Content marketing is continuously on the rise for industries all over the world and the internet. Of course, as all marketers will know, jump back two or three years ago and all focus was on SEO, rather than writing blogs.
However, even though content marketing has become the number one source of marketing and promotion, that doesn’t mean that SEO needs to be shunned to the side. In fact, if you’re able to combine both considerations, you’re onto a winning formula.
Not sure where to start? Here are seven ways you can start combining content marketing and SEO today, helping you to boost your marketing strategy into the stratosphere.
Just like SEO, keywords are still just as important in content marketing; you’ll just need to change your approach. In the past, you may have tried to cram a selection of 5-10 keywords in your website pages and content to try and boost your content’s page ranking.
However, nowadays, especially since the rise of voice search, it’s important to start thinking of key phrases. This is why you see article headlines written like ‘How Do I Change a Car Tyre’. This is because this what people are searching, rather than ‘Car tyre change’.
Stuck for keywords and key phrases. There are so many tools available that can help, just like Google’s own Keyword Planner and SEMRush.
Of course, this may sound like an obvious point, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. For example, when it comes to creating content, you might think that you want to promote your business in every post you write, in one way or another.
However, there is a special rule among marketers called the 80/20 rule. This means that 80% of your content needs to provide value to your reader, whereas only 20% is actually promotional. The more value your content provides, the higher you’ll rank in the search engines.
More commonly referred to as ‘link-building’, good content will automatically attract good links, and this can see you spike in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). These no real technique to this method, simply creating content that people want to share and link to in their content.
You can also link internally, although this isn’t as effective, it will still boost your page ranking. It most cases, it’s all about trial and error. However, Ahrefs and Cite It In are great tools to get you started.
Hand in hand with the point above, it’s still so important to remember that quality always comes before SEO as the quality of your content is the main aspect that the search engines will be looking at.
Avoid cramming your content with keywords, format it properly and make it easy to read and scan and you’ll be onto a winner.
Headlines are one of the most important aspects to consider when it comes to your content. It’s one of the first parts of your article that your readers are going to read, and it will decide whether or not the reader is going to read on.
You need to grab their attention in only a few seconds and give them something juicy to bite on, so they want to read the rest of your content. When writing your headlines, make sure the entire headline is visible in the SERPs and you it to be fully visible in email headlines and on social sharing platforms.
Just like SEO, content marketing and a combination of the two are works in progress, and you can never really call the job done. There’s always something to do and something to tweak, but you won’t know what this is until you analyse the performance of your content.
However, this doesn’t have to be as difficult as it sounds. Tools like Moz and Boomessays have a great set of features to help you easily track the performance of your posts.
Although SEO and content marketing are two separate things that require a different set of skills, combining the two is still a highly effective practice and recommended if you want to boost your business into new realms of success.
Gloria Kopp is content marketer and a blog editor at Oxessays. She is a regular contributor at HuffingtonPost and Paper Fellows blogs. Besides, Gloria is an author of Studydemic educational blog where she shares her writing and career advice with students.