How Content Marketing Helps with SEO

For the longest time, you may have heard the phrase, “content is king.” But what does this phrase really mean? Well when it comes to SEO, it means a whole lot in terms of where your site might rank on Google for various search terms.

However, too often marketers make content marketing and SEO out to be two completely different things. When in actuality, content marketing should be a part of your overall SEO strategy.

But before we get into the details of how content marketing can help with SEO, let’s begin with some definitions.

What is Content Marketing?

According to Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

In a nutshell, this says that content marketing is the creation and use of content to attract people who may be interested in your content to visit your site, and ultimately convert them into a customer. For instance, you may have landed on this article because you were interested in the title you saw on Google search results. You may have seen it after searching for something related to SEO and content marketing. Since you were interested, you selected the search result and decided to read on.

This process is a practical example of how content marketing works. The good news is that it works just as well for other types of businesses too.

How about a content marketing example?

Say for instance that you are a plumbing company. Since you know so much about plumbing, you might write blog articles on your website about different types of common household plumbing issues. If the majority of your business comes from homeowners, these are you perfect potential customers. As homeowners are on Google looking for a fix to their plumbing woes, they may come across the article on your blog that talks about a solution to their leaky faucet.

In that moment, you have then attracted a clearly defined target within your audience. Homeowners who need help with their plumbing. They then visit your site and read your content. If they like what they read and find you to be an expert on your craft, they may contact you for a quote.

And this is how content marketing works!

This all sounds great, but if it were as simple as slapping up an article, you would have customers coming out the wazoo! What we know is that in general, it doesn’t happen this easily. That’s where SEO is needed and comes into play.

So what is SEO?

By definition, Moz describes SEO as “the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.” In everyday terms, this simply means making your website rank higher in search results (on Google).

But why would you want your website to rank higher in search results? The number one reason is because sites that rank higher get more visitors to their websites. In fact, 75% of people won’t go past the first page of Google. So it’s important to be there if you’re serious about being discoverable online.

With more visitors going to your website, this means that are there are also more potential customers. But as we mentioned before, content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. So in order for your site to show up higher on Google’s search results, it must have consistent, fresh and quality content.

This usually isn’t something that happens overnight, but by regularly creating new pages and blog posts, your site can begin to rank higher over time.

So now that we have an understanding of what both content marketing and SEO are, let’s see how they work together.

Content Marketing and SEO

In our opinion, the most qualified potential customer you will ever get is going to come from a Google search. Why? Because this is how most people look for information and services when beginning their research. Think about it. When you are trying to hire a contractor or find a plumber for your leaky faucet, what is the first thing you do? You Google it, right? If you were a plumbing company or contractor, that person searching on Google is exactly who you want visiting your website because you know they would benefit from your services.

Posting your blog articles on social media or sending your content out via email work great. But there is no substitute for the customer quality of people actively looking for your services online. These people searching are essentially qualifying themselves as potential customers.

And this is exactly how content marketing and SEO work together. With an authoritative website that shows up related to what people are already looking for, the battle is halfway won. The other half is converting your newly found visitors into customers.

How do you get your content marketing to show up highly on Google?

The answer to this question could have a series of articles dedicated to this one topic alone. But here are the basics. There are really only two ways to get your content to rank highly in search results and they include either:

1. Post your content on a highly authoritative website that already ranks well because of SEO, or;
2. Build up the authority of your own website by creating enough quality content to improve SEO

So which content marketing option is the right one?

While option 1 may seem like the sure way to go, it does come with some cons. The most obvious being that the content is not being published on your own website. Therefore you would be helping another website improve their own SEO as a guest publisher. An example of this would be if you were a lawyer and wrote a guest article to be published on AVVO (a legal resource website). Your article may rank highly on Google because of their established authority, but the traffic would still be going to a different site other than your own. While this is good in the immediate and for getting your name out there as an expert authority, long term, this may not be the best option.

With option 2, this would take quite a bit more time if you were starting from SEO scratch with a brand new website. But long term, this is the recommended way to go. This is because the content you write and publish is not going to another website. It would be going to your own business website. And when readers are going to your website, you’re setting up the building blocks for your own SEO.

New websites with little content have much less authority in search engines than more established sites that have been around for years. These sites have added loads of content over the years and have gained some likeness points in the eyes of Google. But with enough time and effort in content marketing, so can yours.

Need help with your content marketing and SEO?

If you’ve read through this article, chances are you’re at least interested in content marketing and SEO. Over the years, we’ve helped businesses with their content marketing as part of their overall SEO efforts. In doing so, their SEO has improved substantially. And with improved SEO came improved leads and customers. Maybe our San Antonio SEO company can do the same for your business.

If interested in improving your company’s SEO through content marketing, get started with our SEO plan today! You’ll be glad you did.