How To Perfect Your Content Marketing Strategy

You know that content marketing is important for SEO.

It helps you get noticed by both the Google overlords and your ideal customer. 

But implementing a great content marketing strategy doesn’t happen overnight. And there are a number of things you need to know and understand in order to make your SEO work. 

So, where do you start? Read on, because we’re here to show you how to perfect your SEO and implement it to create an effective content marketing strategy. 

Why is SEO important for content marketing?

Or should that be, why is content marketing important for SEO? The truth is, you can’t create effective content without considering SEO and your SEO is kind of pointless without a great content marketing strategy. 

Which is why both need a hell of a lot of consideration and effort.

Content marketing is a way of reaching your audience and communicating with them in a valuable, interesting, and entertaining way. It helps you build a relationship with your dream audience, earn their trust, and (hopefully) their loyalty and business. In addition to this, content marketing helps with SEO. 

A good content marketing strategy involves growing and generating traffic through user-focused content that is both high-value and educational, helping to draw in your audience’s interest and engage them with your content. 

So, what does this have to do with SEO?

SEO and content are interconnected and complement each other. Without creating high-quality content (the kind Google likes and rewards) you can’t realise the full benefits of SEO and how it can elevate your business. Motivating your audience to hang around longer, improving your rankings and traffic, and creating a loyal fan base. Creating consistent optimised content helps achieve this. 

Why is SEO valuable for your content marketing strategy?

Google processes almost 7 billion searches a day.

That’s a lotta Googling!

And when you’re busy Googling “what is SEO” Google is hard at work filtering out the wheat from the chaff to give you the most useful and relevant results for your search query. And those are the ones that make it to the top of the SERPs (aka the search results). 

But, they don’t get there through a popularity contest. 

They make it to the holy grail of page one by being ranked as the most useful and valuable content on the web for that particular query. This means when the content was created, it was done so with the user’s intent in mind. The number one rule in SEO. The user and their experience must come first. 

According to Google, you need to make sure your content is:

• Useful and informative. Add as much valuable and relevant information as possible
• More valuable than other sites and provides more helpful information
• High quality. Your content should always be specific, unique, educational, entertaining, and high-quality. Focus on your reader’s experience first and foremost
• Engaging and readable. Bring your reader into your world and make it a personal and interactive experience
• Credible. Add links, reviews, testimonials, do your own research, and create a writer’s bio to boost your reputation and trustworthiness. You want to show your readers that YOU are an authoritative voice in your industry

OK. So now you know why SEO is vital for a great content marketing strategy. Let’s have a look at some ways you can perfect your SEO strategy to give your content the boost it needs.

5 simple ways to boost your SEO strategy

You don’t need to be an SEO guru to create an effective SEO strategy. Just follow these simple and easy-to-implement tips.

1. Know your keywords

Before you start creating your kick-arse content, you need to know which keywords your ideal audience is using to find solutions to their problems. Problems you can solve.

This means getting busy with keyword research. 

You can do this by using a keyword research tool (there are free, freemium, and paid-for tools to choose from) or doing your own simple research on Google. Step inside your customer’s shoes and think about what you would type into Google to find a solution to your query. 

Google is great for keyword research as it gives you ideas for what other people have searched for in relation to your search. Make a list of all the possibilities and keep going until you have a solid list of words and phrases that you can use in your content. 

2. Know your goals

Another super important step to help with your SEO and content creation is understanding your goals. What do you want to achieve with your content?

Is it to ramp up your traffic? Attract a new audience? Improve conversions? Create engagement? 

Whatever it is, there’s a content plan for it! Blog posts drive traffic to your site, email marketing improves conversions, social media posts create engagement. When done right, of course. 

When creating your content strategy, ensure you have your goals in mind. They will help shape your writing and give you a clear outline and definition as to what you want to achieve with your content. 

3. Know your audience

You know the old saying, “If you try and sell to everyone then you’ll sell to no one.” Well the same is true with your content. 

If you try and create content and include keywords that are too vague, then you’re going to end up reaching no one. In order to create an effective content marketing strategy, you have to know your audience.

And we mean really know them.

Your content has to provide value to their specific needs. Remember the first rule of SEO? Write for your audience. How are you going to do that if you don’t know them?

This is where creating a customer avatar really comes in handy.

This vital research will help you understand your ideal audience’s goals and values, demographic information, challenges and pain points, objections and roles, the way they like to speak, the brands they like…essentially, it’s a detailed profile of your ideal customer. And when you understand your customer and know them, you’ll have a much easier time creating optimised content for them. 

4. Update your content

How often do you update your website?

Having a regularly updated and refreshed website helps boost SEO rankings, especially when it comes to keywords and relevant content. 

If you want to increase your site’s popularity and drive more traffic, you need to give people a reason to keep coming back. What does this mean? As well as producing high-quality and keyword-targeted content, your content marketing needs to be relevant, recent, and fresh. 

Regularly updated content is viewed as one of the best indicators of a site’s relevancy. Audit your content frequently and make any necessary updates to improve it. 

5. Make your content mobile-friendly and easy to navigate

People consume most of the digital content they read on a smartphone or tablet. 

And because of this, every piece of content you create, including your website, needs to be mobile-optimised and simple to navigate on a small screen as well as a desktop. 

Text needs to be broken down into easy-to-read chunks. Use SEO strategies such as headlines, subheads, links, and optimised images to make your content easy to skim and take in. Mobile SEO focuses on the same integral themes – high performance, great user experience, and high-quality content. 

Creating a great content marketing strategy takes time

But it doesn’t have to be hard. By understanding how an SEO strategy can boost your content marketing efforts, you’re already halfway there.

Remember, you don’t need to be an SEO guru to get started. Just having a basic understanding of SEO will pay off massively. And as long as you put your audience front and centre of your content, you really can’t go wrong.

Need a little boost creating awesome content that speaks to your ideal customer? Then we’d love to help. Take a look at our content packages, and let’s chat about how we can help you rank on page one.