It’s no secret that SEO and content marketing are two of the most important aspects of online marketing. But for many businesses, knowing how to make them work together can be challenging.
Many people think that SEO is all about cramming as many keywords into your content as possible and that content marketing is about writing long, rambling blog posts.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. With the right approach, you can use SEO and content marketing to help each other out and grow your business. In this article, we’ll show you how to make the two work well together, resulting in more search engine rankings and people visiting your website.
What is SEO and what is content marketing?
SEO is short for search engine optimization. It’s the process of making your website and content more visible to people using search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Content marketing is creating and sharing valuable content to attract and retain customers. It’s about creating engaging and helpful content for your target audience and then promoting it to them.
Combining these two strategies can help you attract more visitors to your website and convert more of them into customers. With SEO testing basics in mind, you can begin developing a plan to test your hypotheses and improve your website ranking using the correct type of content that gets ranked in search engines and provides your site visitors with value.
When it comes to public relations, SEO is the online version of earned media and content marketing can be seen as owned media. Thus, a good SEO and content marketing strategy will use both earned and owned media to achieve the best results.
How can SEO and content marketing work together? Here are the key ways you can ensure SEO and content marketing work together to help your business.
Write quality content that is keyword rich
One of the best ways to ensure that your content is both SEO-friendly and valuable to your readers is to write quality content that is keyword rich.
What this means is that you should focus on writing content that is:
- Relevant to your target audience
- Focused on specific keywords
- Well written and free of spelling and grammatical errors
If you can write content that meets all of those criteria, you’re well on your way to SEO and content marketing success.
This applies to any posts that you write. If you’re writing for your blog, ensure that each post is well-written and researched, targets a need (or multiple ones) your target audience has, and includes the keywords you’re targeting. If you want to share your blog on your social media as well, make sure you keep that in mind while you are creating the content. Also, you might want to already have your social media profiles optimized as much as possible, if you want to see the best results from sharing your content. In order to do this, you might want to consider reaching out to top social media marketing agencies and getting some valuable advice.
You can also apply this tactic to any key page on your site, including your homepage, product pages, and contact page. Getting these pages to rank can result in a significant increase in traffic and leads for your business.
Optimize your website’s meta data for the search engines
One of the most important things you can do to ensure that search engines find your content is to optimize your website for them. This means ensuring that your website is designed to make it easy for search engines to find and index your content.
There are several ways to optimize your website for search engines, but some of the most important include:
- Using keyword-rich titles and descriptions
- Creating keyword-rich URLs
- Using header tags
- Optimizing your images
- Creating an XML sitemap
From reaching local SEO clients to a more global audience, optimizing your website for the search engines is essential to ensuring your content is being seen by your target audience.
Make sure your website is mobile friendly
More and more people are using their mobile devices to access the internet, which means that it’s essential for your website to be mobile-friendly. If your website is not mobile-friendly, then it will be difficult for people to read your content, navigate your site, and find the information they’re looking for.
Being SEO mobile-friendly is also one of the top SEO trends this year, so your website needs to be optimized for such devices. Google has also stated that they are now using mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor in their search algorithms. This means that if your site is not mobile-friendly, then it’s likely that you’ll have a more challenging time ranking in the search results.
There are several ways to make your website mobile friendly, but some of the most important might include:
- Using a responsive design
- Creating a separate mobile version of your site (AMP framework would be great option for creating fast-loading, user-centric webpages)
- Optimizing your images
- Ensuring that your content is easy to read on a small screen
Tracking the results of using SEO and content marketing together
As with everything else in business, it’s important to track the results of your efforts to see what’s working and what’s not. Moreover, you can hire a SEO expert that can help you with tracking your data and analysis the same.
There are several ways to track the results of your SEO and content marketing efforts, but some of the most important include the following elements.
Check your website’s traffic
Two free key tools to use are Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Google Analytics can give you detailed information about where your traffic is coming from, what pages they’re visiting, how long they stay on your site, and much more.
On the other hand, Google Search Console can show you which of your pages are being found in the search results and how often they’re being clicked on. This information can be extremely valuable in helping you to determine which of your pages are performing well and which ones need some work.
By looking at your traffic, you’ll know which content is being seen by your target audience and which content is being ignored. This information can be used to make adjustments to your content marketing strategy.
A/B test your content
A/B testing, which is sometimes called split testing, is a method of testing two different versions of a piece of content to compare which version performs better. This can be an extremely effective way to improve your content’s performance and ensure that it resonates with your audience.
There are many ways to A/B test your content, but some of the most common include testing different titles, meta descriptions, images and calls to action. Here are some ideas for doing A/B testing with these elements.
- Titles: Try using a different title for your blog post or article and see if that has any impact on the number of people who read it. Words such as “how to,” “top 10,” and “best of” tend to perform well.
- Meta descriptions: Write two different meta descriptions for your page and see if one outperforms the other in terms of click-through rate. In your meta descriptions, be sure to use keywords and phrases that accurately describe the page’s content.
- Images: Try using a different image in your blog post or on your website and see if it has any impact on traffic or engagement. Images that are relevant to the topic and attention-grabbing tend to perform well.
- Calls to action: Words such as “subscribe,” “download,” and “learn more” can be effective calls to action. Depending on the target audience and the content’s purpose, different calls to action may be more effective.
By A/B testing your content, you can determine what works best for your audience and make the necessary changes to ensure that your content is as effective as possible.
Conclusion
SEO and content marketing are two of the most important aspects of online marketing, and they need to work together for your business to be successful when using this type of marketing.
In the PR industry, we understand that a successful SEO and content marketing strategy requires a lot of hard work, dedication, and time. However, the rewards can be well worth the effort.
No matter what type of business you have, it’s essential to ensure that your website is optimized for search engines and that your content is engaging and informative, targeted to your audience.
By following the tips in this article, you can make sure that your SEO and content marketing efforts are working together to help you achieve your business goals.
