We’ve talked a lot about content marketing and how it should play a major role in your overall marketing mix. But frankly, all the content in the world isn’t going to help bring customers to your website if you haven’t taken it to the next level and optimized it for search. That’s why search engine optimization (SEO) should also play a major role as you allocate your marketing dollars.
Somewhere along the way, however, the purpose of SEO has been lost – it has become more about beating the latest update to Google’s algorithm than about providing valuable content for end users. “Customers” became the missing link between marketing and SEO.
There’s so many misconceptions about the relationship between content marketing and SEO out there that it’s worth repeating: content marketing isn’t about your company and brand, it’s about your audience, and their needs, wants and desires. For the AI, IoT, mobile, wireless and telecom industries, that means creating content that addresses your customers’ most common problems – and some not-so-common ones – as they look to provide value to their own audiences.
So how does SEO come into play? Good content can naturally lead to good SEO. By focusing on delivering value to your customers, you naturally are addressing their needs in every piece of content you deliver. Here’s how you can deliver the content you want and get the SEO results you need:
- Instead of creating a content calendar in a vacuum, hit up your sales team for a list of questions they get asked frequently about your company and your products and solutions. When they are on calls with customers, what are the most common paint points they hear about? You now have a list of built-in topics to address that you know will meet the needs of customers.
How it helps SEO: You’ve been handed a list of long-tail keywords you can use within your content to better drive interested parties to your site.
- Before putting pen to paper on each piece of content, draft a short list of questions that the piece of content should address.
How it helps SEO: This will help keep your content focused, and you may realize you can break the content up into a few pieces, providing broader and deeper keyword penetration.
- Focus your content marketing on the parts of your Positioning and Messaging that no other company does. This may manifest itself into webinars, eBooks, educational articles, how-to videos and other content that provide a response that nobody else can offer.
How it helps SEO: Having unique content that hones in specifically on your unique response to customers problems makes you stand out from the crowd. By providing new answers to age-old problems, you’re more likely to get linked to from outside sources, improving your SEO rankings.
- Instead of relying on ineffective approaches like keyword stuffing, duplicating content, paid links and cloaking, work with an SEO expert on tried-and-true techniques such as proper keyword analysis, competitor analysis, landing page optimization and others to up your SEO game.
How it helps SEO: An SEO expert, whether internal or external, can help you shed all your bad SEO habits and concentrate on those that are likely to deliver results.
Search rankings are important but your content should be aimed at solving human problems. If your content isn’t helpful to people, your SEO strategy won’t work, regardless of the work you put into it. It’s the way that you uniquely solve your customers’ problems and how that is manifested in your content strategy that will get you noticed.