SEO and Content Marketing: 7 Reasons Your Business Needs A Strategy For Both To Thrive

SEO and Content Marketing: How To Take Advantage of Both

Gone are the days when you could succeed in SEO by simply tweaking your website design, keyword stuffed titles and other lame techniques that Google now frowns upon.

The horrible thing is people still believe that these kinds of SEO tactics will help them to hit the first page of Google for their desired keywords, and bring in huge organic traffic.

Just simply browse through freelancing websites like Elance or oDesk, and you’ll end up finding huge demand for so called “SEO experts” who could guarantee a website to be ranked well on Google for particular keywords.

SEO and Content Marketing: On-Page Optimisation Isn’t Enough

Don’t get it wrong.

This article is not written to bash every SEO tactic that has been recommended by SEO experts.

In fact, it is in your best interest to follow some basic SEO guidelines, to help the search robots to find and crawl through your website easily.

So that’s what technical SEO is all about; helping the search engines to access, crawl and index your website, without getting penalised for bad practices.

However, simply optimising your website for search engines won’t guarantee you the top spot on Google.

Here’s where content marketing comes in.

Below we’ll be discussing how content marketing differs from SEO and why it is one of the most effective ways to make your SEO efforts go further.

1. Content Marketing Increases Traffic

Let me repeat it, the purpose of technical SEO is to help search engines find, crawl and index your website. You can’t get to number 1 by simply implementing the best SEO practices to your website.

Why? Because everyone else is doing the exact same thing.

So, how would you differentiate yourself from your competitors and bring in targeted, hungry prospects to your website.

The answer is content marketing, which is one of the proven ways to gain targeted traffic.

What is Content Marketing

Content marketing is about creating content of value (articles, whitepaper downloads, videos, infographics etc.) to attract and convert your target audience into customers. It’s about educating and building a relationship with your prospects, so that they trust you enough to do business with you.

Whilst content marketing can bring in a lot of traffic to your website, it can also be a complete waste of time and money if you fail to do proper research beforehand.

How to get the best results from content marketing

1. Focus on long tail keywords: Long tail keywords are 3-4 keyword phrases that are very specific about what you are selling. When a customer uses a specific search phrase on Google, such as a question, the more likely they’re looking for an answer to that specific problem.

2. Be consistent: Publishing consistently is one of the key aspects of content marketing. Whether it is one post a day or one post a week. Pick a schedule, and stick to it! As for length, it is better to post in-depth, high quality content over short blog posts, as you’ll be ranking for LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords, which increases the amount of traffic you attract to your website.

2. Content Marketing Establishes Your Brand As An Authority

The success of your website lies with how effectively you can convert your visitors into leads.

If you nurture your leads properly, you can double or triple the lifetime value of your customers, meaning that more business will generate more revenue and sales for years to come.

However, converting your website visitors into raving customers, isn’t easy.

There are a lot factors that could affect the purchasing decision of a customer.

The biggest factor is how trustworthy your customers think you are.

One of the best things about content marketing is that it helps you establish your brand as an authority in your market. Here’s how to use content marketing to build your authority and your brand.

• Guest blogging:

Publishing regular articles on high profile websites and blogs will increase brand exposure and establish yourself as an authority in your niche. Learn how to effectively use guest blogging to grow your business here.

• Testimonials:

Because in branding, it doesn’t matter what you think about yourself. All that matter is what your customers think about you.

As Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon says “your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”.

So to grow the trust factor, instead of you talking about yourself, make your customers talk about you.

WikiJob, UK’s largest graduate job website has successfully increased conversions by 34% by effectively using testimonials on their website.

• Case studies:

Another way to bring great value to your brand is by creating and publishing case studies. It not only tells your potential customers what they can expect while hiring you but it also helps you gaining more trust from customers.

Neil Patel has successfully increased his sales by 185% using case studies on website.

3. Content Marketing Expands Your Reach

Though, publishing content on blogs is one of the best and commonly used content marketing strategies, content marketing is not just limited to blogging and guest posting. It includes producing infographics, slide share presentations, ebooks, videos, etc.

Here are some real world examples of companies using content marketing strategies to grow their business.

Example 1: KISSmetrics generated 41,142 backlinks with infographics

KISSmetrics is one of the top companies that leverage the power of infographics. In two years, they’ve created total of 47 infographics.

In addition to publishing great infographics, they also place an embed code below each infographic so that anyone can use the code to embed it on their website.

This strategy helped them generate 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 websites in 2 years.

Creating infographics for your blog

Data is the bread and butter of your infographics.

Unless you have good data, your infographics won’t do well, no matter how beautiful the graphics you designed. You can create data sets by researching yourself or by hiring a professional writer.

Once you have a great data set, you’ll need to find a designer to create the infographic for you. You can use sites like behance and search for the word “infographic” to find great infographic designers. However, if you don’t prefer to spend a lot of money on designers, you can use sites like infogr.am or PiktoChart.com to create them yourself.

Example 2: Copyblogger increased email sign-ups by 400% with premium content

Building your e-mail list is a common marketing strategy used by many businesses online.

However, the team at Copyblogger wanted to offer more value to their subscribers than simply providing an e-book for an email address.

They took it a step further by creating a premium content library called “MyCopyblogger” (essentially a membership website) that consists of 15 high-quality e-books and a 20-part internet marketing course, which is accessible to registered subscribers only.

Essentially they created content and hid it behind a free-paywall you can only get access to by registering.

