SEO and content marketing are different marketing channels. But you don’t have to choose between them. They are complementary.
In fact, you should combine them to increase your marketing effectiveness.
Two main reasons:
1. Content marketing and SEO are like peanut butter and jelly – they work well together
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing content to attract and retain customers.
Here’s how SEO helps content marketing:
- It tells you what your audience cares about — If you know what they’re searching for on Google, you can establish the type of content they want to see. this is called keyword researcha key aspect of SEO.
- It creates a predictable distribution — Sparktoro’s research The results show that 63.41% of all Internet traffic in the United States comes from Google. Most of our blog traffic also comes from search engines.
search engine optimization It is the process of improving a website’s visibility in search engines to gain more traffic.
Here’s how content marketing helps SEO:
- It helps you get more search traffic — If you want more search traffic, you need to rank for more keywords, which requires you to produce more content.
- It makes SEO more effective — Thought leadership content acquires backlinks, gated content generates leads, and sales enablement converts traffic into sales.
2. The same amount of energy, money and time invested in content marketing and SEO can bring results
We are the perfect example. Our content ranks high on Google, generating hundreds of thousands of search visitors each month:
It also attracts links and shares on social media as we ensure each piece is unique and not just regurgitated or “Artificial Intelligence Content”.
Finally, each piece of content introduces visitors to our product and educates them on how to use it to solve their problems. (Keep reading and you’ll see it in action, too!)
It involves all things content marketing and Search engine optimization goals immediately:
- Get search traffic✅
- Build thought leadership✅
- Attract links✅
- Generate sales (long term)✅
How do we do what we do? Believe it or not, there is a way to go crazy. The following line sums up our entire SEO content marketing strategy:
We create and maintain high-quality, product-led, search-focused content on topics with business potential and search traffic potential.
Let me break down how we combine SEO and content marketing:
If you want to get search traffic, you need to target topics that potential customers are searching for.
The easiest way to find these keywords is to use a keyword tool like Ahrefs keyword browser:
- go keyword browser
- Enter some broad keywords related to your website or niche
- Go to match term Report
- Filter keywords with traffic potential (TP)
Side note.
Traffic potential is an estimate of the monthly organic search traffic to the top pages for a keyword. Since pages tend to rank for many keywords, traffic potential is a more reliable estimate than search volume.
Browse the report and pick keywords relevant to your site. For example, if I were an e-commerce store selling coffee equipment, this might be a potential keyword to target:
The business potential of a keyword refers to how easy it is to market your product while covering a specific topic. It’s our “trade secret” – that’s why we can easily describe our products and their features in every piece of content we create.
Here’s how to score a topic’s business potential:
So, taking the example above, the topic “best coffee grinders” would score a “3” (assuming we sell coffee grinders), while a topic like “does decaf coffee contain caffeine” would score a “1” Or even “0”.
You should prioritize topics with high business potential scores, i.e. “2” or “3”.
What does all the jargon mean? Let’s break it down.
search centric
The first step to becoming search-centric is finding the keywords people are searching for. The second part is figuring out Why They’re searching for those specific keywords. This “why” is called search intent.
Given that Google’s goal is to always rank the most relevant content, we can look at search engine results (SERPs) to reveal search intent. Get your target keywords and enter them keyword browserscroll down to SERP Overview and click Identify intent:
So we can see that searchers searching for the keyword “best coffee grinder” want detailed reviews and expert recommendations on the best coffee grinders. Not only that, but we can also see that searchers want Checklist That is fresh.
If we target this topic, making it search-centric means matching this search intent – we need to create a list of the best coffee grinders this year.
Product-led
Being product-led means making sure you’re not just creating content for content’s sake; you’re creating content for content’s sake. You are also “selling” your product. You need to know which use cases, features, or services you want to incorporate into the narrative. Of course, of course.
Scoring a topic’s business potential is 90% of the work done. If you are creating content about a topic with a score of “3”, then your product promotion will come naturally. For example, after covering the best coffee grinders, we can easily add a link back to our coffee equipment store. Or, if we make coffee grinders, we can position them as one of the best grinders around. (This is why I say the Business Potential Score is our secret ingredient.)
The challenge comes when the topic you cover scores a “1” or a “0”. It’s not impossible, but you’ll need to get creative.
For example, I recently reported Topic “SEO Expert”. It has a business potential of “1” and hardly includes product promotion. Fortunately, I noticed that some job listings asked for experience with different SEO toolsets (including ours). Certification courses.
high quality
This is subjective. Everyone’s standards are different. But our view on quality is this:
- precise – No hype, no lies. Every statement we make should be as accurate as possible.
- Clear — No nonsense – remove all unnecessary words and sentences. Use jargon only when necessary. When necessary, create illustrations to expand on ideas and concepts.
- helpful — It’s important to be product-led, but content shouldn’t just be designed to sell. Content should primarily focus on helping visitors solve their problems while creatively contextualizing our products.
- Unique — One way to make your content unique is to get involved—conduct experiments, conduct data research, and write from personal experience. If the skin is difficult, interview a practitioner. focus on didno Can.
Things I always look for when assessing the credibility of writing:
could/should/did
~ Can: Most writers talk about things you, the reader, can do. theoretically. Abstract. Based on no first hand experience. Maybe it should be ignored. “Content Marketing” First and foremost…
— Ryan Lowe (@thinking_slow) December 6, 2023
Deterioration of your content is inevitable:
- search centric — Your rankings may drop due to competitors. Or you’re not even ranked in the first round. Or the search intent for your target topics has changed (for example, the word coronasearch intent changed in the gap year of 2020-2022.
- Product-led — You may need to introduce new features, services, or use cases. Or your team has devalued certain features or dropped certain services.
- high quality — Statements may become inaccurate over time. Or your unique idea is so successful that others imitate you (and outrank you). Or maybe it’s just that the ideas, screenshots, and content are out of date.
That’s why you don’t build train tracks and then disappear. You have to actively maintain it to keep it working properly. (I’m looking at you London Underground.) The same goes for your content.
The way to maintain your content is to conduct regular content audits. We do this every quarter – each writer on our blogging team goes through their portfolio of articles and selects at least three articles to update. Each writer can also choose a couple for full rewrites.
I highly recommend browsing our content audit templates so you can understand what’s going wrong with your content and what to do next.
final thoughts
SEO and content marketing may be different types of marketing, but that doesn’t mean you need to do one to the exclusion of the other.
These two pipelines are highly compatible and, as you can see above, can be designed as a complete strategy to achieve all important marketing goals.
