How does SEO Content Marketing strategy differ from regular marketing? What makes it unique?
Websites are built around content – blog posts, images, or videos. SEO Content Marketing aims to get backlinks to your site (and thus improve your ranking) by creating useful, high-quality content.
Creating great content takes time and effort, regardless of whether you use several types of SEO techniques. It also requires good writing skills and knowledge of SEO principles. Finally, your success depends on having an effective plan and enough resources to carry out your plans.
How Marketing and SEO Can Collaborate to Give Your Better Results
Content marketing and SEO aren’t mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they’re often used together because they both focus on different aspects of digital marketing. But combining the two doesn’t mean you’ll end up with random blog posts. Instead, it means focusing on creating high-quality content that helps people solve problems and learn about individual topics they care about. Then you can optimize that content for search engines like Google and Bing.
While content marketing aims to reach potential customers, the process starts with attracting visitors to your website. Once that happens, you can use SEO techniques to help make sure that your awesome content is read by the right market at the right time. It’s a win-win situation.
The Secret to a Successful SEO Content Marketing Strategy
The most successful companies combine SEO and content marketing into a single strategy. This allows them to build brand awareness, generate leads, and increase sales.
Think Search Engine in Mind When Writing
Search engines are trying to comprehend the context of every piece of information online. They analyze text, images, videos, and even audio files.
This doesn’t just apply to web pages; it applies to blogs, too. When you post a blog article, think about how search engines might index it. What words would they look for? How would they categorize it? Would they include images? Videos? Audio?
If you’re looking to optimize your site for search, there are three things you need to know. First, focus on the keyword sparingly. Second, keep your content focused on topics related to your business. And third, ensure you’ve got a good balance of text and images.
Keep on Producing Quality Content
To rank high in search results, you must keep producing quality content. Search engines like to see fresh content regularly published because it tells them you are active and interested in what they offer. If you don’t post anything new, they assume you aren’t interested and won’t return.
Know Your Marketing Objectives
Before creating content, it’s crucial to define what you want from your content marketing plan. You’ll want to clearly outline your objectives and how each piece of content fits into your broader campaign. This way, you can ensure that your efforts are focused on achieving those key goals.
The most common mistake companies make is thinking that their content needs to be “good.” Instead, define specific outcomes you’d like to achieve through your content. For example, you want to increase brand awareness, lead generation, or sales. Once you’ve defined your objectives, it becomes much easier to determine where to focus your energy.
Build Your Goals
Content marketing is one of those ideas that sound great in theory, but it only sometimes works out quite as you’d hoped. But there’s no reason you shouldn’t start with a clear goal – what do you want to achieve? And once you’ve figured that out, how about starting at the end? Once you know where you’re heading, you’ll be able to plan everything else around getting there.
Identify Your Keywords through Your Ideal Audience
It’s vital to find out what people are looking for online. This involves doing some keyword research.
You’ll need to identify your target audience and define your ideal customer. Next, you’ll use this information to determine what content types you’ll produce and how they will fit into your overall strategy. To start, you’ll want to conduct some basic keyword research.
Once you’ve identified potential keywords, you’ll want to narrow down the list. Start by asking yourself questions such as: Who am I targeting? What problems do my customers face? How does my product solve those problems?
Perform Keyword Research
Now that you’ve got a good list of potential topics, it’s time for some real keyword research. You don’t want to throw random words into a piece of content and hope it works. Your chances of success are much better if you start researching what people are searching for. This will allow you to find relevant keywords that people are typing into the search bar.
Create a Roadmap for Your Content Marketing Goals
You should expand your target keywords into topics—which are essentially broad terms that describe what you want to write about. This is where you start to think about what you’re writing about and what you want to talk about.
This is a great marketing opportunity to make sure you’re thinking about the topic from both sides. What does it mean to you? And what does it mean to others? Once you’ve thought about this, you’ll use a tool like WordStream to find related words, such as synonyms, collocations, and phrases.
Develop Your Topic List
Now that you’ve identified what types of content your brand needs to produce, it’s time to brainstorm topics that are relevant to your brand’s goals. Brainstorming helps you think outside the box and develop ideas that might not occur to you otherwise.
Start by asking yourself questions such as these: What do I want my brand to stand for? What problems does our industry solve? What makes us different from competitors? And finally, why should someone care about my brand? Once you answer those questions people search for, start brainstorming relevant topics that align with your brand’s goals.
Be Practical and Realistic When Creating Your Editorial Content Calendars
Content marketers are often caught up in daydreaming about the perfect piece of content they want to publish. But unless you’re writing a book, there’s no way you could produce everything you dream of every week. So, it’s essential to set yourself some goals and stick to them.
The most important task is to decide upon a monthly goal, such as publishing five blog posts each month. From there, you can determine exactly how much time you need to devote to your valuable content creation each week.
