How Content Marketing and SEO Work Together for Maximum Impact
Last update: 2 September 2024 at 03:49 pm
4.50/5If you want to optimize your digital strategy, look no further. In this guide, we explain how content marketing and SEO work together to improve your SERP rankings and maximize your engagement and conversion rates.
Keep in mind that SEO alone can help your brand rank highly in search engine results. But it is the quality of your content that will help convert each user into a subscriber, user, or customer. The same goes the other way around. You can have amazing content on your site on a regular basis, but without SEO optimization, no one will find or read it.
So let’s take a look at how these two elements work together and how you can maximize their benefits.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating, publishing, and distributing online content in order to attract and engage your target audience. It can also be part of digital marketing.
As you may know, this comes in different forms and shapes. Some of the most common are blog posts, emails, newsletters, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, podcasts, videos, etc.
Remember, the goal of your content pieces is not to sell any of your products. It’s to earn and nurture the trust of your readers.
What is Search Engine Optimization – SEO?
On the other hand, SEO refers to the process of optimizing and improving your website, including the content you publish on it. The whole purpose is to make your site visible on different search engines for different keywords and search intents.
This process involves several practices, including:
- On-Page SEO: The optimization of elements within each page, including titles, meta tags, keywords, meta descriptions, images, subheadings, etc.
- Off-Page SEO:Improvements made outside of your website, including backlinks, social media, guest blogging, and influencers.
- Technical SEO: Optimizing the structural elements of your website to improve performance and user experience. This includes practices such as crawling, indexing, HTTPS, and site speed.
These actions have a direct impact on your ranking and organic traffic numbers.
What Is The Difference Between Content and SEO and Content Creation?
As you can see, while these two concepts are related, there are still some differences between them. Here’s a quick overview of them:
- SEO is responsible for driving traffic to your website or content pages. To achieve this it takes a few actions including on-page, off-page, technical and local optimization.
- Content marketing, on the other hand, is the way you keep those visitors on your site and engaged with the different pieces of content you publish.
In short, to be successful in the digital world, you need to implement both of these marketing concepts.
How Content Marketing Helps SEO?
As we mentioned earlier, content marketing and SEO complement each other. When you have both elements as part of your marketing strategy, you will see benefits such as
- Improved search engine rankings: Creating relevant and valuable content pieces and optimizing them for search engines will help you climb the search rankings.
- Increased relevant organic website traffic: SEO helps put your content in front of target users who are most likely to engage with it.
- Increased visibility and brand awareness: As you begin to show up for various search queries, you will increase users’ interest in learning more about your brand, products, and services. Both SEO and content marketing are responsible for this.
- Improved user experience: SEO helps create a better user experience on your site by improving page speed, optimizing for mobile devices, and improving content.
So let’s see how you can implement both concepts on your site.
How Do You Combine SEO and Content Marketing?
So far, we’ve made it clear that you need to combine SEO and content marketing efforts to succeed in the digital world. Now it’s time for us to share our expertise and show you how.
Work with Content Hubs
Creating and optimizing content on specific topics helps inform both your audience and search engines that you are an expert in that area. Keep in mind that Google highly values authority, relevance, and quality for ranking purposes.
So when deciding what topics to rank for, make sure they are relevant to your target audience, that they are related to their search intent, and that you are able to provide value (insights, thoughts, and opinions).
For example, if you are a health and wellness company, you can create content around healthy morning routines and help your readers understand how to start their day right.
Publish Content for Humans and Search Engines
When you start writing content, always remember that your end reader is a human, not a search engine. You want to write in a way that matches their search intent, answers their questions, and provides insights that they will find interesting.
To match their search intent, we highly recommend using the Semrush Keyword Overview tool. It will not only tell you the average monthly searches each keyword gets or how competitive it is, but it will also specify the search intent it has.
There are 4 types of search intents:
- Informational intent: Looking for information about a specific topic.
- Navigational intent: Wants to find a specific brand or page.
- Commercial intent: Researching options before making a purchase decision.
- Transactional intent: Looking to complete a purchase.
Your prospects will use different keywords depending on where they are in the buying process. Your job is to create content for each stage that will help nurture them and move them to the next stage.
SEO makes your content readable, crawlable, and indexable by search engines. If you need help in this process, you can always reach out to one of the best SEO content creation agencies.
Conduct On-Page SEO
Once your content is all written, you need to make sure you edit it with on-page SEO best practices in mind. We’ve published The Ultimate 2024 Checklist for On Page SEO Services that goes into great detail on what to do, but here’s a quick recap:
- Conduct keyword research.
- Craft meta tags and descriptions that encourage searchers to click and visit your site.
- Make your content easy to read with header tags.
- Create the perfect URL structure.
- Do some internal linking.
- Optimize your images.
- Optimize for mobile.
- Check your page speed and performance.
- Working with schema markup and structured data.
- Pay close attention to user experience (UX) and engagement.
- Don’t forget security and HTTPS.
Keep Up with your Content Calendar
You must publish content on a regular basis; there is no set number of pieces you must publish each week or month. But it’s a known fact that this practice helps you send more signals to Google and quickly rank for more search queries. This means more targeted organic traffic, higher engagement and more conversions.