The result?

Copyblogger grew their e-mail list by 400%

Creating a content library for registered users

The first thing you need is content. Quality, authoritative content.

If you already have great content on your blog you only need to repurpose it, to turn it into an ebook and an email course.

Here are some cool tools that will help you create a content library.

• Open Office: One of the best programs to create ebook. After all, it’s free. Open Office easily allows you to convert doc file into pdf. In fact, if you prefer publishing epub version, just install Writer2ePub, an Open Office extension.

• Membership WP plugin: This free plugin helps you create fully functional membership site. It provides members only access to ebook downloads and online contents, etc.

4. Content Marketing Leverages The Viral Power of Social Media

Though SEO is all about search engine thing, content marketing is more than that. Studies show that content like list posts, videos and infographics are more likely to be shared on social media.

Leveraging the viral effect on social media can be hugely useful in many different ways.

1. It can bring a lot of traffic to your website and helpful to spread brand awareness as well.

2. Share counts can be used as social proof of your brand. According to various studies, 63% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a site if it has good social proof.

3. Future SEO lies on social media. Because more people are spending time on social media than ever, search engines have started to index it, and social signals are now a being a factor of search engine rankings.

List25 is one of the most popular entertainment sites that use content marketing to leverage the viral power of social media.

Because each article is a list post, which consists of funny and intriguing images, List25 gets huge amounts of social shares for each post.

In addition, they also create and publish slideshow style videos on Youtube using the images from their blogs as thumbnails.

This helps them to increase the amount of traffic and backlinks they get from Youtube, as they place links to their website in the description box.

Here, we’ve written about the many benefits of using Youtube for business, and how to get started.

Here are some simple tips for creating a social media strategy that helps you plan and execute your social media goals.

• Focus on few social platforms: Ideally, you will need to spend time on every social media sites available. However, as a small business, you may not have enough money and time to do so. So identify which social media channels your potential customers participate on.

• Schedule your posts: Updating regularly on social media could be time consuming process. So for regular updates, it is better to use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule your social media posts.

5. Content Marketing Allows You To Establish Relationships in Your Market

Building relationships is key for growing your business.  This helps you to meet likeminded people, establish meaningful relationships and to also get referrals to your business.

So it is true that networking can help you grow your business by getting referrals, but the general rule of thumb is to offer something first before expecting something. It’s important that you have some social capital with people before you start asking for favor.

There are many ways to use content marketing to expand your professional network. Here are some of them.

Publish interviews: One of the best ways to create relationship with pioneers in your niche is to conduct interviews with them. This helps you to put you on their radar.

Create round up posts: In case if you have never heard about it, round up posts is like you propose a single topic and reach out to other members on your niche, and they weigh their answers or opinions on that topic. One of the best things about round up posts is it helps to establish relationship with many people for a single post.

Create webinars: You may know that webinars are great way to generate leads. In addition, you can also use webinars to expand your professional network by bringing leaders in your niche to your webinars as guest speakers.

Blog commenting: Commenting on blogs is one of the easiest ways to connect with people in your niche. Though, it may sounds like old fashion tactic, commenting can be a great way to build relationship around your niche circles even today.

6. Strengthens User Engagement

Marketing has evolved into a two-way conversation between publishers and users.

Traditional marketing practices like broadcasting promotional messages into masses and hoping it to grab wider audiences won’t work anymore in this digital era. So, making passive users into engaging users is the life blood of every website.

In fact, engagement is what makes a normal visitor turns into returning visitor and what a returning visitor turns into customer.

Making visitors to be engaged doesn’t always mean to make them click on anything or make them buy your products. Engagement also includes providing great user experiences by answering their questions to solve their issues.

Here are some tips to make your passive visitors to be engaged on your website.

Encourage users to comment on your blog: If you are not getting any comments on your blog, probably it’s because you’re not asking for it.

Reply to each comment: This could be time consuming but making two way conversations is one of the important aspects of building user engagement on your blog.

Create value to each post: Publishing frequent mediocre content will make your readers leave from your blog. If you want to make them stick around, make sure you provide great value to each post.

Optimised for mobile: Make sure your page loads quickly and works on mobile devices and tablets. Studies show that customers are more likely to be engaged while on mobile. According to Google, nine out of 10 searches on a mobile device result in an action.

7. More reliable

One of the best things about SEO traffic is it brings targeted traffic to your website. Potential targeted visitors are one who more likely to become your customer.

However, as search engine algorithms change frequently (roughly two to three times a year), depending solely on SEO traffic can be dangerous. You need to diversify the focus of your online marketing strategy by not depending only one, single traffic source. Here’s where content marketing has a big role to play.

Though, content marketing helps you to gain targeted SEO traffic, it doesn’t focus on search engine traffic alone. Apart from bringing SEO traffic, it also has potential to gain referral as well as social media traffic.

Conclusion

To make it clear, SEO and content marketing are 1 in the same.

Content marketing is one of those proven SEO strategies, which has huge potential to bring massive traffic and exposure to your brand.

At first, you need to do SEO technically right if you are looking for long term sustainable success of your content marketing.

You may need to spend a lot of time implementing technical SEO strategies on your website. In case if you got Google slap, you’ll need to tweak your design and restructure it to ensure that you comply with the latest search engine standards and regulations.

Extra Bonus

Finally, to end on a nice note, we wanted to share a really good infographic from Salesforce‘s Blog regarding Content Strategy.

Via Salesforce