Dominating SEO with Content Marketing

Today’s trends see content marketing as a foremost strategy for SEO. According to research by HubSpot, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on writing and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action.”

Content marketing entails businesses creating and sharing relevant written and visual media so that their target audience can learn effectively about their brand, expertise, products, and services.

There are various types of content, i.e., articles, social media posts, blogs, infographics, and illustrative videos, to name a few. Blogs are one of the three primary content marketing forms, with 89% of content marketers using blog posts in their content strategy in 2020.

Content marketing is all about storytelling. Giving your audience high-quality content that is consistently relevant and relatable for them will help you establish a relationship with your target audience. Content marketing sends a very important message to your customers—that as a brand, you know who your audience is and that you are giving enough care and attention to their interests, well-being, and satisfaction. This relationship translates into trust and loyalty in terms of your customers’ purchase decisions in the long run.

On the other hand, SEO or search engine optimization is defined by dictionaries as “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.” Many people view SEO and content marketing as two different “personas”; while this is true, they are not mutually exclusive, and in fact, SEO is all about content marketing! Compared to content marketing, SEO is narrower and a bit more on the technical side, while the former is broader and more creative. You can integrate the two by channeling SEO’s technicalities and techniques into content marketing.

Here are some best practices and tips on how to integrate content marketing in SEO and dominate the game:

Knowing Your Audience Always Comes First

You cannot begin developing your content without knowing about your target audience first. Effective and valuable content is relevant and relatable to your target audience. As a business, you may already have prior research and knowledge of your target customers’ profile. Your goal in content marketing is to answer your audience’s questions and engage with their interests. People’s interests may tend to change like the weather, and it important that one stays up to date with today’s fads and trends.

Post Quality Content

Apply your research and knowledge about your customer profile to develop quality content. The top searches on the first pages of Google have a few things in common. Content like these is well-researched, current, and long-form. Share relatable content, up to date, and worth reading. Include photos and videos that are share-worthy and showcase your business’s personality and services and the experience that comes with it.

Choose the Right Keywords

This part is a clear integration of SEO and content marketing. SEO demands keywords, and content marketing works by making use of those keywords. Choose the right keywords and strategically place them in every piece of content you will post. Do not spend too much time obsessing over keywords; build a basic list of keywords that will target your content. With content marketing alone, you have quality content, but with SEO, you are making sure that your content reaches your target audience.

Make Your Content User Friendly

Given the right keywords, you have to optimize your content around them, not just merely playing where to paste them in between your lines of text. Make your content SEO friendly, in fact, “SEO friendly” is outdated, and we look on using the phrase “User-Friendly” instead.

In your content, make sure it provides solutions to real problems made by real users. Again, your goal in your content pieces is to answer your customers’ questions. Understand your audience’s intent when it comes to their search queries.

Make sure that your content is free of typos, grammatical errors, false statistics, and misconceptions. Make sure your content is readable. Set an appropriate tone and style that suits your target audience. In writing your content, you can separate paragraphs into small chunks and include many visuals to make it more appealing and engaging for your readers. Many people are not inclined to read, so it is a challenge to make them read.

You can also combine content marketing with social media to get maximum impact. Social media is quite powerful nowadays. Many social media marketers post content to increase brand engagement and awareness.

Dominating SEO with content marketing entails a fresh new perspective. Do not focus on SEO; focus on creating quality content!