How Content Marketing Fuels SEO Campaigns

With an ever-increasing number of marketing channels out there, it can be difficult to know which to choose. Your audience is likely to be spread out across multiple channels and platforms; using Facebook to catch up with friends before searching Google to research hotels for an upcoming holiday, then browsing Instagram for a while before checking their emails.

Even though you know your audience is using all of these channels, you probably don’t have the budget to advertise on them all. You need to work out the most effective for driving traffic, engaging audiences, and boosting ROI. As a starting point, there are two channels that work together beautifully to create a lethal digital marketing strategy: SEO and Content Marketing.

SEO and content marketing have changed the digital marketing world. SEO refers to the technical process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. While Content Marketing is focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain an audience, with the ultimate goal of driving customer action.

SEO and content marketing both have their own benefits and undoubtedly bring important elements to an online marketing campaign. To really deliver results and grow your business, you need to get them both to work together. If you were to simply focus on creating blog after blog at the expense of SEO time, you’d likely start to see a drop in overall rankings.  On the other hand, you completely focus on link building and getting high-quality links to your site, you probably won’t have enough fresh content to support it.

How SEO & Content Marketing Overlap

While it’s undeniable that there are differences between SEO and content marketing, there are areas where they overlap. Taking advantage of this overlap and applying it to your strategy is the quickest way to get more targeted visitors to your website.

1. Keywords Inform SEO & Content Marketing

Keywords are one of the vital elements of any SEO strategy.  SEO is basically about researching and finding the most relevant keywords that searchers are using to find your products or services online, then using them on your pages and blog posts so that they rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Embedding target keywords in your content is vital to rank well and in turn, boost traffic to your site. When writing content that works for SEO, it’s important to use keywords in a strategic manner.  They should be used in the title and body section of the content and fit in a natural way without being overused, as repeating keywords too many times actually has a negative impact on SEO.

2. Quality Content Boosts On-Page SEO

Consistency is key for SEO and content marketing. Google will quickly index fresh, unique, creative content and it will always rank higher than low-value, repetitive content.

Your content shouldn’t just be designed as ‘click bait’ to attract users to your site but offer little value when they get there.  It should add value to them by educating them or solving a particular issue. Influential content that ranks well on SERPs should address important long-tail keywords that are relevant to visitor queries. To identify the most relevant type of content for your audience, it can be helpful to brainstorm creative ideas and then match them to relevant search phrases.

3. Content Helps with Link-Building

Content is also ideal for link-building, which is another major factor of SEO. Getting more backlinks to your website from relevant sources signifies to Google that your site has quality content that searchers will be interested in. The best way to do this is organically, by creating expert content that other websites find interesting and want to link to.

4. Technical SEO Makes Content Findable

While articles and keywords are important for SEO, it’s also important to optimise robots.txt, enhance metadata and use tags appropriately. This technical optimisation makes the web page more appealing to the search engine and ensures that the site has no broken links with error codes.

Optimising URLs and making the slug concise and logical also helps the search engine find relevant subpages and categorize the different parts of your site. With appropriate technical SEO elements in place, your site will be better indexed in order to generate more authentic search results and relevant visitors.

The bottom line is that content is necessary to grow an SEO strategy because Google doesn’t want to see a stagnant website. Google wants to see that your website is building up relevant and useful content.

The key to a successful digital marketing strategy is to get SEO and content marketing to work together. Identify what you want from your website, and then you can work out how much time and resources to dedicate to which channel.  If you want to simply attract users, focus more on SEO tactics that drive visitors to your site. If you want higher conversion rates once visitors get to your site, content marketing is more important.

Digital Squad is an award-winning SEO company. Get in touch with your digital marketing agency Auckland for more information. The experts at Digital Squad can help you with SEO Auckland, Facebook Marketing NZ, and AdWords advertising Auckland.