Introduction:

SEO and Content Marketing have together emerged as the key concepts in the digital world. They have helped in increasing brand awareness, driving organic traffic, and lead generation. SEO (Search Engine Optimizations) is the process of increasing website traffic. It also increases website ranking on SERPs. Content marketing helps the marketer share relevant quality content to drive traffic. SEO acts as fuel for content marketing. SEO brings your content straight to your users. SEO without content marketing is like a river without water.

How do SEO and Content Marketing go hand in hand?

SEO strategies include relevant keywords, quality backlinks, and other elements. But the major element is providing quality content. Relevant quality content without grammatical errors is the first essential element. A very long content might not be mobile-friendly and can lower its SERP rankings. Good digital content is one with a good piece of writing along with SEO. 

To get a clear picture of the integration of SEO and Content Marketing let us understand each of them in brief.

SEO: Search Engine Optimisation:

It is a set of techniques that makes your website user-friendly. SEO makes your web pages visible to the target audience. The main aim of SEO is to drive more organic traffic. SEO makes your page well optimized for users to use over various devices. The SEO expert helps the search engine understand the page well. The expert guides the search engine to categorize the content. SEO is a process through which businesses try to appear on the first pages of SERPs. SEO optimizes your website to ensure that all the criteria of Google search engines are met. 

Google and other search engines perform crawls on the internet to categorize the content. If you optimize your website well, your brand will appear on the first page of Google.

SEO cannot work without content. A web page, a blog, an article, or any post has content on which SEO works. SEO will match the content as per the search query using relevant keywords.

Content marketing:

It is a marketing technique that uses content to promote a business. For content to be great, the content must be good in quality. The content you create should be free from grammatical error, plagiarism-free, and well-formatted.    

Content marketing is all about creating articles, blogs, posts, videos, and many more. The main aim of content marketing is to grow a loyal customer base and spread brand awareness. It also helps a post go viral. Every marketer dreams of getting his products and services to go viral. Getting viral means that your content gets shared by many people and reaches a wider audience. 

Need for integration of SEO and Content Marketing:

SEO makes your website search engine-friendly. And content marketing makes blogs and posts for your website. So both SEO and content marketing should get combined for better results. For this, let us look at the following steps to create an SEO Content Marketing strategy:

• Keyword Research: 

To optimize your website, first look at the products and services you are offering. Then link such products with relevant keywords and key phrases. For this, use Keyword Planner and other similar online survey tools to get the user intent based questions and relevant keywords.

• Create great content:

Your content should stand out from the crowd and reach out to targeted audiences. Look at the content related to your niche posted by other marketers. You may use similar themes and similar formats used by them. 

• Focus on quality more than quantity:

To create good content, focus on generating leads and brand engagement. Always focus on the needs of your audiences. Try to create good content even though they are less in amount.

• Optimize your content for SEO:

On creating content, look out at the SEO best practices. Follow them to optimize your blog posts and ensure that they check as many of the Google boxes as possible. On doing all such activities, post your articles and posts on your website. You may then sit back and look at your website for final results. If you are a startup, there are many market research tools for startups available in the market, which you can take help to generate the content idea while doing SEO.

• Review the effectiveness of your content:

To review your content effectiveness, you may focus on the performance metrics. There exist many KPIs to measure content marketing. You need to select the best one based on your business goals. Some of such metrics are organic search rankings, the number of inbound links, traffic references, and many more.

Organic search engine rankings and organic traffic provide a sign of good content. If your content is relevant to the audience, then it will increase the content authority.

• Competitive analysis:

Look for the content and SEO techniques of your competitors and understand them. This will help you focus on improving your marketing strategies. You may look at the lacuna of your competitors and try to avoid them. Study the websites of your competitors. Try to understand how they have positioned themselves in the market, which web hosting companies they are using for websites, because hosting also matter for the effective SEO, etc.

• Analyze your links:

Getting bad links can damage the image of your website. This can also affect your brand value. SEO helps find out about your links. It helps you select the link, and whether to accept or reject such links. For example, a link from a beauty website cannot be relevant for your academic blogs. A good content marketing strategy with proper SEO will get you a good neighborhood. With a good ranking, you can attract good backlinks to your website. When popular websites start linking to your website, your search engine ranking improves.

Conclusion:

SEO-driven content is powerful and cost-effective. It attracts a wider audience. It also provides great insight and knowledge to the customers about your brand. Content marketing and SEO should work together. SEO should be a large part of your planning. This is the reason why popular content marketing firms have built strong relationships with SEO experts. An SEO expert will guide you to improve your marketing strategies.

Author Name: Suraj Kr. Prakash

Author Bio:

Suraj Kr. Prakash is a Trainer, Growth Hacker, SEO Specialist, and WordPress Website Developer…who is empowering 10000+ readers through the “Dhandho Karo” platform in various niches such as business & marketing.