Content marketing is a popular tactic that organizations use to educate, nurture and convert their users. Although content marketing can help sites reach their existing audiences, without SEO integration oftentimes the content will fail to reach new audiences or bring in meaningful traffic. SEO helps optimize the website to improve its visibility on search engine results, which compliments existing content marketing efforts.
When you have content marketing and SEO working in tandem, your site will:
- Gain visibility and traffic through search engine rankings.
- Engage new and existing users with high-quality, authoritative content.
First, What Is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the art of optimizing a website’s landing pages, performance, and content to achieve high rankings on Search Engines (like Bing and Google) for queries clients and customers are looking for. There are three main facets to an effective SEO strategy:
- Content Creation & Optimization: The creation and optimization of on-site content that targets relevant keywords.
- Authority Building: Includes on-site and off-site tactics to increase your website’s authority and expertise. On-site tactics include adding testimonials, author bios, or thought leadership content. Off-site tactics include content placements on high-authority websites.
- Technical Fixes: Technical optimizations of your website to ensure that search engines can crawl and index your web pages. Also includes tactics such as increasing web security, optimizing for mobile devices, and improving site speed performance.
When your content is created using SEO best practices, not only will your content rank but it will be more authoritative, optimized for user experience, and conversion-focused.
Now, What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and informative content to attract and engage a target audience. The goal is to build trust, establish authority, and ultimately drive profitable customer actions. Content marketing encompasses various formats such as blog posts, articles, FAQs, infographics, and more, distributed through channels like websites, social media, and email.
When executed correctly, it focuses primarily on delivering valuable information and solving problems for the audience rather than directly promoting products or services. This strategy helps businesses build strong relationships with their audience and, when crafted with SEO best practices in mind, can drive organic growth.
How Do SEO & Content Marketing Benefit Each Other?
Content marketing and SEO are two powerful digital marketing strategies that mutually benefit each other. Content marketing involves creating high-quality, relevant content, while SEO optimizes that content for search engines. When implemented together, content marketing provides valuable material that attracts and engages audiences, while SEO ensures that this content ranks prominently in search engine results.
Effective content boosts a website’s authority and relevance, key factors in SEO ranking algorithms. SEO, in turn, drives organic traffic to the well-crafted content. This synergy results in increased visibility, higher website traffic, and ultimately, greater brand exposure and authority.
What Makes a Good Piece of Content?
- Good content attracts ‘right fit’ traffic – The consumers your content targets should align with your product/service to guarantee conversions.
- Good content promotes messaging – Craft your messaging so that it resonates with customers. Then, implement that message across all of your content.
- Good content converts visitors – Asking them to download something, talk to sales, etc.
How to Develop SEO Content
When crafting content for SEO, focus on the details for each of the following:
- Targeting keywords with the right intent and low competition, and making sure people actually search for them
- Offering unique value to your target users within your selected topic as opposed to just re-writing information that already exists online
- What kinds of backlinks competitor content is getting
- How you can optimize your content to make it more engaging
How Does Google’s AI Rank Content?
Google is using AI to classify and rank content by learning from interactions with people who use the search engine. Google takes into consideration the content topic (based on keywords), quality (based on authority), structure (subheadings, content chunking, visuals), context (internal links, content type) and what other websites are saying about it (backlinks).
AI is better than a rules-based search engine (where Google originally started) because rather than being limited by human-defined rules, it can alter the algorithm based on what it learns.
AI can operate at scale in vast different niches. Google wants to rank medical information differently than it might rank toys, an e-commerce site, a travel site, or a local service where Google wants to show a map.
AI allows Google to optimize in all of these different niches at scale – not just billions of pages on the web, but millions of different types of content!
Google’s AI algorithm is also faster to update because it updates on its own. Additionally, it allows for semantic search which means Google understands what you’re looking for. If you’re searching for Microsoft, for example, the AI knows that Microsoft is a company with employees, but it also tries to determine your search intent to understand the query rather than just searching for words on a page. With search intent analysis, Google can determine whether a user is looking for information and navigation, or whether they’re looking to make a purchase.
What Are Some Outdated SEO Content Practices?
Some SEO agencies are still prioritizing outdated SEO content practices. Following these practices leads to lower-quality content, which results in poor rankings, traffic, and conversions. The following optimizations are obsolete in today’s SEO landscape:
- Keyword stuffing
- Keyword domains
- Writing for bots
- Buying backlinks
- Thin and useless content
- Pages for every keyword variation
- Anchor text manipulation
- Thin local pages
5 Ways To Effectively Integrate SEO Into Your Content Marketing Strategy
Here are a way key ways you can immediately start to integrate SEO into your content marketing strategy.
