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Mention digital marketing and within minutes buzzwords like search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing will be mentioned. Both are more than buzzwords. They are integral parts of successful digital marketing for most brands today.
Chances are, if you have a business that uses digital marketing, you already use both. SEO will drive traffic to your website, while you use content marketing on your blogs and social media channels. But here’s the question: Do the two tactics work well together? If not, you may be missing out on a great opportunity to help grow your brand.
Related: 7 Reasons SEO Matters to Every Startup
Making sense of the buzz: SEO vs content marketing
Before considering how SEO and content marketing can be combined in your marketing strategy, it’s worth clarifying the differences between the two tactics. As digital marketing terms are used more and more, they are also often used interchangeably, even though they describe different things.
What is content marketing?
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is “focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.” The overall goal is to encourage customer actions that benefit the brand, whether by subscribing to a service or purchasing a product.
Unlike traditional marketing, content marketing works indirectly with the consumer and aims to stimulate interest in their products or services, compared to specific brands. Rather than talking to customers about a specific product or service, content marketing helps a customer solve problems by providing information they may not have previously had.
Brands that excel at content marketing and search engine optimization build lasting relationships with their audiences. Customers trust the brand as a source of advice rather than a business pushing products and services.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization is a crucial part of marketing for businesses that depend on website traffic. Organize and optimize your content for search engines like Google and help your website rank high in search results. Digital Marketing Institute define SEO as a process that helps brands generate website traffic from “free, organic, editorial, or natural search engine results.”
As a brand, you may pay an SEO expert to improve your ranking, but there are no payments to the companies behind the search engines. This is what differentiates SEO from Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which refers to paid listings. While SEO takes time to deliver results, SEM can increase product visibility in the short term.
Many brands use both approaches as part of their digital marketing strategy. But let’s just focus on SEO. SEO has become a non-negotiable part of any brand’s digital marketing strategy that relies on website traffic for its success. Without it, even the most well-designed website may never be found by the relevant audience.
Based on these clarifications, it is easy to identify the connection between content marketing and search engine optimization.
Related: 7 Ways Small Businesses Can Use SEO to Boost Customer Service and Growth
Making content marketing and SEO work together
To achieve the full potential to benefit your brand, content marketing and SEO must work together. As a new brand, you should create content with search engine requirements in mind. As a brand with an existing content library, it pays to review your content to make sure it benefits your search engine.
Starting from scratch: How to develop SEO-friendly content
Just a few years ago, creating SEO-friendly content meant stuffing keywords into what would otherwise have been a well-written article. As a result, many websites became unreadable and unusable for their users. Search engine operators have taken notice and started changing their algorithms. Today, search engines strive to provide the most relevant content to users.
So how do you tell Google that your content is relevant? The answer is simple: be clear about your content. Search engines crawl through websites, and the easier it is to identify the focus of your content, the higher your content will rank on search engine results pages.
Staying focused is the key to developing successful content. This may sound simple, but sometimes it can be surprisingly difficult to implement. For example, if you offer separate online courses for languages and personal finance, avoid putting both types of courses on the same page. Instead, create a separate language course page and another personal finance page. You may even want to break language courses down into individual languages.
The same goes for blog posts. It is possible to blog about the benefits of online courses in general. However, creating individual content for online language courses and personal finance courses will almost always drive more content to the relevant pages.
Creating content from scratch means starting with your target keywords in mind and matching your content to those keywords.
Optimize existing content
Creating new content can give you an edge with SEO, but it’s a time-consuming approach. Most established businesses and brands already have a library of content and should update and optimize that content to benefit search engine rankings.
Again, it’s helpful to try to think like a search engine. Websites that are continually updated rank higher than those with stagnant content. Updating existing content is a great way to meet this requirement while saving time.
Optimizing your existing content wouldn’t be complete without reviewing your internal and external links. Internal linking informs search engines about the structure of your website and reveals the content it belongs to. Orphaned content, pages not linked to each other, search engines have a hard time finding them.
Related: Why SEO Is Much Easier Than You Think
Take advantage of synergies
SEO and content marketing should work together to drive the most users to your website and generate sales.
To create synergies, start developing content with SEO in mind. Delivering great content that benefits users can easily be SEO friendly, especially if it’s developed that way from the start. Treating SEO as an afterthought tagged at the end of content development simply doesn’t deliver the best results.
Creating content with your audience in mind and a clear understanding of your topic will make it easier to optimize your content for rankings. Regardless of the time investment, traffic optimization is worth it for your business.
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