SEO and content marketing should form part of any digital marketing strategy. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) helps you to make sure your brand is found when potential customers are looking for your products or services within the search engines but content marketing is what they will read when they land on your site and is the way your site will be ranked. 

Let’s have a look at the key differences between the two but also how they work together to make sure your website is found in search engines such as Google. 

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What is SEO? 

SEO involves optimising your content and web pages to ensure that they’re visible to your target audience. It helps you to match your website with specific search queries so that you can drive traffic to your site and hopefully convert visitors into customers. 

SEO involves a number of strategies including: 

• Optimising on page elements
• Using specific keywords
• Optimising your site for user experience 
• Building high quality links 

Overall, the main goal of SEO is to get your website in front of the right people every time a relevant search query is performed. 

If you’re not creating content as part of your SEO strategy, you’re going to struggle to appear for relevant keywords or build trust and authority for your site. 

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What is content marketing? 

One of the key elements that search engines consider when ranking your site is good quality content. You might have a great SEO strategy in place but, if you’re producing low quality, thin content that’s poorly written, your SEO strategy is unlikely to be successful. 

The content you create needs to be informative, educational or interesting to your target audience and provide them with a solution to their problem or an answer to their question. If you get it right, your content marketing strategy can be extremely profitable for your business. 

You can use the content you create throughout the sales and marketing funnel to help support your overall strategy. Whether you want to build visibility online or drive conversions, content marketing can help. 

So, what’s the relationship between SEO and content marketing? 

As we have already mentioned, SEO and content marketing are often referred to as separate entities but they’re actually so entwined that there is overlap between the two strategies 

Including relevant keywords within your content and creating specific pieces of content that are specifically focused on the search queries your customers are using in the search engines will ensure that your content ranks. This means it will help you to drive traffic to your site and help you to reach your marketing goals. In addition, regularly publishing strong content to your website will help to improve its authority which will help to boost your site even more. 

How to make your SEO and content marketing strategies work together 

When you’re creating a content marketing strategy, as well as your overall business goals, you should also be considering SEO. You need SEO to boost the visibility of your website but you also need strong content to make your SEO strategy as effective as possible. 

Here are our top four tips for making your SEO and content strategies work together. 

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1. Understand your target audience 

This is key for success with any digital marketing strategy. Knowing exactly who you’re writing content for will help you to understand how they find information, what they like to know and the channels they use. 

You’ll also need to think about the different stages of their journey too and structure content for both the awareness stage and the conversion stage. 

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2. Conduct keyword research 

If you want to drive traffic to your site and be found in the search engines, you’re going to need to know what your audience is looking for. Keyword research will not only allow you to see what your customers are looking for so you can create relevant content, it will also help you to see what your competitors are using to appear at the top of the search results.

Remember that creating a piece of content and filling it with keywords is not an effective SEO strategy anymore. You need to use keywords naturally within the content and really think about your reader to ensure that search engines look at your content positively. 

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3. Build backlinks 

Once you’ve got some great content on your site, you can use it to start building valuable backlinks to your website. Backlinks tells search engines that your content is informative and relevant to your readers. They act as a vote of confidence for your content - always make sure your links are from high quality sites. Linking from poor quality sites can actually harm your rankings so think carefully about where you build backlinks from to get the best results. 

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4. Optimise your content for SEO 

What do we mean by this? When you create a piece of content, you can make sure its found and ranked highly by searching engines by doing a few simple things. 

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• Include relevant keywords - if you’ve done your keyword research and thought about how you’re going to create content around relevant topics, you’ll already know which keywords will need to be included in each piece of content. Including them naturally throughout the content will help you to appear for relevant terms. 
• Publish content regularly - Google likes to see you updating your website regularly with informative content so create a content calendar so you can keep track of what you need to publish and when. 
• Keep user experience in mind - make sure your content is easy to read and navigate for the user. This means adding in headings and bullet points where you can to make the content scannable and allow users to see whether your content is going to answer their question. Google likes to see that users are not bouncing straight back to the search results as this is an indication that your content does not answer the search query and may not continue to rank as highly as other content that is keeping visitors engaged. 

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If you want to know more about how content and SEO can help you to drive results for your business, why not sign up to our newsletter? 

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