SEO & Content Marketing

Contrary to popular misconceptions, SEO and content marketing are two separate marketing disciplines. And, as with much of the marketing world, the best results come when you combine these two disciplines.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO involves on-page, off-page, and technical methods of ensuring your website is found when people type a specific word or question into a search engine.

The aim is to drive organic traffic from your online content (as opposed to inorganic traffic from paid ads).

The most common way people come to know about search engine optimisation is when they're looking to boost their website's performance in search engine results. This might be with a goal to produce more leads from an online form, or simply getting more traffic to their homepage.

On-Page vs Off-Page vs Technical SEO

On-page and off-page SEO can also be thought about as the stuff your users can and cannot see.

On-page SEO includes how the words on the page are written, how many, and how they're formatted (for example, headings, titles, and body text). Images chosen, links provided in the text, and the overall design of the content also play a part. Finally, the metadata — how users will see your page previewed in search results — must also be optimised.

Off-page SEO is what you do beyond your website. This includes getting backlinks from advantageous sources, such as other trusted sites, or optimising your social media profiles, Google Profile, and ensuring you have a steady stream of positive reviews on Google (or other reputable review platforms).

Technical SEO includes the behind-the-scenes factors that most people will never notice, but they're essential for search engines to map and show your content in their results. This involves optimising page speed, canonical tags, sitemaps, and other technical considerations valued by search engines.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is pretty much what it says on the tin: marketing by using content. The outcome is driving people to your website repeatedly, through all your different channels.

But the intention is to create content that subtly warms up leads by building trust and community — all so that, by the time they need your services, they already know you're an expert in the field from the helpful, user-centric content you provide.

Creating content in this way is a long-term strategy to keep current and future clients interested in your company. Unlike other forms of marketing, content marketing is done consistently, all year round. The topics covered may be chosen based on user patterns or honed to whatever specific marketing campaign is running at the time.

Content Used In Content Marketing

Content marketing is usually executed over multiple channels such as a website, social media, YouTube, email, and print. The following types of content are good examples of what's often created:

• Blog post
• Website landing pages
• Social media post
• YouTube video
• Podcast
• Email newsletter
• Case study

SEO And Content Marketing: Why To Combine The Two

So, now you've recapped what SEO and content marketing are, you may have noticed that they're effectively two sides of the same coin.

You can't execute a complete SEO strategy without high quality content. There is no amount of technical and off-page SEO that would combat a terribly written web page or blog post.

Equally, forgetting to consider SEO when executing your content marketing strategy may mean that no one ever finds all the content you've created. And that defeats the purpose.

Using these two disciplines together means creating high quality SEO content that is tailored to the intentions and needs of your target audience — full of your company's personality, as well as being easy for search engines to crawl. Ultimately, this allows your content to be found by the reader exactly when they need it.

Creating An SEO-Driven Content Marketing Strategy

When combining an SEO strategy with content marketing, it's a bit like the chicken and egg scenario. You can start from either, in theory. However, we'd personally recommend starting with an SEO strategy.

Starting from the SEO side means you can ensure the basics have been ticked off first, such as:

• Setting up analytics and tracking dashboards — this will ensure you can actually measure improvements and website traffic driven by content marketing.
• Fixing technical errors — such as page speed, usability, and non-indexed pages (which are not crawled by Google and therefore have no chance of showing in a search result).
• Maintaining any progress already made — it's easy to decide you hate every web page and blog post you've published up to now. But you want to add to the traffic you already get from existing pages, not throw it away. (This is a common SEO mistake when building a new website.)

Once the foundations are built, that's where creating content comes in.

The Benefits Of Merging SEO And Content Marketing

The whole point of content marketing is to provide valuable information that's relevant to the reader, whilst subtly keeping your brand front of mind. And the whole point of SEO is getting the right people to view your content.

Hand-in-hand, merging the two often creates the following benefits:

• Content marketing sets the target audiences for your SEO strategy — SEO ensures that your blog on, for example, "How to build a shed" actually comes up in Google for that search query, and not for other keywords that your target customer will never search for.
• SEO drives changes to existing and ongoing content by regular auditing.
• Content marketing can soften otherwise robotic SEO content, with clear brand guidelines and tone of voice.
• SEO keyword research provides insight into topics to cover.
• Content marketing breaks target keyword research into a digestible and intriguing series of content to keep the reader engaged.

Tips For Creating SEO Content

Here are a few tips for content marketing campaigns that are search engine optimised.

