Content Marketing is about creating valuable content and disseminating it freely in an attempt to turn appreciative readers into customers. This can be done through blogging, newsletters, videos, emails, wikis, free reports, free manuals, infographics – just about any way you can create content (including video and images) is a great way to improve SEO marketing.
Content Marketing isn’t just a fantastic way to engage new readers and customers, it can also form a key part of your SEO strategy. Let’s take a look at 3 ways that Content Marketing is great for SEO:
1. Optimize for Customers, not Keywords
Back in the dark ages of SEO, people wrote SEO content using keywords which are scattered through content. However, the problem with this is that the content becomes much more attractive to search engines and much less attractive for people. And content should, after all, be for people. Content Marketing, unlike SEO copywriting, is all about people and, because of that, it’s great for SEO.
The 2011 SEO Moz Search Ranking factors cite page level link metrics as the top factor in search ranking algorithms.
While page level link metrics make up about 21.45% of the search algorithm, page level keyword usage only makes up 14.93%. Page level link metrics have decreased in importance since 2009 but this still means that it is far more important for people to link to you than it is for you to have a bunch of keywords all over your page. People will not link to content that makes no sense to them, and that means that search engines will love that page less. Produce quality content that people will want to link to and you’ll be doing wonders for your SEO.
2. Getting Social
Web 2.0 is all about sharing. This means that links back to your website from another website are not enough, you also want to encourage your readers to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, among others. And you can bet that with Google launching its own social media platform, Google+, that getting people to +1 your content is going to be a growing factor in the uphill struggle of SEO.
While Search Engine Optimizers aren’t 100% certain how Google and other search engines are using Social Media in their algorithms, they do know that it’s happening. Quality content is far more likely to be shared by people than traditional SEO copywriting. Again, it comes back to the fact that Content Marketing is written for people, not for search engines. Write content that people will love and it will be shared. Shared content makes Google happy which makes you happy.
3. Good Content Converts Search Visitors
SEO is about getting people to your site. Good SEO tactics are about getting them to convert. Conversion involves everything from buying a product to clicking on an advertising link. There is no point getting people to land on your site if you aren’t going to get them to convert. Imagine someone searches for “new television” – are they more likely to click on an advert from a spammy site stuffed full of keywords or from a quality site with unbiased reviews?
With a Content Marketing strategy you will be providing quality content and developing yourself as an authority on a subject. Google loves sites that are an authority on whatever their niche is, as those sites provide quality content to searchers. Follow the suggestion of Matt Cutts, Head of the Google Web Spam team; “try to make a site that is so fantastic you become an authority in your niche.”
With a Content Marketing approach you make people happy, which makes Google happy, which makes you happy – everyone wins!
