SEO and Content Marketing

Content comes in many different forms, which is exciting because it means you can select the formats that will work best for both your business and your audience. After all, there would be no point investing in long-form content if your audience would prefer to engage with a short video instead.

So, let’s dive into the nitty gritty of online content and explore exactly how it can be used to enhance your approach to SEO, ultimately driving meaningful outcomes that will contribute to your bottom line.

Is Content Important for SEO?

Content is extraordinarily important for SEO. But don’t worry, we’re not just going to leave it at that, we are going to explain precisely why it holds so much value.

Without enough quality content on your site, search engines simply won’t have enough information to correctly index your webpages or ensure that you are ranking well for relevant search terms and phrases. Similarly, without a solid SEO strategy, your content will never be seen by your ideal clients. and certainly won’t be shared amongst your audience. Instead, it will simply sit online, receiving no traffic and zero engagement. And you don’t need us to tell you that this scenario essentially defeats the entire purpose of having content in the first place.

Optimised content boosts your organic search engine visibility, which will drive additional streams of highly qualified traffic to your most important digital asset. This will positively impact your click through rate (CTR) as well as your leads and conversions. But how can you do this successfully? By investing in unique, high-quality content that is tailored to your offering, showcases your expertise and is designed specifically to connect with your audience.

Your content should also be keyword rich, without tipping over into the realms of keyword stuffing, which could have negative consequences on your digital presence, including being hit with a Google penalty and losing your strong ranking positions.

What is SEO and Content Marketing?

There can be some confusion with content marketing and SEO, most notably with regards to if and how they fit together. The simple answer is that, yes, SEO and content marketing do fit together. In fact, they more than fit together. They’re a bit like salt and pepper, Tom and Jerry, or peanut butter and jelly. They essentially come as a pair.

So, if content marketing and SEO are so well-connected, you might be wondering exactly where the confusion comes in. Well, content marketing and SEO aren’t integrated, with many people viewing them as being two very separate activities. Although they do both have their unique qualities, they also overlap and merge in many other ways.

Content is a broad term which covers everything from video and imagery to written articles and audio. Unfortunately, too many people think that a fully realised content marketing strategy removes the need to also invest in a robust SEO strategy. But this fundamentally doesn’t make sense because without SEO, your content simply isn’t going to be successful.

Search engines want to ensure that the results they are delivering in response to every query conducted on their platform are relevant and valuable to the searcher. To do this, complex algorithms look for the presence of very clear signals which allows them to understand both the content and context of each piece of content.

This helps search engines to deliver in terms of quality but also in terms of user intent. After all, if a searcher can’t find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, they aren’t going to have a particularly favourable opinion of a search engine’s functionality or reliability.

So, SEO and content marketing overlap but it might be helpful here to focus on the things they do differently, in a bid to ensure that you view them both as being equally important. While SEO is more technical and narrower in scope, content marketing is more holistic and broad. SEO can be applied in a much broader fashion by channelling its technical capabilities into the wider nature of content marketing. Similarly, content marketing strategies can only be given the best chances of success by applying SEO in the implementation stages.

1. Making and fulfilling demands: SEO essentially sets a series of demands and content marketing utilises its capabilities to deliver on those demands. So, if you want to increase traffic to your site, your content marketing strategy will work hard to do just that.
   SEO simply doesn’t exist without content. It needs substance, articles and keywords to work. It’s why the cliché phrase “content is king” is still bandied about. Because it’s true. Content marketing itself is also content, as it is the process of practically applying SEO to drive results.
2. Keywords: Another thing that SEO and content marketing have in common is keywords. Keywords are a fundamental component of an effective SEO strategy but the only way to use them in a meaningful way is in your content marketing. Keywords should be consistently integrated throughout your content in a strategic manner informed by best practices and search engine guidelines.
3. Technical optimisation and user experience (UX) : SEO is much more than just keywords, links and articles. It also has a technical side which includes metadata and strategic sitemaps. But did you know that this is also linked to content marketing? Don’t forget, these technical strategies are utilised to ultimately benefit the UX. They make content more accessible and readable in myriad ways, including in its presentation and location. Take a moment to think about why you want to invest in the creation of a solid sitemap? Because you know it will help your audience to locate and access your content.
4. Consistency: Search engines favour fresh content. In fact, fresh content is rapidly indexed and, provided that it is also of a high enough quality, will rank higher in SERPs in comparison to older content with a lower value. So, an effective SEO strategy relies on the consistent publication of content, which is where content marketing comes into play. The term itself is an active verb, which means that it is something that requires consistent investment, which will ultimately be rewarded with stronger rankings and all the benefits that brings with it.

How Do You Use Content Marketing?

When thinking about using content marketing to boost your SEO strategy, it is impossible to overlook the power of structured data. Structured data is what search engines use to rank results in SERPs and for the creation process of snippets and rich snippets. So, when the page title, metadata and description are properly added to the structure of the webpage, these important pieces of information will also be displayed in SERPs.

Let’s look at some of the added benefits of utilising structured data in considered and meaningful ways.

1. Highlighting your content: The more structured data you properly incorporate into the structure of your webpages, the more likely it will be for search engines to reward this effort with stronger ranking positions, not least because they will find it easier to crawl and index it.
2. Boost your CTR: Anything you can do to boost your CTR is likely to pay dividends in the long run. Highly structured and well-organised content is appealing to searchers looking for answers to their queries as efficiently as possible. Additionally, if you can ensure your SERP snippet is engaging and presents your site as being both trustworthy and authoritative, you have a far better chance of attracting your ideal audience.

