When doing keyword research, it is essential to go beyond the common keywords and terms as these keywords would have higher competition levels, which will not allow your business to rank on the first page of search results. Rather dig out long-tail keywords and phrases that will help your business in getting relevant traffic.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a part of digital marketing that involves creating relevant and appropriate content to attract more users. The sole aim of content marketing is not always sales. Like for example, content marketing could work for educating the customer in the form of ebooks. 

The purpose could also be to make the customer move down the marketing funnel or provide entertainment. Content marketing goals could be different, but the idea behind it is to add some value to your audience. Content marketing also helps in building a relationship with potential leads and customers. It is crucial to create content that would appeal to your audience. Good content with an enticing headline helps in improving the click-through rate of the website. The audience visits your website for handy ready to absorb content. The content should also be shared on the social media pages. This helps in driving more traffic to your website—moreover, this aids in developing a brand name for your business.

What is the relationship between SEO and Content Marketing? How do they work together?

Social media is the most common platform to share the content. But sharing content here does not guarantee that it reaches the right audience. SEO provides information to the users at the moment when they need it. Think about the last time you searched online. For gaining information on any query, search engines are used. It was observed that 57% of the marketers feel that relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic. So even if SEO and content marketing might appear different, they are two sides of the same coin. Quality content helps in ranking your website better on SEO.

How does content affect your SEO?

Creating good quality content is the best way to improve search engine optimization. The content should be focused on the keywords that are majorly searched for, as this would increase your website’s visibility. When a customer does a search using any of those keywords or words related to your content, the search result will show it. Free exposure is given to your content when it ranks better on search engines. 

This helps in increasing brand awareness and also drives the relevant traffic to your website. The larger the potential traffic directed to your website, the better would be the conversions. SEO and content marketing are different tools but should be considered as the antagonist. They work wonders when put together. While SEO is more technical, content marketing is a broad term. To improve your search engine optimization, great content should be created.

SEO Content Marketing Strategy

SEO and content marketing do wonder when incorporated together. Here let’s talk about how to create an SEO content marketing strategy.

Analyze the target market

For SEO driven content marketing, it is essential to analyze your target market. If you want your strategy to be successful, then the content created should reach the right segment of the audience who are actually in need of your product and services. Therefore it becomes mandatory to analyze the target market. A buyer persona is important for your business. Information like age, gender, and location are available in the buyer’s profile. Other important information like buyer’s interest and buying behaviors are also available. All this helps in creating content that would be much appreciated by the target audience. Another important thing to include in your content is the frequently asked questions. 

These questions are the major concerns of the audience related to your business. Understanding the challenges which the target audience face and providing solutions to them in your content will help in creating engaging content. You already know what your audience needs and are serving them decorated on a platter.

Find the most relevant keyword

The most frequently searched keyword should be included in your content. This would increase the visibility of the content on the search engine. Moreover, the audience would find this content valuable. Most of the efforts should be put into this part of the content. Targeted keywords also help in generating quality leads for your website, and those can be converted for a ready purchase.

Create quality content

Once the process of identifying the most relevant keyword is done. The focus should shift towards creating topics around them. Create content which not only includes blog posts but other reading stuff like ebooks and white papers. Video content could also be created around these topics, which the users may find interesting. 

Just sprinkling keywords all over your content won’t ease the task. Instead, the content should be of high quality. The search engine would penalize you by giving a lower rank if the quality of the content is not good. To create effective content, try to write one that does not have any grammatical or spelling mistakes, use examples to generate interest in the reader, write in such a way so that the audience finds it relatable and easy to read.

Frequently update your content

Content creation is not a one-time thing. You constantly need to update it. Although your blog posts will keep getting traffic over the years, updating the content will keep it refreshed. One needs to understand that the customer’s preferences keep changing with the change in time. 

Hence the content should be reviewed periodically. Including the new keywords, updating the facts and statistics, and refreshing the blog writing style so that it becomes more appealing, are few of the techniques to keep the content updated.

Benefits of SEO driven Content Marketing

Let’s lookup for some of the benefits that SEO driven content marketing has to offer:-

Longer the content, the more the keywords opportunities

Content marketing does not restrict you to specific word limits. These could be in the form of long blog posts, ebooks, or guides where more keywords could be incorporated. Relevant keywords that your audience is highly likely to use would improve your SEO rankings. According to a survey, it has been observed that pages with higher content rank higher in the search engine results pages. However, quality content is preferred over content size.

Engaging content keeps the audience on the page for longer

People who visit your page might leave the page if they don’t find the content relevant to their searches. This is called the bounce rate. Engaging content reduces the bounce rate of your page. A very high bounce rate is a signal that something is incredibly wrong with the page. Content that doesn’t help your viewers is of no use. So the length of the content is essential, but then one should not compromise on the content quality.

Unique content gives better ranking

Unique content ranks higher as SEO looks for something that has never been done before. Keyword research is crucial, and content should be built around it. Try to include long tail keywords and phrases in the content to make it unique. This would help in ranking better, along with providing resourceful content to your audience.

Read more: 5 Ways how Content Marketing and Social Media work together