What Is Content Marketing and Why Is It Important for a Website?

16 mins read

Content marketing refers to a strategic marketing method of creating, publishing, distributing and sharing material online that promote the brands and stimulate the interest in purchasing products and services. These materials include videos, blogs, and social media posts. It is commonly used by businesses to attract attention to increase customer base and increase sales.

A good example of content marketing is the Coca-Cola soft drinks brand. It markets its products by associating it with soccer. Videos are posted online of soccer players and fans enjoying the soft drinks. This makes the product popular due to the vast soccer support in the world. The association of Coca-Cola and soccer has made the brand well known over the world.

Content marketing & SEO

The word SEO is an acronym for, search engine optimization. It’s a marketing technique that enables you to increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website by ranking it top of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Content marketing and SEO is dependent on one another and it helps put your website in the forefront and first choice among customers compared to other websites.

Digital marketing requires one to always take advantage of an opportunity. In most situations, content marketing relies on social media and email to advertise these mediums are strong. They depend on the luck that what you email, advertise or post will be found by a potential buyer at the right time they are looking for a product or service that you offer.

How content marketing supercharges SEO?

Content on its own cannot be enough. Information has to be cited. Content marketing and SEO have to interdepend on one another for content marketing to supercharge SEO they have to be joined in an effective way to achieve a positive impact.

One of the approaches is to choose known link content in your area of specialty. Then you create a modified version of the content. By doing this, you are able to match with the prior created links. You are also certain whatever you are promoting is correctly defined in the links.

Here some of the tips how content marketing supercharges SEO

1. Use of social media

This appears to be one of the most important media of passing information today. Majority of the people in the world have access to the social platforms. When a link is shared on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other smaller sites, many people can view it. When you incorporate content in the social networks it spreads far and wide in the world.

2. Use of keywords

As much as SEO is concerned, the use of keywords acts as an important tool. For you to supercharge your SEO, you must relate to the words that are mostly used by customers. This can be done by using the Google keyword tool to find out which words are trending. Also, you can find words that are related to what your customers seek.

3. Be precise and concise

With life moving fast, people are usually so busy and do not have time to read a word or long text. So, one has to make sure they are concise and a text has to be precise and exactly meet the needs of the customer with use of simple language. One has to use attention markers such as headlines with bold letters and italics. Basically, the content has to be captivating that one cannot get past it.

4. Engaging with your audience

For your SEO to have constant visits, your content has to have a personal touch with your customers. For customers to accept your brand you must empathetically touch on their needs. This can be done by associating stories with your content and you can use pictures, videos of day to day happenings that people can relate to. For people to be engaged you have to go an extra mile of not just using mere or latent semantic keywords to relate to your content.

5. Uniqueness

Your brand has to stand out and be as authentic as possible. It should stand on its own and one cannot relate it with another from the logo, colors used, modes of an advert and also the fonts. The uniqueness of your logo helps you stand away from other links and contents. This can be the one way of ensuring constant visits by customers as you happen to provide something that is not in the market.

How to do a content audit?

Sometimes you may need to conduct a thorough inspection to check the performance of all the content on your website. Content auditing is done for both SEO and content marketing. This is important to help you plan on your future marketing. Content auditing can help you decide on what content to remove, improve or maintain as-is.

Content auditing involves a series of steps. Given below are the steps to follow when doing a content audit.

1. Create a spreadsheet of your assets

The first step of conducting a content audit is to create a spreadsheet where you will collect all the URLs on your website. Essential tools you can use to help collect URLs on your website and other SEO data points are Screaming Frog and the URL profiler. Arrange the data in rows and leave enough columns.

2. Gather data

You can fill the columns that you left with data points you have gathered. This data will depend on what you want to achieve with your audit as well as your intended complexity. Some of the data points to include are page title, target keyword, word count, number of comments and many more.

After choosing your data points, you can then label a column for each using different resources, you can get results from the different data points you chose. Shared count – for instance, give you the number of times users shared your posts. Screaming Frog, on the other hand, will give you page title for the URLs you are auditing.

3. Analyze data

This is the final step that entails putting all the information you get into use, you have to analyze the data and make recommendations once the audit is done. You will also need to make conclusions on all the observations that you make.

The importance of optimizing Content

The importance of optimizing content cannot be emphasized enough. Optimized content ranks better in the search engines and this enables your content to be viewed easily when people search on Google. Content optimization can be done with two main factors,

They are; content creation and technical stuff. Content can be optimized during the creation in two ways,

The first method is audience-centric which involves creating content with a target audience in mind. You can identify a particular audience and write what they want to hear.
The other way is content-centric; where you write content and then find an ideal audience for your content.

The technical part of optimizing content entails the use of keywords, URLs, meta descriptions and meta titles.

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Ways to build links through content marketing

It is 2018, where link marketing has become tough, unlike the good old days. If you want a higher rank, you need to have a great link profile pointing to your domain. There are various ways that can be used to build links through content marketing. They are categorized according to the amount needed to produce the content. These categories are indicated by;

low budget
mid-budget and
high budget techniques.