Once you know how long you need to dedicate to creating a dedicated content strategy, you can start planning. You don’t necessarily need to plan out every post in advance; think about the main points you want to cover and the angles you want to take. Upon conceiving an idea of what you want to say, try to identify the best ways to say it. Consider whether you want to use images, video, or audio to support your argument. Finally, consider how you can vary your style and tone – you don’t always have to use dry academic language. If you’re trying to communicate something emotional, you can go straight for the heartstrings.
Always Present Fresh Content
If you want to improve your site’s performance, there are several things you must consider. One of those things is updating your content regularly. You might think that you’re done once you hit “publish,” but you’d be wrong.
If you want good UX and rankings, it’s necessary to reevaluate old articles to ensure they remain useful occasionally. Then, you can keep it fresh and updated by making the necessary changes. These updates don’t just happen automatically, though. They require some planning and effort.
Evaluate Your Links
In terms of link building, there are plenty of ways to go wrong. Some of those mistakes include overbuilding, buying links, and spamming forums. But one mistake should be addressed: evaluating the value of your inbound links. There are several ways to do this, including looking at anchor text, domain authority, and linking profile.
The best way to evaluate whether a linkback from a site that ranks well in Google is worth something is to look at how much traffic those sites send to yours. If there is no significant increase in traffic to your site, then the linkback isn’t worth anything. But it might be worth considering if it sends many visitors to your site.
Evaluate How Content Affects Site Structure
When you start creating more content for your blog, it’s important to consider how this will affect your site structure. This includes where each piece of content lives on your site, whether there are multiple versions of a particular post, etc. In addition, if you want to keep your readers happy and help improve your rankings, it’s important to consider how your site works and how users navigate around it.
The same goes for Google and others. They use site structure to determine your content’s relevance to specific queries. So, if you’ve got a bunch of duplicates scattered throughout your site, it could hurt your chances of showing up in the organic search results.
Reoptimize if Necessary
Your content marketing campaign and SEO are long-term strategies. You should continue working on one tactic because you think you’ve reached success. Instead, continue to optimize your site based on what you learned and how well your efforts worked.
Monitor your search engine rankings over time. If you notice a sudden drop in rank, check out why. Was there something wrong with your previous work? Did Google update its algorithm? Were you hit with penalties? Make sure you know the answer to these questions before jumping into action.
Keep tabs on your organic traffic. How much did you grow? What percentage of visitors came from social media? Are you getting enough leads? Do you want more? These are all great metrics for measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.
Finally, look at your reach and impressions. How many unique visitors do you receive regularly? Where are they coming from? Is your relevant content being shared across multiple platforms? These numbers tell us a lot about the quality of your content and whether you should invest more resources in creating better pieces of content.
Reclaim Links
Brand mentions are great – especially when they link out to your site. But what happens when people mention your brand without linking to it? You might think nothing happened, but there could be big consequences. You’ll want to keep an eye on mentions like these because they’re often signs of spammy activity.
If you want to build linkable and share-worthy content, you’ll need to know how to find out where people are talking about your brand online. You can try Google Alerts and Moz Pro to monitor mentions of your brand, but there’s no guarantee those mentions will lead to actual links.
The best way to ensure your brand gets mentioned where it matters most is to claim those mentions yourself. There is a tool called Link Reclamation that makes it easy to reclaim unlinked mentions across social media platforms.
Write More Long-Form Content
One thing that hasn’t changed though is the importance of quality long-form blog content. In fact, according to research conducted by BuzzSumo, people spend nearly twice as much time reading long-form content on average compared to shorter posts. Even better long-form content performs even better on social networks. People are sharing longer blog posts and infographics on social media and doing it more frequently.
When writing long-form content, focus less on quantity and more on quality. Of course, you can always add more words to your post later, but adding too many long-tail keywords will hurt your chances of ranking highly. Instead, try focusing on providing useful content that’s interesting to your audience.
Simplify Your SEO Strategy Campaign
There are various ways to optimize your site for search engines, such as social media posts, video marketing, etc., and it can seem like there’s no end to how much work you need to put into your campaigns. But, in reality, just one thing needs to happen daily. And that’s optimizing your site for search engines.
The goal here isn’t necessarily to rank #1 for every keyword but to focus on improving your conversion rates and driving organic traffic to specific landing pages. This requires much less effort than ranking for hundreds of popular keywords, but it still takes some planning and execution.
So, let’s look at a few tips to help simplify your process.
Focus On One Keyword Per Month
When you think about it, there are only 24 hours a day, meaning that you will need more time working on multiple projects. Instead, try focusing on one project per month. If you want to work on a long-term campaign, break it down into four weeks, six months, or even 12 months. Then, you can make sure that you keep momentum along the way.
Prioritize Your Workflow
Once you have identified the key areas you need to focus on, figure out where you’ll spend most of your time. For example, you’ll spend three days a week doing blog posts, while another three days will go towards social media management. Once you know what tasks you need to complete each day, you can better organize your schedule.
Set Up a Schedule
Now that you know what to do, set up a calendar to stay organized. It doesn’t matter if you use Google Calendar, Outlook, Trello, or any other system, but make sure that you stick with one method throughout your entire campaign.
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