20 Aug The Keys to Effective Content Marketing and SEO

We all know how much businesses love content! Not only does it help in promoting products and services but it also allows businesses to educate their audiences and spread their influence within their industry. No doubt, content marketing has become so pervasive that custom-content creators have increased their spending in 2018.

In the same way, businesses are also investing a bulk of their online marketing resources in search engine optimization or SEO. Digital transformation has made it possible even for startups to promote their brands. But in order to rise above the digital noise, these businesses will have to make sure that they are highly visible online. This is indicated by the fact that small businesses often spend a minimum of $500 for high-quality SEO services.

Sure enough, content marketing and SEO go together as the most cost-effective and effective strategies for putting your business front and center. However, creating a content and SEO strategy is not without barriers and challenges. Even though it won’t cost you a fortune to build an effective means of engaging your audience, crafting your strategy doesn’t involve any shortcuts.

You just have to use these keys for creating and distributing content and ensuring that your online presence gets all the exposure it deserves.

Draft out a clear-cut plan

The first thing you will need to do is to plan your strategy from the ground up. Remember: There are no shortcuts to this. Everything has to be articulated in order to achieve the results you want to see. But in order to get to the results, you will need to define them first. That said, setting your goals should be the first step in the process of building your content and SEO strategy.

Along these lines, you may want to choose the main objectives of your campaign and determine the specific activities that can help you achieve them:

• Lead generation – If the main purpose of your online efforts is to generate leads for your product or service, you may need to create fill-forms and other lead capturing devices on your website. In this case, you can offer free downloadable content such as brochures, videos, e-books, and audiobooks.
• Increased sales – Want to increase the number of people purchasing your product or services? You can simply build an e-commerce site where visitors can shop for and purchase the things they need. For this, it helps if you provide detailed product descriptions and video demonstrations that potential customers can use to make the decision to purchase.
• Brand influence – Your business growth is best gauged by the effectiveness of your branding strategy. After all, you can’t have loyal customers if you don’t have an initial audience base you can reach out to. Content that introduces your business is a key factor for improving your online branding. You just have to make sure that you’re using relevant keywords that will help your business rank in the search engine results pages or SERPs. This will be discussed more thoroughly below.
• Traffic volume – Maybe you’re not in the business of selling. Maybe you have an advocacy to promote. Maybe you’re running a news website. At any rate, you still need to attract the right people to your website using a mix of relevant content and keywords that get a lot of engagement.

Sharing and adding value to curated content

Sometimes, you will have to scour the internet for relevant content you can share to your audience. But more than just sharing content, you will need to add value to any curated content by adding commentary or relating it to your business. It’s fairly easy to find information that aligns with your business. Tools such as Storify and Curata are great for searching content that is highly engaging and can help enhance your business’s online visibility.

Content curation can also bring in SEO value. By choosing the right content to share, your business is able to add brand authority, allowing it to generate even more visitors and improving your search engine rank. This is due to the fact that you’re also generating backlinks to your website, which improves your online presence.

Landing pages for each audience segment

If you’re looking to promote a special offer,  you might as well build intuitive landing pages that are highly targeted. If you’re a business coach that engages entrepreneurs in the retail industry, you could create effective landing page content that’s built for this specific sector. There are tons of landing page builders you can use in your content marketing. LeadsHook and UnBounce are just some of the best platforms for creating targeted landing pages for your business.

Once you have set up the needed platforms for your landing pages, you might want to consider these few key elements that add SEO value.

• Organize your design in a way that makes it easy to engage and convert visitors. In this sense, the proper placement of graphics is integral to this goal. Hiding certain links from plain sight won’t help your customers make the necessary step towards a conversion. To be on the safer side, it’s best that you pick a more minimalist design for your landing pages and place the most important buttons near or in the center.
• For your color scheme, pick a combination that best represents your brand. Two or three colors will do. Going beyond that will only manage to clutter up the design of your landing pages, on top of giving your visitors a headache.
• Providing social proof not only adds to your business’s online reputation, it also helps in establishing trust with people who might want to purchase a product or service later on. Social proof can be in the form of your participation in an industry event or an award given by a reputable institution.
• Calls to action are critical towards converting your visitors into paying customers. For this, you will need to write compelling copy that is sure to entice users into subscribing to your mailing list, purchasing a product, downloading a free e-book, or sending you a query.
• Finally, you might also add backlinks that will lead users to your website where they can be further nurtured by additional content. This will surely optimize your engagement as well as improve your site authority.

Keyword-rich and industry-relevant blogs

If you don’t already have a blog for your business, it’s crucial that you start one.  According to HubSpot, at least 53% of marketers consider blogging as their top priority. The reason for this is the fact that blogs add value to their content marketing strategies. Not only does it help influence buyers’ decisions, but blogging can also improve your website’s searchability. This would involve coming up with a list of keywords to include in each blog you publish.

Still, the most crucial element to creating keyword-rich content is research. That said, you should be able to invest time and money on finding high-value keywords. Here are a few steps to begin with:

Know your topics

When it comes to keyword research, you should be able to get a firm grasp of the process behind building a list of high-value keywords that align with your main objectives and improves your brand’s searchability. Start by listing topics that are related to your product or service. Make sure that these topics closely match what your business provides to your audience. You can use the SEO tools stated above to help you come up with ideas for possible keywords that can help your business compete in the SERPs.

Look for related search terms

After that, you may want to focus on related key phrases. This will help in terms of enlarging your keyword list so you can use a diverse range of words and phrases that target specific audiences. The best way to do this is to simply enter the words in your initial list in the Google search engine and check the automated suggestions. From there, you can get a few more ideas to add to your keyword list.

Compare yourself with competitors

Another crucial strategy for enhancing your business’s online visibility is to check what keywords your competitors rank for. Tools such as SpyFu are useful along these lines.

Easily navigable and optimized websites

Of course, blogging is just the sauce to the entree. If you’re looking to get more people to view your content, you will need a website that’s easily visible. For this, you might want to reduce your website’s loading speed and consider a more intuitive design. Making it easier for users to navigate your site adds to the effectiveness of every piece of content you publish. Other than that, search engine optimization remains the key to getting more customers that are sure to make a purchase. For this, you will need an on-page SEO checklist to help you determine the needed improvements that support your content marketing strategy.

Content isn’t always about writing blogs or designing graphics. There are many things that goes on underneath the surface. Applying the four keys to effective content marketing above should help you get started.