Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing are beneficial strategies many marketers use. Few companies have proved that implementing accurate keywords and good content can generate revenue and potential customers.
SEO is one of the tools that digital marketers use to optimize their website performances. It shows content relevance and link popularity so that its pages can be found easily, along with increasing insights.
Meanwhile, content marketing is a strategy that uses the distribution of relevant content like newsletters, blogs, articles, videos, photos, and emails to create awareness among customers. The method keeps them updated with the latest products and services.
These combined strategies are useful for creating greater-quality content with the best keywords. The combination of the marketer’s focus and expertise, prospect points, and other important details will attract a lot of traffic.
A 2024 research from WebFX stated that using SEO and content marketing brings many advantages like potential Return on Investment (ROI) and decreased advertising costs. Most SEOs are organic (free), which helps save less money on other advertising platforms and creates huge ROI as it adds more revenue.
Understanding the basics
SEO fundamentals
SEO involves many components to attract users. Keywords play a key role in SEO and help adjust the target audience to be well-oriented. Other components like on-page optimization, rank tracking, backlink analysis, competitor analysis, content optimization, reporting, and analytics SEO enhance insights to the top rank of search queries. Remember to create content that is as relevant as possible to the user’s needs.
Search intent is also significant in optimizing SEO. Aligning users’ intent ensures that the marketer’s platforms meet their needs and create more effective content strategies. The Evereffect research mentioned four important aspects of search intent: informational, commercial, transactional, and navigational. These will help improve user experience and more engagement.
Content marketing essentials
Content marketing is a strategy of creating and distributing relevant and high-value content consistently to attract potential customers and retain regular ones. It will make customers keep relying on the marketer’s products and services. The other goal is to increase profitable customer action on purchasing products or subscribing to services.
Content can be created in many forms like articles, blog posts, videos, infographics, social media posts, etc. The differentiations affect insights and it has to be along with value and delivery. It is also important to keep the content updated with customers’ needs and interests because it can enhance brand awareness and reputation, increase customer loyalty and retention and push revenue growth.
Aligning SEO and content marketing
Keyword research and content planning
Marketers may utilize keyword research to find relevant terms that can be used to create valuable content, as well as the popularity and ranking difficulties of these terms in their target market. This can include long and short-form keywords that match product offerings and are relevant to the business. Analyzing keyword strength is also essential to see whether certain keywords can be realistic to aim for high rankings.
Marketers can type in the keyword and see what typically appears in a search engine to find ideas and inspiration regarding user pain points and issues. It is also crucial to monitor those keywords’ trends to keep marketers’ products and services on top of the latest news. Those keywords are also helpful in building topic clusters on pillar content, meaning that one topic can consist of many sub-topics and help search engines see that the website covers this topic broadly and in-depth.
Creating SEO-optimized content
Marketers can build optimized SEO content by incorporating relevant keywords in a headline. This can be done by creating urgency together with appealing numbers, keeping the relevancy and consistency.
Additionally, meta tags are important for helping search engines comprehend and index information, enhance click-through rates, and increase exposures. Marketers can include four essential elements: title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and alt text for images. These can create effective meta tags for SEO.
Marketers must create informative and engaging content to stay updated with trends. They can try analyzing recent popular information on social media. They can also analyze competitors' content to identify gaps in marketers' content and opportunities to create more engaging content.
Building backlinks and authority
Backlinks are links on other websites that lead to a marketer's website. They improve credibility from other sites, and more backlinks mean greater trust and usability for customers.
There are certain ways to promote content to other websites naturally, like sending it to subscribers on an email list, sharing it on social media, adding a video to the content, asking bloggers to create awareness, and many more.
High-quality content enables marketers to push organic traffic, gain new audiences, and enhance conversion rates. The effort should be made in the long term instead of the short term to resonate with the audiences.
Measuring and optimizing
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Based on 2023 Portent’s research, there are several examples of KPIs for SEO and content marketing like leads, transactions and revenue, goal completions, influencer mentions, keyword ranking, and more. Some KPIs may not be usable for the time being. Therefore, it is important to track the success of the content by identifying goals, setting KPIs, and iterating to find what works well.
There are ways to track website traffic, conversions, and engagement metrics. Sessions and recordings, tracking web forms, Call-To-Actions (CTAs) that convert leads, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms for evaluation are important components to analyze.
Content analysis
Aside from website performance, analyzing content performance is also important to ensure its visibility and value for customers. There are several key analyses or metrics marketers can use: user behavior metrics, SEO and visibility metrics, revenue-related metrics, content production metrics, and engagement metrics. Some content can perform poorly, and the way to manage that is by brainstorming new ideas and checking URL or HTML issues.
Iterative optimization
Continuous improvement and updates are useful for creating better content. A study from Granite5 mentioned four essential points of content improvement: maintain, optimize, rewrite, and retire. If the content satisfies customers, marketers need to maintain its position. Otherwise, if the content is older or obsolete, it needs rewriting or even retiring if the value is no longer beneficial for the customers.
Case Studies
Nike and NCR Voyix are the two best examples of this topic. Nike’s 2020 "You Can't Stop Us" campaign in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has attracted millions of views across various platforms. It also generated $8.95 million in media impact value through just 1,067 ad placements. It sent a valuable message of resilience and unity in diversity so that people need to be strong at all times when facing any situation.
NCR Voyix is popularly known for its expertise in digital commerce and retail. The company managed to perform informative content and recognition among users. Their educational content had 53.20% of their keywords working, attracting 154.5K monthly visitors worldwide. Their success is motivated by the performance of 9.1 million backlinks, user engagement, and content quality and relevance.
Conclusion
SEO and content marketing are useful to create better engagements and insights for users or customers. Marketers need to understand their brand’s place in the wider industry to leverage content and search optimization to establish their online position, specifically search queries. By aligning and implementing SEO and content marketing with those steps above, marketers can achieve good-quality content and their best keywords for the best user experience.
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