost needed to really make your business shine. Increased visibility, lead generation, and sales won’t be a distant dream any longer.
Use The Synergy To Your Advantage
SEO and content marketing should collaborate to drive traffic to your website and generate sales.
Begin developing content with SEO in mind to create synergies. Treating SEO as an afterthought at the end of content creation simply does not produce the best results.
Creating content with your target audience in mind and a thorough understanding of your subject will make it easier to optimize content for search engine rankings. Traffic optimization is worthwhile for your business regardless of the time investment.
Wondering how to draft the best SEO & Content Marketing strategies? Contact us and we’ll help you!