On average, marketing comprises almost 11% of overall firm budgets across the US.
With a 44% increase in 2017, more of that marketing budget is being spent in the digital realm. And when it comes to online marketing strategies, SEO content marketing is critical.
If you’re new to the world of digital marketing, you need to know what SEO content marketing is. Driving sales is only one of the SEO benefits that we’re going to talk all about. Keep reading to learn more.
What is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation. The ultimate purpose of SEO is to increase the traffic to your website. But SEO doesn’t attract any visitors to your website – this technical process will attract quality, organic traffic to your site.
SEO accomplishes this task through a number of strategies employed both on and off a website. These strategies focus on helping a website rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs). The idea behind this is that the higher you rank on the SERPs, the more traffic your site will gain.
The more visitors to your site, the higher your chances of converting clients. SEO also helps with brand awareness, PPC, and lead generation.
What Is Content Marketing?
If SEO is the tactics used to bring traffic to your site, content is the vehicle through which you deploy those tactics. Not only are many of SEO’s strategies embedded within content, but your content is also what drives profitable client actions. Content marketing will:
- generate leads
- increase sales
- increase email subscriptions
- increase brand awareness
- create repeat business
- create a wider customer base
Content marketing does all these things by solving people’s problems. Your content should offer value to your clients in the form of helping them solve problems. The problems that you help them with should align with the kinds of problems you fix with your services.
How SEO and Content Marketing Work Together
You can do SEO without content marketing and vice versa, but you won’t get very far. These two tools work together in your marketing strategy. And one without the other diminishes your efforts significantly.
They differ in that SEO is the more narrow and technical of the two. Content marketing, on the other hand, is more broad and holistic.
Where the two come together is that your SEO is applied and channeled through content marketing. The only way your content marketing strategy can be successful is by making it visible through the use of SEO.
For example, doing keyword research is a part of SEO. But you need to use those keywords in the articles, pages, and content on your site.
Below, we’ll discuss in more detail the exact areas in which SEO and content marketing work together.
SEO Needs Content
Without content, you’d have no way of applying certain SEO tactics. You need words, articles, keywords, verbiage, and substance on your site through which to use SEO. Conversely, the practical application of SEO is at the very centre of a successful content marketing strategy.
SEO Needs Consistency
Both SEO and content marketing need to be consistent. New, fresh, high-quality content indexes faster by search engine crawlers. It also gets ranked higher than repetitive and low-value content.
To appear higher on SERPs, which is the goal of SEO, you must create fresh and creative content. Therefore, good SEO means consistent content. And consistent content is part of any good content marketing strategy.
SEO Needs Valuable Content
One of the most important components of determining where a page ranks on SERPs is the value of the content. It’s not enough to publish consistent content, another part of good SEO is high-quality content that offers value to users. That’s why your SEO content marketing strategy has to involve high-value content that solves the problems of your clientele.
Low-quality pages that don’t offer value can cause your entire website to underperform on SERPs. It’s better to have less high-quality pages than many low-quality pages. That’s because Google knows whether your content is good, and that will reflect in your page rank.
With great quality content, search engine crawlers will rank your page higher. That means that you have a better chance of attracting clients to your site.
And if it’s good enough to solve their problems, they’ll want to share it. That, in turn, drives even more traffic.
But how do you ensure that you’re answering the questions of your clients? You embed keywords from SEO keyword research into your content. We’ll talk more about that next.
SEO Needs Keywords
Another critical aspect of SEO is keywords. The SEO side of keywords involves researching relevant keywords and key phrases that your clients are looking for when they search. The content marketing aspect of this involves inserting those keywords into your content.
Inserting the words and phrases that users are searching for helps your page rank higher in the SERPs. By knowing how your clients search for your type of service and inserting those terms into your content, you’re more likely to turn up in the SERPs when they look for your service. The higher in the rankings you are, the more clients trust you, and the more likely you are to convert them.
However, using keywords in your SEO content marketing strategy requires a strategic approach. Stuffing your content with keywords reduces the value of the content. This will reflect in your ranking because Google will penalise you’.
SEO Needs Links
Another crucial strategy used in SEO is link building, linkbacks, and inbound linking. Some of your website authority comes by virtue by age, but much more of it comes through mentions of your business from other sources. The more other pages links to you, the more trust Google has in the value and legitimacy of your site.