1. Keyword Search Intent Alignment
Using a keyword research tool, such as Ahrefs or Semrush, conduct keyword research to uncover phrases that align with your audience’s needs and the type of content you are providing. While it is important to choose keywords with high search volume, it is even more important to understand the intent behind the keywords. To understand the search intent of a keyword, simply look at its search engine result page. Are most of the pages ranking informational blog pages? Or are they Shop pages? What type of information is included on the pages?
For example, say our team at Fire&Spark wants to create a new blog post for the website about our SEO content marketing services, primarily targeting the keyword “seo content marketing services”. Looking at that keyword’s SERP, we can quickly see that the majority of ranking page are service pages not blog pages.
This signals to us that, since Google is primarily ranking service pages, most users searching for “seo content marketing services” are not looking for general information about SEO content marketing, but are looking to understand companies’ specific services and possibly even submit a quote or convert.
On the other hand, the keyword “seo content marketing” has more informational blog pages ranking in the SERPs. This signals to our team that targeting “seo content marketing” is a better choice for our blog.
2. Incorporate Authority & Trust Signals
Strive to craft content that showcases your industry expertise and thought leadership. In-depth articles, case studies, and whitepapers can solidify your position as a trusted source of information. High-quality, authoritative content attracts both readers and backlinks, strengthening your SEO standing.
It is important to note that improving your content’s authority not only comes from creating high-quality content. The addition of trust factors to your content can also increase the authority of content.
A few ways to add trust factors to your content includes:
- Citing reputable sources
- Adding author biographies with credentials
- Adding FAQs
- Pulling from your company’s lived experience and expertise
3. Branch Out From Brand Specific Content
Oftentimes, we work with clients that publish a lot of blog content that is brand and product oriented. While there is nothing wrong with this type of content, usually it is not the type of content that brings in a lot of organic traffic. It is important to have a mix of content so you are also targeting relevant keywords with high search volume.
For example, take this blog post published on ugg.com:
While this blog does an excellent job of showcasing UGG’s latest collection, the blog is not optimized for organic search. According to Ahrefs, the blog only brings in 2 organic visitors per month and ranks for 3 keywords. When your blog content is too closely tied to your brand, oftentimes it will not target high search volume, non-branded keywords. To rectify this, UGG could supplement this blog by also publishing a more SEO-friendly piece, such as “6 Ways To Style Slippers in Autumn”.
4. Research What Is Working For Competitors, But Do It Better
A key part of any content marketing strategy, especially when SEO is incorporated, is to do a thorough competitor analysis. This will help you not only understand what is working well for your clients, but where there are gaps in their content that your website can fill. When evaluating your competitor’s content for SEO, it is important to use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. A couple of key metrics to evaluate are:
- Total number of backlinks
- Number of keywords ranking
- The search volume of the keywords the content piece ranks for
- The Keyword Difficulty of the keywords
- Traffic
Once you have established which content pieces or strategies are working well for your competitors that you want to emulate on your own website, it is time to identify how you can differentiate your content from the competition. Add your own unique expertise and spin to the content to ensure it stands out and provides more useful information.
5. Utilize A Pillar Content Strategy
An SEO pillar content strategy is an approach that involves creating comprehensive, authoritative, and in-depth content on a specific topic or theme. This content serves as the cornerstone or “pillar” of a website’s content structure, with related, shorter articles linking to it, enhancing the website’s authority and visibility on search engines for relevant keywords.
It’s important to note that the related, shorter content pieces do not need to all be blog articles. They can be FAQs, videos, or landing pages such as glossary pages, review pages, comparison pages, and more.
Pillar content strategies are so important for SEO because they concentrate your topical authority in a few key areas, which is more effective than creating one content piece for a variety of topics.
Interested in working with an SEO content marketing expert?
Key SEO Content Marketing Takeaways
- Integrating SEO with content marketing is vital for expanding reach and driving meaningful traffic by optimizing website visibility on search engines.
- SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, involves enhancing landing pages, content, and performance to achieve high search engine rankings.
- Content marketing is about creating valuable, relevant content to attract and engage a target audience, building trust and authority.
- SEO and content marketing mutually benefit each other, increasing visibility, traffic, authority, and brand exposure.
- Outdated SEO practices like keyword stuffing and buying backlinks should be avoided in favor of modern SEO emphasizing quality and relevance.