What is a SEO Content Strategy?

The best SEO content strategies work to earn new streams of high-quality traffic from organic SERPs. If you are creating content in a bit of a vacuum with no real strategy or set of outcomes in mind, you likely aren’t seeing much of a return on your investment (ROI). To secure profitable traffic from this approach, your content needs to be centred around a considered SEO strategy.

The key here is to start from the ground and work up, so here are a few methods that we think will set you off on the right foot.

1. Settling on a defined subject area: If you thought that keyword research would be the first thing we mentioned, you may be surprised. Why? Because keyword research cannot make an effective SEO strategy on its own. Instead, it is imperative to start by carefully defining the expertise and purpose of your brand. By identifying the unique knowledge you can offer to your audience, you will discover the subject area you should focus your attention towards. This crucial piece of information will inform everything from your keyword research to your audience research and even the content creation process.
2. Defining your audience: If you don’t know precisely who you want to connect with in SERPs, how are you ever going to create the types of content they want to see? In addition to looking at the audiences your competition are targeting, you can also analyse your current customer base to see if you can identify any patterns from which you can create a series of audience personas that will inform many of your decision-making processes moving forwards.
3. Researching keywords: Now you understand who you want to reach and the content core you should be focusing on, this information can be used to fuel your keyword research process. You’ll ideally want to start with a broad term that relates to your unique industry experience. From here you can work to narrow the term down by considering your bestselling services and/or products, keyword variations, and questions your audience might enter into search engines to locate information your business can provide.
4. Intelligent optimisation: As soon as you have an informed list of keywords that you are confident will deliver a solid ROI, you can begin integrating them into your content. Intelligent optimisation is essential to ensure that you are capitalising on every opportunity to prompt search engines to index and rank your content.
   Building upon your initial SEO content strategy will help you to secure even more impressive gains. Undertaking a consistent process of research and understanding will allow you to make informed refinements to your approach, ultimately making sure that your strategy is ultra-smart and ultra-powerful.

Does Content Marketing Really Work?

You might be surprised to learn just how many businesses continue to question whether content marketing actually works but we understand why this is the case, not least because it can appear to be something of an abstract concept. However, we can assure you that, yes, content marketing can and does deliver significant results. But don’t just take our word for it…

The Content Marketing Institute has released statistics which illustrate that content marketing strategies generate 3x more leads than paid strategies. Why? Well, it’s partly because every piece of content you publish speaks directly to your audience and contributes to the increased online exposure of your brand.

Here are just a few ways that content marketing can boost your brand’s bottom line:

1. Boost organic rankings: Sharing well-optimised content on your well-optimised website will help you to rank better in SERPs for related keywords and phrases. It’s as simple as that.
2. Increase sales: When you share some of your expert knowledge with your audience, they are much more likely to return to your site and, ultimately, make a purchase. Why? Because you have already proven that you know what you’re talking about and furthermore, have freely shared this information with them.
3. Boost your social following: Like search engines, social platforms rely on content. The more engaging your content is, the more people will naturally want to follow your profile to receive updates when you post. Additionally, ensuring your content is highly shareable will further increase your social reach and drive additional traffic to your most important digital asset.
4. Increase the efficiency of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns: Your PPC campaign won’t deliver the outcomes you are hoping for if your website doesn’t contain plenty of relevant, high-quality content. PPC campaigns are designed to enhance your marketing strategy but without content, you won’t be able to prove the relevancy of your site or your brand.
   So, as we have seen, when executed correctly, content marketing can deliver a variety of extremely beneficial outcomes. There are some common mistakes to avoid, however, including:
5. Targeting the wrong keywords: Keyword research is a combination of art and science, but it’s important to remember that targeting long tail keywords will often drive some of the best results because they have the ideal combination of a low level of competition and a high search volume.
6. Keyword stuffing: Every page on your site should have a target keyword but it is essential to ensure that this keyword is integrated naturally throughout the page. Integrate it too many times and Google might hit you with a costly penalty that could set your entire digital strategy back several months.
7. A sub-par link structure: Search engines like to verify the quality of the content they are recommending to searchers, which is why they value sites that provide sources or links to additional resources that will further enhance the user’s understanding of a subject. Ensuring relevant webpages on your site are connected will also help you to share their SEO juice and further boost your search visibility.
8. An absence of title tags and meta descriptions: These tags help search engines to understand the content and context of each page. Without these important aspects, your content could struggle to rank for your target keywords and phrases.
9. An absence of image alt tags: In addition to helping search engine crawlers to understand the content of an image, which they are unable to see, image alt tags are also beneficial to those who have a sight impairment.
10. Duplicate content: Search engines want to see original content, so much so that publishing duplicate content just isn’t worth the time or energy.

In Conclusion

SEO is a digital powerhouse behind every successful business and ensuring your online presence is appropriately optimised is vital if you want to strive towards bigger and better success moving forwards. The Search Creative team have the expertise and skills to help you to unlock the true potential of your digital strategy. So, if you want to talk all things SEO and content, please feel free to get in touch at your earliest convenience.

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Paul Smith

Director at Search Creative

Paul is a founding partner of Liverpool based SEO agency, Search Creative. Paul has more than 17 years’ experience in the SEO industry, creating and implementing bespoke SEO strategies that help local, national and international businesses unlock their true potential online.

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