Nearly 61% of B2B content marketers feel that SEO changes are their biggest issue. This points to the fact that SEO and content marketing are both linked to each other. You can use them together to achieve your goals.
While SEO deals with improving the overall experience of a searcher, content marketing deals with the creation of content that the searcher is looking for. Using them together can give a huge boost to your marketing and help you achieve online success.
Here’s how you can use a combination of SEO and content marketing to grow your brand:
1. User Experience
Search engines strive hard to give their users a better experience. They do so by ranking websites that provide accurate information and good experience to their visitors higher in search results.
SEO thus involves steps that you need to take to improve the quality of your website and offer a seamless browsing experience to your visitors.
One of the most important parts of SEO is the content that’s on your website. It should be well-written and accurate. At the same time, it should be able to satisfy the searcher’s intent. When people find content that they were looking for, they will more likely return back to your website.
Creating this high-quality content can increase their time on page and decrease your bounce rate. Both of these factors will positively affect your website’s SEO and help you rank higher in the SERPs. This, in turn, will get you more visitors.
2. Keywords
Keywords are essential for the success of your SEO strategy. You need to use relevant keywords in your content to ensure that your rank for those keywords in the SERPs.
First, you need to find those keywords through keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner and KWFinder.
Your keywords need to be used judiciously and naturally in your content, and that’s where content marketing comes into play. You also need to add keywords to your headings, URLs, and meta description to improve your SEO.
This way, SEO and content marketing both work together to help you rank higher in search results.
3. Backlinks
Backlinks are like the backbone of SEO. Each backlink that you earn will help your website rank higher in searches if it’s from a reputable source.
One of the best ways of getting backlinks is by writing guest posts. However, guest posts will only be accepted if you write high-quality content.
Additionally, you can expect to get some traffic out of the guest posts if the audience of that website finds your content useful. This, too, will only happen when you’ve written informative content. That’s where content marketing helps improve your SEO.
Another way of getting backlinks naturally is by creating great content that people will want to link to. Such useful content can earn you some valuable backlinks that can positively impact your SEO.
One method which many brands use to improve their SEO is by partnering with influencers. Influencers are adept at creating quality content for their audiences and, thus, can help drive traffic to your website.
A backlink from their website can also help boost your SEO. However, finding influential personalities can be a tough task. To make it simpler, you can use tools such as BuzzSumo, Influence.co, and BuzzStream.
4. Competitor Analysis
Using SEO tools like Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Majestic, and others you can get insights into your competitors’ content strategies. You can find out which of their pages get the most traffic and which ones have the most backlinks.
This will help you find topics that your target audience is interested in reading about. By identifying your competitors, you can get ideas for your blog posts. At the same time, you can find the best keywords for your niche.
5. Internal Linking
Another way you can align your SEO and content strategies is through internal linking. By adding internal links, you can redirect your website visitors from one web page to another. In this way, your visitors can read more content on your site.
At the same time, internal links are helpful at improving your site architecture. You can also help Google’s crawlers understand what your web pages are about by adding appropriate anchor text. In this way, it can help improve your SEO efforts as well.
Final Thoughts
SEO and content marketing may seem like two different modes of marketing. However, they can work together to help you accomplish your business goals. Keywords are necessary for SEO and can only be used well through content marketing.
Similarly, you can only expect to earn backlinks when you write quality content. Lastly, both of these marketing methods are aimed at giving a better experience to your visitors. And, only when both are done well, will the experience be good.
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What other ways do you use content marketing and SEO to grow your brand? Have something to say about this article? Share it with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.