It’s like peanut butter and jelly, Sonny and Cher, or bread and butter: content marketing and SEO (search engine optimization) just naturally go together. However, unless you know how content marketing helps SEO, merging both techniques into one effective strategy can be tricky.
Fortunately, with a little help from the team here at Results Digital, The Woodland’s SEO company, you can learn how both tactics support each other and create the driving force behind your marketing campaigns. Ultimately, we’ll help you take advantage of an excellent opportunity that can maximize your campaign performance and ROI (return on investment).
Defining the Buzzwords: SEO vs. Content Marketing
To help you better understand exactly how content marketing helps SEO, we’ll start with a quick definition of both terms.
What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, uses various techniques to improve the visibility of your website to your target audience. The goal is to increase the amount and quality of web traffic to your website and content via the organic search engine results pages (SERPs). However, there’s one word in that last sentence that’s more important than the rest: quality.
Frankly, driving more organic search traffic and increasing visibility for your website isn’t enough. You need to capture the specific people searching for the answers, products, or services your site provides — and that’s what SEO does. Standard strategies include:
- Link building
- Keyword research
- Content creation
- Title tag and meta description optimization
However, SEO doesn’t work by itself. You need to add the secret ingredient: quality content, which makes it possible for users to find your web page and the information they’re searching for in the first place.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the root of all digital advertising campaigns. Content means any form of information: blog posts, infographics, videos, podcasts, ebooks, service pages, etc.
Basically, content marketing is the process of creating, optimizing, and publishing helpful, relevant, and valuable information for a target audience. The goal is to deliver content that establishes trust, authority, and credibility within that audience, using strategies like search engine optimization (SEO).
But wait — content marketing isn’t necessarily just for promoting or selling your brand. Instead, it’s about educating, informing, and entertaining. Also, keep in mind that SEO isn’t a “magic bullet” that can transform bad content into good content and make it rank higher in the SERPs. If your content is full of errors, bad links, or useless, irrelevant information, sprinkling in a few keywords or embedding some cool videos just won’t cut it.
4 Ways Content Marketing Helps SEO
So how does content marketing help SEO to boost your campaign performance and growth for your business? Let’s explore the four main ways.
1. SEO Boosts Quality Traffic That Will Read Your Content
Did you know that about 68% of all website traffic is from searches? SEO can help you snag a share of that lucrative pie.
Naturally, people who search online are looking for information, answers, products, services, or brands. By utilizing high-quality content marketing and SEO, you can get more traffic from people looking for the information you provide. Then, as they discover that your site is a credible source of valuable information, they stay longer and move through your sales funnel, from visitors to leads and, eventually, loyal customers.
2. Publishing Content Provides Additional Opportunities for Keywords
Search engines don’t have people who manually view and analyze text and visuals. Instead, they use automated and artificial intelligence methods to categorize and index your website. That’s the fundamental importance of using SEO techniques like keywords, alt tags, and meta descriptions: to help search engine crawlers properly index and rank your page.
By combining SEO with content marketing, you gain more opportunities to use keywords that will help your page rank higher in the SERPs.
Without content marketing, you limit your website to a few quick paragraphs of homepage copy and visuals with alt text descriptions. By publishing content like blog posts, infographics, and FAQs, you have more places to leverage relevant keywords that help your target market find your website.
3. SEO and Content Marketing Can Boost User Experience
Another benefit of SEO and content marketing is improving user experience. The core elements of SEO are the quality of your content, website structure, internal links, etc. Search engine algorithms penalize websites that use “black hat” SEO or deceptive techniques to rank higher or drive more traffic. Black hat SEO examples include using paid links, stuffing keywords, or publishing stolen content.
By merging helpful, relevant content with SEO, you’re increasing the chance of ranking higher. Even better, you’re delivering a website with a positive user experience, which keeps users coming back for more and can convert them into loyal customers. For example, you can use SEO to improve page speed, create a responsive website, and optimize content. Ultimately, you’re contributing to a superior user experience by providing content with value to your audience.
4. SEO-Optimized Content Marketing Increases Brand Awareness and Visibility
As you know, the top five spots in the search engine rankings receive the most traffic and the highest click-through rates. But how can you reach those highly coveted spots and make sure your target market associates your brand or business with those high-ranking keywords or queries? Hopefully, you already know the answer: by leveraging both SEO and content marketing.
You need to post content that doesn’t just answer questions; it should also show readers that only you have the answers to their questions or problems. Try to include a fresh, unique perspective that doesn’t just regurgitate the same information from the top-ranking pages. The more you do this, the more luck you’ll have ranking highly in the SERPs.
Results Digital: Your Top Choice for an SEO Agency
Understanding how content marketing helps SEO can help your website rank higher, drive more traffic, and provide more value to your customers. If you need help developing an SEO content strategy and learning the most successful methods for content marketing, Results Digital is here to help. Call (281) 975-2086 now to request a consultation with our team of SEO digital marketing experts.
