Creating SEO and Content Marketing Strategy for your business

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SEO and content marketing- two distinct marketing tools, that require separate skill-sets and strategies for business promotion. It seems that these are two different marketing concepts, but are related and dependent on execution, to some extent.

While content marketing helps you to create your solid brand over time, whereas SEO is a process to promote your business (website) organically, at search engines.

Content marketing can be aimed at any or most digital media on the internet including social media, SEM, paid advertising, emailing and including search engines. SEO focuses on your website and its content’s optimization, for acquiring higher ranking, so the more traffic.

Before diving into the content and seo strategy, let’s first understand what search engine optimization and content marketing are, separately.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, SEO is a process of optimizing the website and its content to make it more searchable on the internet, primarily on SERPs. Attain a higher rank on a specified keyword, is the goal of every seo campaign.

Higher ranks bring more traffic, more conversion and more sales- are those perks that every marketers have in common. But throughout time, the search engines become quite updated and start preferring the audience first.

Marketers and website owners are advised to optimize their own website as recent search trends. The search engine prefers the site, having a user-friendly structure and better site experience with quality content pointing the right solution.

Indeed, content is the priority for the search engines to rank your site, but are not the only thing. It also demanded your website to be optimized for on-page and off-page element combining.

To know more about SEO, refer our detailed article: Guide to Search Engine Optimization

What is Content marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing approach to create and distribute the contents aimed to educate, engage and encourage the target audience, for making a profitable business action. The idea of content marketing is not to sell directly but to convince with required information first.

Content marketing has a long history so far, but is trending in the recent era due to internet things. TV commercial and newspaper ads, flyers, and all traditional marketing also have been using content. But are not effective, the same as today’s online marketing is.

Unlike traditional marketing, content marketing does not require a bigger budget to spend and place to rent. All you need is to have your creative message out there with the right medium, to reach a targeted audience.

 

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Now you understand that content is a point where seo and content marketing intersect. Both approaches heavily depend on content creation and optimization. SEO content strategy is a reason for achieving business goals by combining two powerful concepts.

Further sharing how to create the content marketing and seo strategy for your business, that supports your marketing and business goal together. Let’s get started…

1 Identify and understand your target market

When it comes to starting a content marketing and seo strategy, the first thing you need to do is to identify and understand your target market. The analysis within your industry, itself provides you a clear picture of what your competitors are and who should be your target audience.

The process helps to create a buyer’s persona, a profile of your potential customers. Once, having these details in hand, you can efficiently plan which type of content to create and where to promote it later on.

More than that it also gives an insight into your audience’s exact needs, that you can consider to come up with topic ideas for content writing.

2 Keyword research

According to research around 80% of people prefer to search online, look for information first before buying something. Informational, transactional and navigational are search types, their inquiries fall under.

Every search inquiry has its purchase intent, so the information needs. Which is enough for you as a business to understand what kinds of content to produce.

At this strategic part, probably you get to know what your target audience is looking for. Working on researched keywords, you better create content aimed at their information needs, and to reach them at a precise time. Certainly, you require to optimize your content for the search engine, as well as for the audience’s needs.

3 Content creation

At this stage, you have a set of target keywords, with information plus transactional intent. Depending on the search purpose, the next thing is to create quality content, to answer your target audience right away.

In the process of writing the contents on defined topics, don’t forget the actual intent. For that, it’s advised to create long-form blog content for the informational quarries and separate website pages such as service pages for the transactional intent.

Further that, you can create eBooks, case studies and whitepapers, providing information with the proof. Don’t just rely on the blog contents only, your audience may look for a credible source of information.

4 Content optimization for search engines

The great thing about SEO is, it makes possible for you to reach your potential buyers, at the time they need your services. But the higher ranking and possible service inquiries never come anyway.

Now you need to make your content optimized in the minds of search engines. Content created with considering seo ranking factors, always place your content in the upper rank on specific search queries.

Stuffing keywords anywhere in the content never helps anymore, make sure your keyword usage looks natural. Aim to create content that is user-friendly and thorough enough.

5 Content optimization for Readers

Every content must be optimized for search engines. But you need to remember that, ultimately it’s humans who interacts with your content and takes action afterward. You may be succeeding to attain a higher rank and more traffic due to low-quality content.

Reality is your site user experience counts. That determines how qualitative content you have. Informing the search engine to update content ranks accordingly. To prevent the sudden rank fall, it’s better to optimize your content for readers as well.

For that, your content should be informative and descriptive enough which directly answers the searcher’s questions. SEO content marketing is something that optimizes the content for searchers and search engines.

Always writing for the audience, that you want to do from first. Follow the right tone of voice, be approachable for your audience. Aim to provide something unique that your audience won’t find elsewhere.

Keep them revisit your website for more info, by providing good information and quality content regularly. Show signs of an authoritative website, which search engines prefer.

Here you haven’t done anything extra. You have just prioritize your audience’s needs and aim to answer the actual solutions they want. You have just served your content purpose well.

Final thoughts:

The combination of seo and content marketing benefits your business, the two possible ways. It brings the target audience on your site and promotes your offer right away.

Combining both marketing tools ensure that your website is optimized and your content is user-friendly. That serves marketing purposes well, which reflects from your overall traffic, and website conversion.

SEO and content team, are the two pillars of this combined strategy. Content team requires creating content with SEO practices, such as keyword targeting, heading tags, internal linking, and all. Same as seo team needs to maintain the content quality while optimizing it for the search engines.