Minimal/ low Budget Content Marketing Techniques

These are content marketing methods which require a small budget to carry out. The most important resource that you will need to execute these techniques is time and knowledge. You may also need a graphic designer to make your content more visually appealing to the customers.

The following are some of the low budget content marketing techniques

1. Case study

Before you create a link, you must develop it and have a clear way of showing how the link is reached upon. A case study shows the process of developing this particular link. One has to share this process for others to see and know how it was reached upon. This can be made possible by using social media and other online network platforms. It does not only benefit other associates but also gives you deep findings and a vast area to work and provide services. After making an all-around case study and successfully publishing it, you will be able to find viable editors who will advise and offer guidance where necessary.

2. Interviews

This is the finding out of information through asking questions. One can make this successful by inviting experienced resource personnel to share guidance, information, and tips. To make it cost effective you do not need to go for celebrities to interview. You can focus on anyone who has vast experience and you can encourage them to come onboard. To ensure you earn links focus on issues and topics that are directly related to your customer’s needs. You have to be in touch and engage the interests of your audience. Something to consider is that interviews can cost a great deal of time to plan and execute, although it is one of the best ways to get links.

3. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging involves publishing your content on another website. The secret to succeeding in building links with blogger outreach lies in the sharing quality content that adds value to the audience. Entertaining and educative content will stamp your reputation as an industry expert and help grow your personal brand. This way, people click to your link to know more about you hence getting a good link.

4. Long-form content

Long form content involves sharing long articles of about 1800 words and more long-form educational materials provide an effective avenue of getting links from resource pages.

This is because they are more interactive and provide readers with valuable information and a rewarding experience that they will want to link to quality long-form content needs to provide a solution to the readers in a better way than your competitors. This is done through understanding the questions your audience is asking and trying to answer them well. Sites like Google Autocomplete and Quora can help you understand the questions frequently asked about your field.

5. Professional contributions

People can also act as a linkable asset. Experts from your industry can help make your online marketing content become attractive to publishers. You can use the experience of these experts to add more information to your content to attract a large audience.

6. Data Analysis

Analysing of data collected by someone else is another inexpensive but effective content marketing tool. You can analyze data from authoritative sites like the World Health Organization, Data.gov, ONS and various other sites related to your niche. You can also create content from statistics of top-earning celebrities, or even analyze the richest football clubs based on statistics or club revenues released in each financial year by reliable sites such as Forbes.

Mid-Budget Content Marketing Techniques

Having a bigger budget of about a few hundred dollars per month gives you the chance to use more ways to market your content. Some of the techniques you can explore with a Mid-budget include;

1. Infographics

Low-quality infographics were a common thing in the past leading to a dip in the reputation of infographics. This has led to the strictness on the quality of Infographics. Low-quality infographics can no longer be published by bloggers. For infographics to be effective in building links, they need to be of high quality. Most publishers will only cover and link out your content if your infographic is unique and attractive to the general audience.

2. White papers and Research papers

Conducting research and creating a whitepaper on an area of your field can help in earning links that are specific to your industry. The research adds more knowledge and progress which makes people in your field want the association to your business. This technique works best with B2B.

The cheapest way to go about undertaking a research is to team up with research institutions like local universities. For instance, pesticide seller can conduct a research on the mutation cycle of a particular pest. This way, the cost of research can be shared with the institution.

3. Teaming up on Content Campaign

Collaboration on content has become a common trend lately. Most businesses appreciate the value influencers can bring to their brands.

Teaming up with another brand with the same level as yours is not only interesting but also an effective content marketing technique.
Teaming up with complementary brands on shared content can help get new links. Brands and those people that work for them have different expertise.

These different skills, when brought together, can help in reaching a wider audience. Collaboration can come in various ways which include teaming in creating blog posts and infographics.

4. Local Publications

Regardless of the coverage of your brand, local publications can still play a great role in earning links. Regular columns in local newspapers and other online publications can help in offering expert advice and give more information about your brands.

High-Budget Content Marketing Techniques

These techniques require you to spare a lot of resources towards your content marketing. These may require a budget of above $2,000 for each campaign. They include;

1. Surveys

Surveys require a lot of resources to conduct. Most publishers will require over 2,000 respondents to accept your survey as viable. This cost, however, comes with an advantage – raw data. The content created from raw data collected through surveys is the most sort after by publishers. It is always interesting to the readers, and this enhances your brand.

Content marketing using surveys needs to be done right to earn links. It requires you to create interesting and relevant stories that people will want to read. There should also be a link for easy follow up.

2. Building Your Personal Brand

Anyone can tell you building a personal brand are never an easy job. It’s a process that requires time, hard work and a lot of patience. This, however, if done well, can help you stamp your authority as an industry expert where people can go to.

A personal brand is a great SEO tool that can help you build links. To build your brand you can use various tools such as column writing, video content just to name a few.

Conclusion

Content marketing and SEO cannot be separated. For effective internet marketing services, you have to ensure the correct use of social media. To establish links, you must meet the needs meanwhile engaging the potential customers. Every business requires a good content marketing strategy to get more customers hence improves sales.

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