In addition to Marketing Automation, Mobile Marketing and Influencer Marketing, Content Marketing is one of the most important online marketing tools in recent years, and it is central to SEO. We will show you what Content Marketing is and how it can be applied for search engine optimization.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing generally refers to the publication of informative, entertaining and useful content that is tailored to the needs of target groups. Think for example about tutorials, manuals and step-by-step instructions.
Content Marketing content can be published on one’s own website, social media channels and in various electronic formats. A preliminary target group analysis is essential: what are the needs of your customers and partners, and can you provide additional value to them by publishing information?
How is Content Marketing useful for SEO?
Imagine your current website as a physical shoe shop for Italian leather shoes in the upper price segment: your store is located in a sleepy out-of-town location, and when customers visit they usually ask for cheap rubber boots. In this analogy, good Content Marketing for SEO would lead to moving your store to a more-frequented location near your city’s shopping district, more solvent walk-in customers with a flair for expensive Italian shoes, and the most important benefit would be that you sell more shoes.
Content marketing for SEO uses the fact that interesting content gets shared among users, who themselves continue to spread the content. In addition, search engines consider technically optimized and relevant content of websites to be important, which leads to improvements in rankings and in the visibility of the website.
In summary, good content marketing has the following effects:
- Relevant content leads to valuable backlinks.
- Social shares result in more visits and more relevant traffic to your website.
- Your online visibility improves.
- You are more likely to reach relevant customers, and more leads can be generated.
How does that work, good Content Marketing for SEO?
Successful SEO Content Marketing is complex and labor-intensive.
What is my target group interested in? Once you have the answer to this central question you can create new content based on the keywords that match your business. Sticking to the technical and content guidelines for search engine optimized texts and publishing further content in the form of optimized landing pages on a regular basis is crucial for SEO relevance.
Successful content types
According to a study by BuzzSumo and Majestic the following content types are the most successful in terms of social shares and the generation of backlinks:
- Well-founded content that answers popular questions, such as: “What is…” or “What does… actually mean?”
- Posts that contain strong opinions or political ideas.
- Content that presents innovative research and insights.
- Content that addresses a trend theme, but also offers practical insights.
- Relevant news about new products or developments.
Successful formats
- Articles with texts and images: The content must be relevant and contain enough text. Ideally, that is 600-800 words per landing page.
- Videos get well shared on the web. But also the page on which the video is published needs to contain enough text. This can be achieved by drawing up a summary of the content, or by writing a blog which treats other aspects of the subject.
- Listicles are another popular format for social shares. They can stand alone or complement texts.
Important accompanying activities
- An active link building strategy
- Sufficient internal links
- Other on-site factors (page title, H1, keyword density, etc.)
- Other technical SEO factors such as mobile-friendliness or the loading time of a web page (page-speed)
- An active social media strategy to publish the content
Finally: carry on!
- that you publish your content abiding by the rules for SEO.
- that you regularly publish new content.
- that you have patience until the results become visible.
