Why SEO and Content Marketing go Forever Hand in Hand
When you’re producing content for the web, you’re not just throwing some reading material out there in order to get
a little attention. That would be no more effective than launching a commercial campaign where you stand in front of your business saying “Hi. I sell stuff. Want some?”. Creating valuable content from an SEO standpoint means creating content for the web that is
- Findable
- Readable
- Understandable
- Actionable
- Shareable
Not the first line, because that’s where your SEO and content strategies come together. Your content needs to be findable. This goes beyond optimizing your content and landing pages with keywords. It all begins when you fully understand the segmentation of your customers. This means getting to the root of their behavior, understanding their preferences (including how they prefer to discover information on products using the web), how they consume information and how they share what they find.
When you know what your customers care about and the things they prefer – as well as those they dislike – then you’ll be able to more readily identify how those concerns and interests manifest as search terms, social discussions. With that information you can refine not only your keyword research but also the type of content you produce to improve your position with your target audience.
SEO and Content Strategy – Staying Shareable
Not only does your content need to be easy to find but you need to make it easy to share that content whether it’s a blog, an article, eBook, white paper or informational landing page on your site. Editorial plans based on your refined research will make all of your content much easier to find and consume but the important thing is to know your audience and what they want to read. Through that content you can create empathy with your customers. When they feel like you understand them, they’re more likely to share your content.
SEO and Content Strategy – The Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar is more than just a calendar. It’s a plan that outlines your content types, the topics you want to cover, your primary keywords each post is to be optimized for and it also indicated how content will be sourced or repurposed, research methods used, editorial guidelines, distribution methods and more. When you combine content strategy using the editorial calendar with clear knowledge and best practices on SEO, including how content is indexed, then you have a powerful ally in online marketing.
When you produce content for your business, it’s not enough to create something just to create something. Your strategy needs to be based on optimizing content for your target audience first once you come to understand them. With that strategy in place you can revisit your SEO to fully optimize the content for search visibility.