This is why a big part of SEO is building links between your sites and high-domain authority sites like those that end with .edu and .org. Only one link to your site from a site with a .edu on their URL can significantly increase traffic to your site.
You can build links by purchasing them. There are agencies that connect your site with high-domain authority sites at a cost. But the far more effective way to build links to your site is through your content marketing.
Consistently putting out valuable, high-quality content increases your chances of earning links. When you’re solving people’s problems, they’ll want to share that information. And earning links the organic way is the best way to go about link building.
SEO Needs User Experience
While so much of your SEO strategy is about articles, blogs, keywords, substance, and link building, another big part of it is user experience. That involves backend SEO strategies such as enhancing metadata, updating the slug, using tags, and optimising robots.txt.
Search engines check backend things to make sure there are no broken links or error codes before ranking you in SERPs. Even with the best content marketing out there, if you’re missing the technical optimisation aspect of SEO, you’re not going to rank very high.
But the user experience check that’s handled by SEO is also beneficial to your content marketing strategy. It ensures that your site is user-friendly, easy to read, and easy to use.
Using the right tags ensures your site gets indexed accurately. That means it targets your ideal audience and brings the right people to your site. By the right people, we mean people who are most likely to convert.
User experience also makes sure that your content is accessible and strategised in a way that considers how the user is going to use it. Using headers and title tags is a part of SEO that also organises your content in a user-friendly way.
How Does SEO Content Marketing Drive Sales?
Now that you understand how the two are interrelated and interdependent, the million dollar question is: how does SEO content marketing drive sales? The most basic answer is, SEO ensures your great content gets read by your client and increases the chance that they purchase a product or service from you over your competitors.
More specifically, SEO drives organic traffic to your website. Your content is what keeps them there and drives conversions. Let’s look at each of these in more detail below.
Organic Traffic
The SEO industry is built around organic traffic. As mentioned, the entire purpose of SEO is to increase the amount of organic traffic that visits your website.
Organic traffic is users that come to your website from non-paid, editorial, or natural search results. That means, they typed in what they were looking for, and your site popped up in the organic results (i.e. not a paid advertisement). Approximately 51% of all website traffic comes from organic search results.
Traffic, Content, and Conversions
Why is organic traffic so important? The idea behind SEO is that the higher you rank on SERPs, the more organic traffic your site will receive. In turn, you can expect a higher conversion rate with higher traffic rates.
In this process, SEO is the strategies and tactics employed to bring organic traffic to your website. To complete the equation and convert these visitors to sales, you must employ content marketing. Your content is what keeps people on your site and keeps them coming back.
Valuable content is content that solves the same problems as your services. Offering this information for free creates a relationship with your client that’s based on them trusting you as an authority.
The concept behind all this is that if clients think that your free information is helpful, they’ll see more value in your paid services. That free information helps them trust you and addresses any buyer apprehension that may stop people from making purchases. This also puts you above the competition who aren’t offering anything for free and helps to establish your expertise.
While there is the potential for losing a few customers who will take your free information and never need your services, the clients you gain in the long run make SEO content marketing worth the efforts.
In addition
SEO content marketing drives sales in other ways as well.
For example, content that’s filled with persuasive copywriting can help you sell products and services in and of itself. SEO brings the visitors to your site, and you can convert them to sales with great writing that positions your product or service in the right way.
You can also drive sales and make money from SEO content marketing using affiliate marketing strategies. That means you promote the products and services of affiliates and you make money when your visitors make those purchase. You can also build your traffic and domain score using SEO and then sell advertising space on your website.
Kickstart Your SEO Content Marketing Strategy
SEO is the tactics employed to increase a website ranking on the SERPs. Content is the vehicle through which you deploy many critical components of SEO. Keywords, links, and user experience are all key components of SEO that you can only apply through your content marketing strategy.
The purpose of SEO content marketing, then, is to increase traffic to your site and, in turn, convert users to sales. The idea is that the more visitors see your valuable content, the higher your conversion rates will be.
But digital marketing involves so much more than SEO and content. In a world where more and more marketing budgets are being spent on online strategies, you need professionals to help get you up and running. Contact us to find out what we can do for you.