Our Popular and The Best Keyword Research Tools for SEO blog post will help you understand the different tools available on the market and how they can help you find different keywords to continue generating more and more pieces of relevant information and high quality.
Check your Backlinks and Look for More
Pay close attention to checking your backlinks and reaching out for more. To perform the audit, you’ll want to use tools like Moz’s Link Explorer. They are designed to give you information on how many backlinks your site has, what they are, and the page and domain authority with just one click. You can also compare your site to your competitors to see who is doing the best and what you can replicate from their strategies.
Once you have an understanding of which websites are mentioning your brand, products or services, you can start manually contacting them and asking them to add a link to your site. Make sure your email is very specific:
- Where they mention your company.
- What link you suggest they add.
The more backlinks you have, the better signals you send to Google about how relevant and authoritative your site is.
Answer your Audience’s Questions
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: your content marketing efforts need to answer your people’s questions. Whether it’s a blog post, a video, a newsletter, or an infographic, you need to provide answers filled with valuable insight and information.
Tools like Semrush Keyword Magic Tool are packed with features to help you find the search terms your target audience is using, and even what questions they are typing into search engines. Another way to find these questions manually is to enter various search queries into Google’s search bar and look for the “People also ask” snippet.
Make sure you create relevant content around these questions and answer them in a direct and easy to understand way.
Create Evergreen Content
Fill your site with content that will be relevant weeks or months from now. You want readers to browse your site and find useful resources that they can use.
Try creating pieces such as checklists, glossaries, case studies, lessons learned ebooks, ultimate guides, etc. Make sure everything you share there is timeless, value-driven, and reusable.
Ultimately, you can repurpose any of these pieces to keep your social media accounts and newsletters filled with quality content and keep your audience engaged.
Consider Google’s E-E-A-T Acronym
Finally, your content marketing efforts must revolve around Google’s E-E-A-T. This acronym stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. It’s the perfect way to ensure that every piece of content you publish meets quality standards.
- Experience: Your content reflects personal experience with the topic.
- Expertise: You demonstrate significant knowledge of the topic
- Authoritativeness: You address the topic from a position of authority.
- Trustworthiness: Content comes from a trusted source.
When writing your content pieces, we highly recommend using tools like Semji or SurferSEO. They’re packed with features to help you understand if it’s readable and follows SEO best practices.
How to Measure and Analyze Your SEO Content Strategy
Once you start implementing content marketing and SEO, you want to track your results. This will help you understand whether your actions are getting you closer to your goals or holding you back.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for SEO-Driven Content Marketing
Depending on your content marketing and SEO goals (engagement, awareness, or conversions), your KPIs will vary. Here’s a quick recap of the metrics you should carefully monitor and analyze on a regular basis.
Engagement KPIs
- Organic traffic: You need to understand how many people are consuming your content. Google Analytics is the perfect place to find the number of unique page views.
- Click-through rate CTR: The most important engagement indicator is clicking on the links you share on a piece of content. To estimate this, divide the number of clicks received on a link by the total number of visitors to that page.
- Time on page: The time spent on your content is a key indicator of how people are responding to it and whether or not they find it interesting. The more time people spend on your page, the better for you. Use Google Analytics to find this metric.
- Bounce tate: Refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your site within seconds. The higher the bounce rate, the worse it is for your Google rankings. You can track this metric in Google Analytics.
- Comments: Carefully read how your audience engages with each piece of content you share. Their comments are full of data points that will help you understand if they feel positive, negative, or neutral.
Brand Awareness KPIs
- Keyword Ranking: It’s imperative that you monitor which keywords you’re ranking for and what content is responsible for them. You can use any of the tools mentioned here.
- Backlinks: An important metric to understand if you are signaling to Google how authoritative your site is. Moz’s Link Explorer will be your ally here.
- Referral traffic: An indicator of how many site visitors are coming from your backlinks, and which ones are performing best. You can use Google Analytics to check this metric.
- Social shares: The perfect indicator of whether visitors like your content enough to share it with others. The higher the number, the better for your brand awareness.
- Brand market share: Probably the most important KPI if your content marketing goal is brand awareness. It measures how many sales came from your efforts. To measure it, simply divide your total sales or revenue by the industry’s total sales over a fiscal period.
Conversion KPIs
- Conversion rate: You need to understand if your landing page is converting visitors. You can use Google Analytics to check your conversion numbers. Once you have them, simply divide them by the total number of visitors. The result is your conversion rate.
- New leads: If you have lead magnets and you want to track how many people actually sign up for them, these are the new leads from content marketing.
- Lifetime value: It’s important to understand how much revenue you can expect from a single customer. This will help you estimate how much you can spend to acquire each new customer.
- ROI: Helps you determine if the amount of money you spend on marketing activities is worth the amount of money you make in sales.
Conclusion
Businesses like yours need to develop and implement content marketing strategies that incorporate SEO techniques. This combination is the only way to ensure that you are creating quality content and getting it in front of your target audience,
We understand that getting started can feel complicated. But there’s no need to worry. You can hire SEO specialists with a background in content marketing, or you can work with a content marketing SEO agency. Both methods come with their own set of challenges and benefits, but ultimately the decision depends on your budget and business needs.
What really matters is that you, as a company, implement both concepts together. This is how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors and win a piece of the market share. Ready to get started?
