How Content Marketing Can Improve Your SEO

Are you looking for new ways to enhance your SEO this year? Did you know that content marketing can improve your SEO? Content is extremely important for SEO, with many benefits that you should be aware of.

SEO isn’t just about making technical tweaks to your website to improve rankings – on-page and off-page optimization are both important components of achieving higher rankings – and content marketing plays a big role in both. With 44% of people saying that they typically consume three to five pieces of content before engaging with a vendor, having informative content on your website is crucial.

Keep reading to learn more about how content marketing and SEO work together, and how content marketing can improve your SEO efforts.

How Content Marketing and SEO Work Together 

SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that it can perform better and thus, rank higher in search engines. 

Content marketing is the process of encouraging website visitors to move through the sales funnel by providing informative and helpful content. 

While not integrated, SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand (and overlap), and a content marketing strategy created for SEO can help your website rank higher, rank for more keywords, and reach more potential customers. 

Let’s look at the three main areas of SEO, and how content marketing contributes to each to get a better understanding of how they work together.

• On-page SEO: This refers to any action taking place on your site to improve rankings, such as optimizing URLs and images. In terms of SEO content, this includes adding new optimized content to your website, such as blogs, service pages, videos, and more. 

• Off-page SEO: This refers to things outside of your website, but that point back to it, helping you increase your domain authority. This is usually in the form of high-quality backlinks and online directories. In terms of SEO content, this includes writing guest blogs on other websites to obtain a backlink.

• Technical SEO: This refers to non-content optimization elements on your website. Technical SEO includes areas like mobile and site speed optimization.

As you can see, SEO needs content.

Top 4 Ways Content Marketing Can Improve Your SEO 

Here are four key ways that content marketing can enhance your SEO efforts:

1) Valuable content produces backlinks

Backlinks help to add authority and trustworthiness to your website. Content that provides value to the user encourages them to refer back to your content, through shares and backlinks, which boosts your SEO and allows more people to find your content and website.

According to Spyfu, content that attracts the most backlinks include:

• How-to posts
• Guides
• Ebooks
• Opinions pieces
• Interviews
• Research
• Gated content
• Infographics
• News

2) Google likes longer content

Long-form content continuously proves to be more engaging and better for SEO, with long-form content dominating page one of search engine results. But Google doesn’t rank content based on its length alone – value, dwell time, click-through rate (CTR), and organization are all important factors taken into account. Longer content allows you to hit more of these key ranking factors.

3) Keeps users on your site for longer

As mentioned in the previous point, dwell time is very important for higher search engine rankings. If your content provides value, users are more likely to stay and read it.

Ensuring good readability of your content will also help. Make sure your content has an appropriate font size and spacing, headings, and it is easily scannable.

Including related content (from your website) at the end of your content or interlinked throughout, will encourage users to continue exploring your website (for longer). 

The longer a user stays on your website, the more likely they are to return and convert. 

4) Achieve new rankings

Through the regular optimization and publishing of content – like blogs – your website can rank for new keywords and terms. Content allows you to strategically incorporate different keywords and provide answers to queries that users have. Plus, it’s easier to cover a topic in more detail with longer content.

How can you improve your content marketing SEO?

Now that we know how content marketing can improve your SEO, how can we put these improvements into practice, and reap the benefits? Here are five ways to get started:

• Keyword research: Utilize keywords that apply to your content and ensure that they are used within the body of the content, the title and the URL. But avoid overuse of keywords or it will look spammy to Google.

• Searcher intent: Knowing why your target audience is searching will help you deliver content that they will want to consume. Take a look at your customer journey and see where there are content gaps. Also look at other metrics like time on page, bounce rate, and conversions to better understand how users are interacting with your content.

• Update old blogs: Case studies by Backlinko and Hubspot have shown that updating old blogs with new and relevant information, can increase organic traffic. Republishing old blogs is a great way to ensure your site is updated and crawled more frequently by Google, especially if you don’t have time to write a new blog from scratch. 

• Build quality backlinks: As mentioned previously, building quality backlinks can help you rank higher on search engines. You can do this by creating high-quality blogs for your website or by offering to guest blog for authoritative sites in return for a backlink to your website.

• Content distribution: To maximize the traffic to your valuable content, you need to distribute it. This could be done by sharing it on social media, running ads, and repurposing it into different assets.

Create a Cohesive SEO and Content Marketing Strategy

While SEO and content marketing are important individual elements to any digital marketing strategy, combining the two can take you to the next level.

A cohesive SEO and content marketing strategy should include creating relevant content that your target audience is looking for, updating and republishing old content, building quality backlinks, and having a consistent distribution strategy.

Are you looking to enhance your SEO and content marketing efforts? Consultus Digital can help. Our digital marketing experts understand how content marketing can improve your SEO, and look to utilize these two services to create a complementary marketing strategy to boost ranking, leads, and conversions. Get in touch with us today to learn more.