What’s the ultimate objective of every business owner and digital marketer? Sure, boosting brand awareness and improving audience engagement is crucial. However, if your marketing campaigns don’t drive any conversions, your business won’t thrive. Whether you want your audience to sign-up for a webinar or purchase a product, your marketing strategies must be focused on conversions.

If you’re familiar with digital marketing, you likely already know about the importance of search engine optimization and content marketing. A common mistake made by marketers is to use these techniques exclusively. What they don’t realize is that SEO and content marketing complement each other. When strategically paired, they propel each other and improve your conversion rates.

Understanding SEO & Content Marketing

SEO is a set of strategies used to drive increased organic traffic from search engines to your website. It ensures that your website appears among the topmost organic listings in relevant search results. Thus, it increases brand awareness and helps you earn the trust of your target audience.

SEO is an ongoing process that delivers long-term results. This involves a series of steps such as audience research, website audits, keyword research, content creation, backlink building, etc. Additionally, you’ll likely need to improve your website’s performance, ensuring that it loads quickly, is mobile-responsive, and easily navigable.

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Content marketing, on the other hand, refers to the practice of creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract your audience. It’s an inbound marketing technique that piques your audience’s curiosity and interest and educates them about your products/services. It’s a great way to build authority and strengthen your brand’s online reputation. Additionally, it helps generate leads and convert them into loyal customers.

Similar to SEO, content marketing requires you to have a deep understanding of your target audience. It’s equally crucial to define your goals and identify the most effective distribution channels to meet those goals. Moreover, you should publish high-quality, insightful, original, and relevant content that provides solid value to your audience. It should either educate your audience, entertain them, or solve their problems.

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It’s worth mentioning that content marketing and SEO succeed best when they support each other. Otherwise, you may end up either grabbing traffic that leaves quickly due to sub par content or failing to drive any traffic to your well written content.

How SEO & Content Marketing Work Together

The simplest way of addressing this topic is to understand how today’s consumers search for new products/services. Let’s say you want to purchase a new phone. The first thing you’ll do is run a quick Google search to find the latest smartphone models within your budget.

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Next, you’ll likely visit the web pages from the first few search results and weigh your options. Initially, you’re just looking for more details to make an informed decision. If you’re interested in a particular model, you might click on the corresponding link for more information.

This is also likely how your target audience behaves. If they’re looking for your products/services, you want your website to show up in the topmost search results. This is your chance to educate them about your brand. You need to provide original and engaging content to help them understand how your product/service fulfills their needs.

As your website visitors keep returning for more content, they might sign-up for your mailing list or purchase your product. If you keep sending more useful and relevant content to them, they’ll likely convert into loyal brand advocates. That’s why it’s crucial for your SEO strategy and content marketing campaign to support each other.

Here’s the thing – your SEO strategy thrives on high-quality content. When you consistently publish top-notch content, it establishes your website as an industry authority. This often encourages other bloggers to include links to content they love on your website, thus strengthening your inbound link profile. Over time, search engines may begin to include it at the top of relevant search results. A well structured SEO campaign often drives more qualified visitors to your website/blog. These people are actively searching for terms related to your product/services. That’s why they’re more likely to convert into subscribers and customers.

Likewise, SEO helps steer your content marketing efforts in the right direction. Distributing and promoting your content is a vital part of content marketing. When your content is well optimized, it’s more likely to show up in search results. Structuring your blog posts using keyword-rich titles and sub-headings makes them more engaging and readable.

SEO & Content Marketing: Best Practices

You’ll get far better results if you coordinate your SEO and content marketing efforts. The first step is to identify your target audience’s needs, interests, emotions, aspirations, spending habits, struggles, and pain points. It’s also essential to define your goals and assign measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to them.

Dig deeper into your potential customer’s mind and find out the search queries they are using to identify solutions to their challenges. Next, find the distribution channels and content formats that’ll resonate with your audience. Then, create a list of content ideas and topics that will the questions they are looking to answer. It’s also recommended that you create a content calendar that defines your publishing and distribution schedules.

The key step is to create original and groundbreaking content and publish it to the right channels at the right time. If you’re publishing a blog post, make sure it’s well optimized for your target keywords. Likewise, if you’re uploading a video on YouTube, integrate these keywords in the video description and tags.

Lastly, make sure your website is user-friendly and mobile-responsive. Optimize the site architecture to help search engine spiders navigate your website and index new content. Create a keyword-rich FAQ page that addresses your audience’s most common queries and pain points.

Conclusion

A good SEO strategy gives direction and purpose to your content marketing efforts. Likewise, high-quality content breathes life into your SEO strategy. You can best achieve your marketing objectives when they support each other.