Improving Your Website

How Content Marketing Helps SEO: 5 Examples

Combining content with an SEO strategy can have a very positive impact on your business’s bottom line. A few benefits of a content marketing SEO strategy include:

• Larger word counts
• Ranking for long-tail keywords
• Increased online presence
• More inbound links
• A fresher website

Want to learn more about how content marketing helps SEO? Keep reading!

Internet marketing has paved the way for a softer marketing approach that focuses more on raising awareness than trying to generate a sale right away. SEO and content marketing are great examples of this.

Content marketing focuses on engaging people and building brand authority, while one of SEO’s primary goals is to increase visibility by reaching a top ranking in search engine results.

What often gets lost when focusing on these two disciplines is how much content marketing and SEO can help one another.

You may have a particular set of goals for your content strategy, but you’ll see great benefits if one of those goals is more effective search engine optimization.

Before we dive into five ways a combined strategy can help you, let’s briefly discuss the basics of each concept.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing tactic in which you update and refresh your website so that it shows up in search engines — preferably at the top of the results. There are over 200 factors that influence where your website appears in Google search results, so you have plenty of options to choose from when you’re ready to get to work. You may update keywords in your content, add internal backlinks across your pages, or work on improving your website’s load time. Whatever you do, the goal is to see your website rise in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

What is content marketing?

Content marketing means creating different assets that help your business build relationships with your audience. These assets may include blog posts, articles, podcasts, videos, infographics, or any other element that communicates a message to your audience. The ultimate goal of content marketing is to create things that your audience loves and that, over time, convinces them to become a customer. You may create content for each part of your audience’s journey, like when they first get to know you, when they’re considering their options, when they’re almost ready to make a purchase, and when they’ve purchased from you and need information.

Now you know what SEO and content marketing mean. Keep reading to find out how content marketing is a great way to beef up your SEO efforts.

1. Content marketing leads to larger word counts

Search engines favor pages with more words. In a study by serpIQ, the top-ranking pages contained around 2,400 words, while lower-ranking pages had 2,000 or fewer. When content marketing is part of your strategy, you regularly produce new content with larger word counts, which helps those pages — and, therefore, your site — rank higher in search engines.

While the quantity of content is important, so is quality. If you only focus on word count, you run the risk of populating your pages with 2,000 words that don’t say anything and are soon overshadowed by a 500-word blog with valuable information. Aim for longer content, but not at the expense of relevance.

2. SEO and content marketing help you rank for long-tail keywords

Now that almost every company optimizes its site for search engines, it’s difficult to rank for broad keywords. So instead of focusing on simple words or phrases, create content that meets your potential customers’ exact questions.

Look no further for an example than blog titles. A marketing blog post could be optimized for broad terms such as “digital marketing” or “social media,” but it could end up with lower rankings in relatively irrelevant searches.

On the other hand, when optimized for titles such as “social media for doctors,” which more closely resemble a typical search term, pages rank higher and are more likely to reach their intended audiences.

3. Content boosts your presence online, including on social media

A company whose site contains the basic information may see some social media engagement, but not as much as a site that’s always posting new content or guest posting on other sites. When you implement content marketing, you always have something new to share, which increases the likelihood of shares and mentions on social media.

The result? You can boost your search engine rankings over sites that don’t generate as much buzz. This, in turn, can lead to another SEO benefit…

4. Great SEO content marketing leads to more inbound links

Search engine ranking is impacted by the sites that link to you — not just how many sites, but how popular and influential those sites are. Other sites aren’t likely to link to a homepage or “About Us” page, but they are likely to link to a high-quality blog post, ebook, or infographic.

As long as you produce optimized content that delivers valuable insights, you’ll motivate other sites to link to your pages. Not only will this increase your website’s rankings, but it will also improve your company’s brand authority.

5. Content marketing keeps your website fresh

The Internet is constantly changing, so it stands to reason that web users prefer new content to old. Without an SEO content marketing strategy, there isn’t much reason to update your site. With one, though, your site is changing all the time, offering new, fresh content on a regular basis. Search engine crawlers notice and give your pages higher rankings than sites that haven’t made any changes in a while.

Look at any list of SEO tips, and you’ll see how similar it is to the list of content marketing best practices. This is why content marketing should be an important part of your SEO strategy and vice versa.

These were just a few examples of how content marketing helps your SEO. Check out our additional resources to learn more about content, SEO, and many other digital marketing concepts. And if you’re wondering how your site’s SEO is, our tool can help. Get your free SEO grading today, no credit card required.

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