You either say that SEO is about content marketing or content marketing is about SEO. Whichever way, you would not be entirely far-off from the truth. If you want to have good and effective content marketing strategies, then SEO has to be at the core of what you do.
First, you need great content so that your clients, readers and audience stick to you. Second, you need good SEO to be found in the first place. Or you can think of it this way:
“Great content helps you find your audience. Great SEO helps potential clients find you.”
Whether you are a photographer, a brand or anything, you need to reach people daily. And that is where content marketing comes in; creating useful and germane content aimed at reaching a specific, well-defined group of people or audience. The contents could be videos, podcasts, articles and so on. It doesn’t need to come with a call-to-action aimed at profit engineering. It could be solely for entertaining your customer base.
It gets technical too, and that is where SEO comes in. SEO is the various rules you have to follow and tactics you have to employ to get noticed – traffic – by search engines. Why search engines? Because everyone is on the internet these days, and you will find most of your customers in that digital space. Moreover, the digital community is rapidly expanding as internet penetrates even unknown places.
So, how do you utilize content efficiently for SEO? While it gets really technical down the line, here are the less technical parts:
Stuff Less
Google and its bots are smarter now. Gone are the days when you pack a handful of targeted keywords into a post and you rank well. The rules have definitely changed. Keyword stuffing looks just like spamming; Google site crawlers easily detect these and push your website or content down the ranking list. And while Google looks beyond keywords to rank, keywords are still crucial to providing good content.
Build Authority
Google ranks pages, not websites. You need authority to prove to Google that you are not a “fraud” and that you are reliable and give out worthy content. This is done by way of links. You can either link from a trusted website like one with a domain authority of 90 and above, or create great content that links to trusted and established websites.
A good way is to guest-post on a popular site and link back to yours. Building internal links within your site and spreading them around does a good job too.
Always Think Mobile
Look at these statistics:
- More than half of the world population in 2016 had access to mobile phones.
- Almost 40 per cent of the world population is expected to have access to smartphones by the end of 2018 too.
Accounting for more than 50 per cent of all digital site traffic, optimizing your content by actively thinking of mobile users will put you out there. You want people to see your products and services easily, and get to know that you exist, think mobile.
