Before we get into how content marketing can improve your SEO ranking, first let’s dive into what makes up content marketing. Hubspot defines content marketing as an “effort that centers on creating, publishing, and distributing content for your target audience — usually online — the goal of which is to attract new customers” (Wainwright, 1). Basically, companies use content marketing to advertise their business in a digital space to attract new leads. Because the digital realm is crowded, it is important to make sure you are working towards your ultimate goal and are doing it right. It must add value to customers’ lives, be compelling, be creative, and stand out among the crowd. Another term to be familiar with is SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a system in which search engines (like Google) recognize unpaid webpages and reward them with organic visibility. It is important to maintain a good SEO ranking to have a greater chance of appearing in a search engine naturally with no spend.
Forbes states that SEO is a technical process which increases the quality and amount of traffic to your website while content marketing refers to the process of creating value by attaining new leads and driving business. We want to dig into this overwhelming world and discuss a few ways in which content marketing can improve your business’s SEO ranking.
Understand Your Current Ranking
Before anything improves, a business needs to know where they stand in their SEO ranking. How can you know if and where there is room for improvement if you do not first have an understanding of your website’s SEO metrics? There are different SEO tracking tools available for businesses to use to gain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding to their SEO health. Once you determine where your business stands within the SEO ranking, you can take the necessary steps to improve your content and boost your SEO ranking.
Incorporate Keywords
Keywords are the words or phrases people type into a search engine and are necessary to a website’s vitality. Think of them as beacons of light that bring people to a website. As such, it is important to have the right keywords for your business. To determine what to use, think about the essentials of your business. In other words, if you had to boil your webpage down to a few words or phrases, what would they be? Once determined, start incorporating those keywords into your created content. While increasing your website’s ranking, targeted keywords draw traffic to your site. However, it is necessary to note that there is such a thing as over optimizing your website. Do not try to overstuff your website with keywords, this could cause a backlash with the search engine.
Create Valuable Content
Good content adds value to your audience and value is created when a business knows exactly what resonates with their audience. In order to create valuable content, you must determine what people engage with the most and what resonates with your audience. If people enjoy your content, it will ultimately increase your SEO ranking. As your website generates more views (otherwise known as hits), search engines will know and your ranking will improve. It also benefits if you have the right keywords incorporated into your content as this will only help generate more content views. Everything works together. Creating valuable content is as good as gold in the SEO world.
The key factor with leads to your business is the creation of valuable content whereas SEO ranking is the vehicle to push your content into the eyes of consumers. SEO ranking determines your websites online health. In order to have a decent SEO rank, you need to know your websites current ranking before you can improve. If you want to talk to SEO professionals, feel free to give us a call or shoot us an email. We’d love to chat with you about your business’s SEO needs.
