The Intersection Of Content Marketing And SEO

If there were ever two marketing tactics that belong together, it’s content marketing and search engine optimization. Blend them together properly and they’re better than PB&J.

Content marketing and SEO work so well together because they are really about the same two things: giving your people exactly what they want. You need the search engines to help prospects find your content. You also want your content to hook your visitors, so they keep coming back once they find you.

Sounds a little like the chicken and the egg, right? It is. That’s why you need the two working together.  Search engine optimization without content a human would like to read is just spam. It also needs to be content users will be able to find.  If the content can’t be found in search engines, it really is useless.

Fortunately I don’t need to dive into search theory or talk about elaborate content strategy to make these two tactics work. You just need to understand which elements of your pages to optimize, both for search engines and for humans.

To help with that, the most important elements of a web page are listed below, both in terms of search engine optimization and for content marketing goals. Get these basics right and you’ll be on your way towards getting SEO and content marketing working together.

Get the keywords right.

Maybe you’ve heard keywords don’t matter anymore. Well, they do.  They just don’t matter as much. Your content should still include keywords.

Why you do this for search engines:

Every bit of traffic that comes from a search engine starts with a user entering a keyword. Simply put, keywords are how your pages get found. There are other factors, sure, but people still search with keywords. Smart SEOs research not just the industry terms they want to rank for, but the words and phrases their audience might use to find them, too.

Even smarter SEOs optimize their content around what’s called “long tail keywords” These are keyword phrases of three words or longer and are often indirectly related to your product or service. They get less search traffic per keyword, but usually get dramatically less competition. That makes them easier to rank for.

Why you do this for people: Searches for long tail keywords tend to convert to leads and sales better. Like two times better. If you can find a couple of really great long tail keywords and rank high for them, you’ve hit content marketing gold.

That’s what travel company Holiday Gems did with a quiz they built specifically for the long tail keyword, “where should I go on holiday”. It earned them first position in the search results for that phrase.

Get the title and meta description tags right.

 Title and meta description tags create the headlines and descriptions of your pages in the search engine results. They look like this:

 Why you do this for search engines: While titles and meta descriptions are not as important of a ranking factor as they used to be, these still impact how you rank indirectly. Simply put, a good title and description increase the number of “relevant” searchers that click on your listing, moving it up in the ranks, by showcasing it’s quality.

Why you do this for people: To people, those title tags and description tags are the only information they have before they land on your page. Write those tags in a way that accurately represents your page, but that also speaks to a user’s search intent. By properly creating these tags, you’re calling out the exact users you’re looking for, meaning that more relevant searchers will click through to your site and they will know exactly what to expect once they get there.

The listing above for the State of Small Business Report mentions a survey of 1,000 small business owners. That’s information our key audience wants.

Use those keywords and variations of those keywords once or twice again in the subtitles you use on the page.

 Why you do this for search engines: Search engines pay more attention to words in header tags (H1, H2 and other HTML headline tags) than they do to body text. Make that work for you by sprinkling, not dumping, keywords in. It’s also important to put in variations on those keywords. The days of keyword stuffing and keyword density are over. The days of using related terms are on.

Why you do this for people:People tend to scan more online than they read. Those subheaders help them scan, but they also pull the reader in a bit and make the page look easier to read.This post from Ferguson Plumbing varies its keywords several times in the headline and subheaders.

Use those keywords and variations on those keywords in the body of the text and in image alt tags.

Why you do this for search engines: Again, shake up the keywords or terms you use. Search engines figured out a long time ago that humans switch up the words they use to describe things. Too many repeated keywords can hurt your rankings.

 Why you do this for people: Write like you speak. When’s the last time you were describing something and used the same exact word throughout the explanation? You are not a robot.  You shouldn’t be doing that in your writing either. Feel free to mix up the way you talk about the topic, you don’t have to worry about using the exact phrase (e.g. SEO) every time you talk about it in the article. You could also use “Search Engine Optimization” or even just “search.” Your readers are smart enough to understand what you’re talking about and so are the search engines.

Remember: Your #1 priority is engaging the human reader.  You need to answer their questions and be useful. That’s the only way you’re going to get any ROI out of their visit.

Create content worth reading and sharing

Why you do this for search engines: Social share counts influence rankings. So do metrics like bounce rates. The happier your readers are, the more likely you’ll get more search engine traffic.

Why you do this for people: Visitors who enjoy and trust your content are more likely to sign up for a newsletter, download a white paper, or attend a webinar. Engage them enough and they’ll become customers. Not to mention, the more visitors share your content, the more potential readers you’ll reach through social media channels. Done correctly, this process can lead to a large volume of traffic from both search and social channels.

So how can you do this? Studying your Google Analytics reports is a start. Customer surveys can be helpful, too. Here’s a survey Lumosity sent:

The tool that does some SEO for you

 That’s enough information to be dangerous. I bet you don’t want to have to hack code to fix your website. Or maybe you just want someone to tell you exactly what to optimize on each one of your own pages.

There’s a plugin for that. Yoast SEO is a free WordPress plugin that takes all the headaches out of SEO optimization.

You will have to pick a keyword to make it work, but after that the plugin guides you all the way to a well-optimized page. As you progress, a little dot turns from red to orange to yellow to green. Sound simple enough?

Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be hard. Leaving it out of your content marketing can result in cutting off thousands of dollars in free traffic. So let your content marketing be informed by some keyword research. Optimize your pages lightly with the tips above. Just always put your website visitors first. They’re the ones who become customers, not the search engine bots