There is an awful lot of confusion out there about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content marketing, and how these two things fit together. Some people treat them as two different things and then feel surprised and disappointed when they don’t see the results they expected. Both are essential and can do important
things on their own, but it’s not enough. To achieve the success you desire, you need to bring the two together and take advantage of their potent combination.
In this blog post, we’re going to present you with some ideas to combine SEO and content marketing that you might not have considered. Of course, these barely scratch the surface. Once you get in the mindset of doing this automatically, you will probably think of several profitable ideas on your own.
Google Trends should be your first stop before you start any article or blog post. Here you will see a list of well over 100 topics that have garnered the most searches in the past 24 hours along with two featured insights. Your subject matter doesn’t necessarily have to be that recent, but it’s a good place to go to see what people want to read.
It’s also essential to select keywords and target your writing around it ahead of time. You can accomplish this by doing some research at Google AdWords or checking Google Analytics to see which keywords have driven readers to your site most recently. Just remember that you must make your keywords flow naturally and write content that is genuinely useful to readers. Google could penalize you for spam if you don’t.
Take Advantage of Guest Blogging Opportunities
If you have blogs you read often and admire, see what it takes to submit a guest post to the site. The more often you do this, the more likely readers will come to see you as an expert in your industry. However, the benefits of guest blogging go far beyond thought leadership. It gets your name and company name on other well-respected sites, which in turns gives you more links and higher rankings.
You can see a huge uptick in traffic when you link back to your own site, but you should not overdo this. The links should be of genuine value to the reader and not just something to manipulate search engines into giving you higher rankings. Of course, you should say yes to any guest blogging opportunity that comes your way as long as it’s in your niche.
Don’t Overlook the Importance of Indirect Conversions
Receiving traffic from converting keywords is important, but you need to look at the big picture. In fact, you could mistakenly limit your traffic by keeping your focus here and ignoring the possibility of indirect conversions. This is a visitor who didn’t type in any of your top keywords to get to your site. He or she may have clicked a link on Facebook or typed in a random search term. After arriving at your site, this round-about visitor read a few blog pages and subscribed to receive updates. It wasn’t until six months later that this person became a paying customer.
The moral of the story here is to continue creating high-quality content that makes readers’ lives easier in some way. It just might convert into a sale from someone who deeply appreciates the information you put out there.
Are you an SEO Expert but Not a Writer? No Problem!
We can’t all be good at everything. Maybe you’re an SEO whiz but struggled through English class and haven’t tried to write anything since then. As a Content Runner client, you can provide the SEO keywords and other details to a writer and he or she will take it from there. Another option is to modify an article you get back from one of our writers to meet your SEO criteria. With our open platform, the way you choose to work with a writer is entirely between the two of you. Our staff is always here to help work out the details.