If you find that your online marketing plan simply isn’t producing the results you expect, don’t worry. Having a comprehensive content marketing strategy will help you increase your SEO score, connect with your audience and engage them more than ever before.
Below we’ve compiled a handy guide to content marketing. Read on to find out exactly what content marketing is, what are its advantages, and how you can implement it in your content marketing strategy.
What Is Content Marketing?
Before we go any further, there is a fundamental question that we must answer: what is content marketing?
Content marketing is an approach to marketing characterized by a focus on creating valuable, high-quality content to attract a certain audience and hopefully get them to buy your product or service. In the context of this article, we are mainly referring to online content marketing.
Unlike traditional online marketing, which primarily focuses on ads, content marketing usually comes in the form of email newsletters and blog posts. We will focus on blog posts since they have the biggest impact on your SEO score.
What Goes Into Content Marketing?
As we mentioned above, blog posts are the most valuable component of content marketing. If your website doesn’t already have a blog section, this is the first thing you should focus on. Creating blog posts will allow you to build an extensive library of valuable content, which will form a basis for a comprehensive SEO strategy.
Even though blog posts will mostly be text, there are other elements you can include to help boost your SEO. For instance, videos can make for a great addition to your pages, illustrating and showcasing the content of your posts. You can also create a video version of your post for YouTube, which will give you a whole new marketing platform.
Like videos, images and infographics are another useful addition to your blog posts. They can serve to further illustrate the content, while at the same time making it easier to use.
The Advantages of Using Content Marketing
Content marketing has proven to be far more successful than traditional marketing in recent years. This is mostly due to people changing the way they use the Internet, such as the rise of mobile web browsing.
One of the main benefits of online content marketing is that it will increase the number of organic visits to your website. People searching for content will see your website in the search results, and will be far more inclined to visit than if they saw an ad for your business. And if your posts provide engaging content, it’s far more likely for visits to convert to sales. Even if that’s not the case, you will have gained a follower of your brand by providing valuable information and insight.
Aside from this, content marketing is also generally more affordable than traditional marketing, which provides a better ROI. The downside of this is that the positive SEO effects may take some time to show, at least until you build up the number of your blog posts.
Content Creation Tactics for SEO
Now that we’ve covered the definition and benefits of content marketing, we can talk about creating a content strategy that will boost your SEO score. Using the steps below, you will make sure your content is optimized for SEO growth.
Create High-Value, High-Quality Content
From the very beginning, your focus should be on creating high-quality content that your visitors will find valuable. This will form the basis of your entire SEO marketing strategy.
Your blog posts should cover the subjects you yourself are an expert in. This will have the dual benefit of making sure you share valuable and verified insight, and it will serve to increase your domain authority. We will cover that in more detail later.
As for what type of content you should post, taking a look at Google Analytics can provide certain guidelines. Long-form posts seem to do better than shorter ones, so you should aim for 2,000+ words.
In order to reach this word count, you can start by posting comprehensive guides related to your industry. This type of post usually contains valuable information presented in an easy-to-read way. The more understandable and detailed the content is, the more visitors you will have, and your SEO score will rise as a result.
Sharpen Your Research Skills
If your goal is to create detailed and high-quality content, a simple Google search won’t do. You will need to dive deeper into the subject matter to create something that will draw in organic searches.
As you explore the topic of your post, make sure you do it from different angles. This will require you to draw on your own experience, as well as search for in-depth sources and references. One of the easier ways to find related literature is to use JSTOR, Google Scholar, or consult industry publications.
Tapping into different sources when approaching the subject will make sure you cover it in sufficient detail and will provide valuable content to your readers. Once you do this, you can expect other websites to link to your content, which will make it rise to the top of search engine results.
Use Targeted Keywords
Even if your website has the best content possible, it still won’t be worth much if it can’t reach the target audience. You still need to include targeted keywords in order to optimize your posts.
Targeted keywords are words and phrases that your target audience is actively searching for. In order to find out what these are, you will have to research your audience.
Although this might sound complicated, it really isn’t. Simply identifying the type of readers you want to attract is a step in the right direction. Once you’ve identified your audience, focus on figuring out their search intent. Find out what terms they are searching for and what questions they need answers to.
With this information in hand, it becomes a matter of using any of the many keyword analysis solutions out there. Tools like Google Keyword Planner will help you find relevant keywords that will drive organic searches to your website.
Finally, you can begin to formulate your blog posts in such a way you can organically include targeted keywords into the title and throughout the text. However, make sure you don’t go overboard when using keywords. Keyword stuffing is frowned upon by Google, and will only serve to lower your SEO score. We recommend following white hat type of SEO as it will help you in the long term.
Make Your Posts Easy to Read
Readability is one of the key elements of good content marketing. A well structured and presented post will have visitors staying on it longer, making sure they read it till the end. This tells Google that your website has valuable information that can be useful to readers, which in turn increases your search engine ranking.
When focusing on readability, make sure your content is structured in a logical way. You want to follow the basic rules of writing an essay:
- Make an assertion (hypothesis) in the introduction.
- Use the body of the text to present evidence that reinforces that assertion.
- Conclude with a summary of the information presented.
Make sure that the sentences and paragraphs aren’t too long. If possible, also use custom, high-quality visuals to pique the audience’s interest even further. This can take the form of product photography, useful infographics, or screenshots if you’re writing a tutorial.Build Your Domain Authority
As we mentioned above, providing useful information to your visitors will lead to high search engine result rankings. An added benefit is that the more people see your content, the more likely it is to be recognized as useful by other website owners in your industry.
This is very likely to lead to the linking to your website in their blog posts, further increasing your SEO score. In fact, the more links to your website are out there, the more authority your domain has in Google’s eyes. Building your domain authority this way is one of the best long-term methods of achieving top SEO rankings.
You can also reach out to other website owners and ask them to feature a link to your content. This way you’re not only getting organic backlinks but also growing your professional network.
Help Google Help You
Once you have content you can be proud of, there are still some tweaks you can make to ensure it gives you that bit of an edge over the competition. One such method is making sure you land in Google’s featured snippets.
Featured snippets are search results selected by Google as best for the search term, and are featured above the search results. Google will usually choose one of the top five search results to feature.
Even though there are no hard and fast rules to landing in the featured snippets, there are still things you can do to increase your odds. Having a good structure for your content (as we discussed above) is one of these.
Conclusion
SEO with a focus on the audience has proven time and time again to be the most profitable approach to online marketing and will continue to do so in the future. We hope this guide will help you plan and implement content marketing in a way that will bring your SEO performance to a new level.
