We are sure you have heard the phrase, “content is king” before, but what exactly is it referring to? In this article we discuss why content is king, and the top strategies to creating a content marketing strategy that will help increase your rankings in search engines like Google.
What is Content Marketing?
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as follows:
Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
The reason content is considered ‘king’, is because it is proven to be such a beneficial marketing tactic, driving profitable customer action (as the definition above describes).
As an experienced marketing agency, one of our staples when onboarding a new client, is to consider their content marketing strategy to be of upmost importance. In this increasingly digital world, people turn to online platforms to consume content – look no further than this data by CMO.com, suggesting that TV – As we know it – is dead.
What does this mean to you as a business owner? You need to be one of the first results when relevant search queries are entered in to these online platforms to separate yourself from the competition. We’ve identified the best way to do this is to ‘marry’ content marketing with the equally important digital marketing concept of search engine optimization (SEO).
What is SEO?
According to Search Engine Land
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.
Your business may provide the best products / services, but without SEO, your website is at a disadvantage compared to your competitors.
How Are Content Marketing and SEO Related?
Unlike email marketing or social media, content marketing excels at delivering your marketing message to people that may be unaware of your brand. An extraordinary amount of questions are typed into search engines daily, and an opportunity to exists to have your thorough, well-written, accurate responses to these questions be the first thing these customers see, if the content is optimized for search engines.
The best thing about content marketing? It is the gift that keeps on giving. Once you have achieved that ‘status’ of being the authoritative voice for search term(s), unique, relevant visitors will continue to flood your website with traffic. Considering the initial investment required for content is the time (and costs of outsourcing if you are not generating your own), the return-on-investment can be huge…and scalable!
How Do You Get Your Content Marketing Found on Google?
We have covered in detail, the steps to generate a hyper focused content development strategy. This is the first strategy we always recommend to clients. Yes, it would be ideal to have your content rank for highly competitive keywords but starting with lesser competitive search terms allows our clients to become the authoritative voice on questions or queries that otherwise are left unanswered or ambiguous.
For the more competitive keywords and search terms, there is two well known factors that go into generating high-ranking content.
- Publish your content on a highly authoritative site
To keep things simple, think about the traditional sites you trust for your information. These typically consist of the Wikipedia, educational institution websites.
The benefit of publishing your content on these sites is that they are more likely to be found and provide a referral source to our client’s money site (where conversions and transactions take place). Additionally, being found on these highly authoritative sites increases your brand awareness and credibility.
- Publish your content on your own site
In a future knowledge base article, we will discuss the basics of what are the necessary steps to increasing the domain authority of your website.
Ideally content would be published to our client’s site. The obvious benefit of this is that it increases the chances that the visitor sticks around to view our client’s other content and/or products/services and converts into a new lead.
Both options will require significant investments in time and consistency.
What Are the Benefits of Combining SEO and Content Marketing?
We have touched on this a bit previously in the article, but the main benefit of generating extremely valuable content and optimizing it to be search engine friendly, is that it drives customer actions that provide return on investment that exceeds other digital marketing options.
Now that we have established the benefits…
What Content Marketing Strategy Produces Results?
There is no reason to re-invent the wheel when it comes to content marketing strategies. We have seen great results using the Skyscraper Technique. Brian Dean at Backlinko provides an easy three step process:
Step #1: Find Proven Linkable Assets
Step #2: Make Something Even Better
Step #3: Reach Out to The Right People (Link Building Exercise)
Conclusion
Content marketing is a proven strategy that if you are not currently utilizing, you are missing out on potential revenue. With this article’s actionable tips, we suggest incorporating both content marketing and SEO into your digital marketing strategy as soon as possible.