Review All Existing Content Through An SEO Lens

Does your existing content rank for the keywords you actually want to be found for? And if so, how well is it performing? Is it consistently driving quality traffic to your website?

Reviewing your existing content marketing efforts through an SEO lens allows you to gather insights on what needs to change moving forward. This may include adding to content, re-writing it, or even creating brand new web pages — plus any off-page and technical SEO considerations that have fallen short, such as the load speed of your content and the overall usability of your site.

Utilise Keyword Research

Keywords are the bread and butter of any SEO strategy. They're invaluable if you want to write content in a way that makes sense to a search engine, as well as your reader.

For example, if you're an SEO agency, you might want your homepage to be found for the keyword "SEO." So, SEO would be the word you look to include throughout your web page.

But keyword research can also give you related phrases, long-tail keywords, and even competitive keywords (words your competitors currently rank for). These further insights help your SEO copywriter — the person writing your SEO content — to build out your page in a way that's going to be more helpful to the reader.

For example, a related search may be "SEO strategy" and a long-tail keyword may be "why have an SEO strategy?" Your page may therefore have the title "SEO strategy services" with headings such as "why have an SEO strategy" and "how to build an SEO strategy."

All of this means the content isn't just great for Google — it answers the natural next questions of the reader, as they think of them.

Publish Consistent, Quality Content

If you're going to be publishing content anyway, it may as well be optimised for search engines. After all, you want people to find it!

Search engines like to visit up-to-date pages. The easiest way to support this is to publish regular SEO content, such as a blog post (as well as updating your core web pages every few months).

Contrary to popular belief, blogs are not there simply for company news or the odd opinion post. They're the ideal way to get high quality content continually crawled.

Using keyword research, in addition to a reliably repetitive publishing schedule, is a great way to build a readership that knows they can count on you to give them valuable information every week, fortnight, or month.

Plan Search Optimised Content In Advance

The devil really is in the detail when it comes to SEO and content marketing. Planning your efforts in both fields ensures they can work together and not in silos.

For example, if you know your readers want to read about a specific thing in the month of July, review your existing content on the topic and re-optimise if needed. Next, plan your upcoming July content with in-depth keyword research and other relevant SEO considerations.

When July comes around, you will be providing content you know your audience loves, and that Google is able to find, categorise, and offer to even more people.

Internal And External Link Building

SEO is what allows your content marketing efforts to be found. Content marketing mixed with SEO is what sends users into a rabbit hole — and rabbit holes mean more time spent on your website.

Linking between your own website content, where relevant, means that any additional information the user would find useful is just a click away. Internal links may be to a popular blog post, email sign-up page, service or product pages, or even contact and about us pages. The point is, if the user is likely to need it, they should probably have a helpful link to it.

External links are incredibly important for your technical SEO, both to and from your content. For example, if you've quoted a government guideline, it's always good to link to the government website page on which that quote can be found — it adds trust.

Where backlinks are concerned, if you're being linked to from a trusted source, such as a popular news site, this can increase the authority with which search engines view your page. If you're good enough for a popular news site, you must be a reliable source of information for search engine users. Not to mention, you're just a click away from everyone who reads the original news site's article — traffic gained without having to write the content yourself.

SEO And Content Marketing: How And Why To Combine The Two

If you've made it this far, you now have an idea of what goes into combining SEO and content marketing.

Whilst they can work fairly well on their own, in order to be truly successful, these two strategies must be planned and executed alongside each other.

Content marketing is important for establishing your ideal client and what content they want to consume. SEO is what will ensure your client can find it in the first place.

An SEO-first approach can save you time when it comes to ensuring the basics have been covered first. But if you're already on the ball with creating content, there's also no need to worry.

Starting an SEO-driven content marketing strategy with your new knowledge is what will make the difference moving forward. Auditing all your existing content, updating for SEO, and fixing any behind-the-scenes SEO considerations that have been neglected is all part and parcel of getting your website up to scratch.

Finding The Right Support For SEO And Content Marketing

So now the question is: do you have the time to implement the above?

No? Well, Sway Digital is here to support you.

We've helped businesses of all shapes and sizes to:

• Avoid the stress of maintaining SEO and content creation
• Boost search engine traffic and website leads over time
• Increase exposure and ultimately grow the business

Book a free, no-obligation chat today. If you're interested in seeing how this could work for you, get in touch! We're offering a no-obligation discovery call to chat about how your company can move forward with SEO and content marketing.