Contents
Content is essential for search engine optimisation, not just important. Without content, there would be no substance behind search engine listings and nothing to provide to users. Search engines rely on various types of content to provide their users with listings that are relevant and targeted to their needs.
To do this, they index and prioritise listings based on their performance on the web, popularity, and value. This content can be a text-based article, a Photoshop created infographic, a screen recorded tutorial, a WebCam or recorded video, or everything in between. Every day, there’s new technology being introduced that invites new ways of creating content. It’s a search engine’s job to find and display this content to their users.
What is Content Marketing in SEO?
Content marketing in SEO is the process of creating content that subtly promotes a brand, rather than directly, and using this content to build awareness and interest in your own products or services. By integrating a content marketing strategy into SEO, you can provide content that your audience will be more receptive to, and ultimately, it will perform better in search engines. Users love content that doesn’t “hard sell” a product or service, but rather, provides value and meaning.
Let’s also explore some of the reasons why content is essential to content marketing and growing your business organically online.
SEO and content marketing are not two separate ventures
Content marketing is often viewed as this overarching venture that supersedes SEO and is more of a branding effort than it is for traffic generation. In truth, SEO and content marketing are blended efforts that coincide together to create long-lasting results.
When businesses view SEO as an entirely separate process, they tend to limit their audience by creating search engine optimised content that merely touches the surface of providing value and does not strive to overachieve.
What is content marketing in SEO? It’s providing immense value and focusing on the ways your content can solve the problems your audience is facing. By producing something that’s valuable and meaningful to your users is how content marketing helps SEO.
SEO is technical, content marketing is more user-focused
It’s easy to get caught up thinking of search engine optimization (SEO) as a more technical endeavour, after all, when you look up rank factors or an SEO checklist, it often comes down to changing on-page HTML elements, rewriting URL structure, internally linking, and other technically sounding practices.
In truth, many of these things are just about optimising content to make sense to the robots that are going to be reading it. It’s not all that technical and things like “on-page HTML elements” are just how search engine robots decipher content. To take full advantage of content marketing you need to implement quality SEO strategies and to be effective with your SEO campaign, you need better quality content that’s based on a functional marketing strategy. Content marketing and SEO are essentially one process.
SEO requires content and content marketing fulfils that goal
To be effective with a search engine optimisation campaign, you have to produce valuable content that offers more to your audience than your competitors have provided. That often means going above and beyond to address their needs and concerns with exceptionally valuable written content, video and other media, and images such as infographics. The more that you can do to separate yourself from others in your industry, the more successful you will become and the better your results will be. SEO requires this extensive effort put into your content and content marketing is what fills that goal.
Both SEO and content marketing demand keyword usage
SEO requires you to produce content on a wide variety of keywords, which you then optimise that content to rank for those keyword phrases correctly. Content marketing requires equally vast keyword usage in your campaign. To appeal to a wider audience and address more pain points and concerns with your content, you have to uncover new keywords that your audience is searching with. Both SEO and content marketing demand extensive keyword research and usage within their implementation.
SEO and content marketing require backlinks
Backlinks are a significant aspect of search engine rankings and more backlinks to your content marketing campaigns means more exposure and popularity. Both SEO and content marketing benefit from gaining links. One of the best ways to build links to your content is to go out there and share it with your audience in the places that they frequently migrate to online. This includes social media groups, forums, question and answer communities, and other places where your content can get discovered. For both SEO and content marketing, these of the most valuable links to have.
SEO and content marketing require consistency
To rank at the top of the search engines, they need to see that you are dedicated to providing your audience with quality content. Both SEO and content marketing require this consistent effort to be successful. Just take a look at recent content marketing trends and you will see that consistency is key.
With any website development project, your success is often dependent on your ability to stay dedicated and focused long term. SEO and content marketing are no different. Google and all other search engines love fresh content and they reward you handsomely for your consistency in delivering it.
SEO requires a technical implementation and users benefit from this with content marketing
When you go the extra mile to ensure your web design and content is technically optimised, this also benefits a content marketing campaign. Everything about the content will be addressed and all the technical implementation is handled. In the end, all of this serves the user and helps to promote your content on a grander scale. Making content easier for search engines to index, analyse, and rank, also means that your content is easier for humans to find. Getting your content in front of the eyes of more readers is the goal of both SEO and content marketing. As a web page designer, this needs to be one of the primary goals for your website.
Conclusion
Ultimately, you can’t do search engine optimisation without also doing content marketing. You can’t be a content marketer without also addressing search engine optimisation. Doing one without the other would be doing shorting your audience and limiting your overall traffic potential.
If you would like to learn more and address your content marketing and SEO strategies on a grander scale, it’s important to dig deeper. Be sure to address the common concerns of SEO if you are a newcomer and explore some of the more basic on-page optimisation strategies.
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