Where SEO and Content Marketing Collide

Search engine optimisation (SEO) can seem like a bit of a mindfield. Just a simple Google search for ranking factors brings up thousands of different articles that are packed with different pieces of information and advice on optimising your website. With Google evaluating sites based on hundreds of different ranking factors, knowing where to aim your SEO strategy to get the biggest bang for your buck seems a little impossible.

But what if we told you that your content marketing efforts could actually be having a huge impact on your SEO performance, if you were to ensure you get a number of things right. Content marketing and SEO are two closely related digital marketing tactics, read on to find out how you can ensure you’re getting the most out of your efforts.

What is SEO

Firstly, let’s start with a brief overview of what SEO actually is. Search engine optimisation is the process of gaining and increasing relevant organic traffic. Essentially, it’s ensuring that your brand or business appears in search engine result pages when someone searches for something relating to your product or service.

As we mentioned above, there are hundreds of different ranking factors that Google takes into account when ranking your website in search results pages. A proper SEO strategy looks at three different areas: on-page, off-page and technical SEO. Within each category, there are many different areas that need to be continuously optimised to prove to Google that your website should be ranked favourably.

What is content marketing

Put simply, content marketing is a marketing tactic that’s used to attract and engage your target audience by creating and sharing relevant content. As a result of effective content marketing, your brand can enjoy an increase in awareness, a higher level of customer trust, and it ensures that your business is always top of mind when someone is looking for your product or service.

Content marketing is about providing the information that people are actually looking for, whether that’s answering common questions at the research stage of a buyers journey, or offering useful tips and tricks to existing customers.

Writing content for search engines as well as your users

When it comes to utilising your content marketing to boost your SEO performance, it’s absolutely essential that you write and produce content for your users AND search engines. What we  mean by this is ensuring that the content is easy to consume for your target reader, but also ticks a number of different boxes in the eyes of search engines.

Search engines now place a heavy emphasis on customer experience, rewarding websites that remain relevant, offer a good user experience and ultimately serve users with content that they want to read.

A great place to start when producing content for your website is keyword research. Keyword research is about finding and identifying keywords that you want your site to rank for, it also helps you uncover potential blog titles or evergreen content pieces. By undertaking this research beforehand, you can ensure that you’re serving your audience with content that they’re actually looking for, as well as giving your site a chance to rank for that specific search term.

Once you’ve identified your keyword, make sure you feature it regularly within your blog, in the page title and in the meta description . Gone are the days of keyword stuffing, but still make sure that you’re including your selected keyword where it’s natural to do so! 

As well as the above, make sure all aspects of on-page SEO are ticked to ensure you’re giving the page the best possible chance of ranking.

Producing valuable content that attracts links

The next area in which effective content marketing has a big impact on SEO performance is through attracting links. Quality content that provides genuine value has the potential of naturally acquiring backlinks (other websites linking to your website). Backlinks are a key ranking factor and one of the most difficult factors of SEO to get right, so producing content that naturally gains backlinks is a big win! 

Backlinks work by proving to search engines that your website is trustworthy and essentially is a vote of confidence for your website. In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content.

‍Just remember to EAT!

Our final tip for ensuring your content marketing efforts are as effective as they can be is keeping in mind the acronym EAT - expert, authority, trustworthy. These are the criteria that Google considers to be indicative of page quality.

Expert - make sure you’re writing in a way that proves the level of knowledge you have in your area. Show your expertise, have an opinion and write with confidence. In addition, include formal expertise, qualifications and education of the writer of the piece of content. 

Authority - authority is about reputation, particularly among other experts and influencers in the industry. Make sure you’re consistent with your content marketing efforts to position yourself as an expert authority in your industry. You want to ensure your website is the go-to place when people are looking for information related to relevant product or services. Search engines recognise this and it’s a key ranking factor!

Trustworthy - make sure your content is a trustworthy source of information! When it comes to trustworthiness, there are a whole range of different aspects that search engines look at. A good place to start with your content marketing is ensuring that you’re writing with complete accuracy and that you’re including relevant external links to other trustworthy sources of information.

‍Closing thoughts

Ensuring your content marketing efforts also serve from an SEO perspective is key for getting the best possible return on investment. Are you not sure if your content marketing efforts are as effective as they could be? Get in touch for a chat, we’d be more than happy to offer some tips.