7 Content Marketing Tactics That Will Improve Your SEO
Content marketing is an integral part of SEO. It involves creating and sharing content such as social media posts, blogs and videos to engage your customers and drive website traffic. If content marketing is done right, it helps build a relationship with your audience and keeps them returning to your website.
By SOFIA DAVID
Statistics show that content marketing for SEO gets three times more leads than paid searches. Another study conducted by Ascend2 found that 57% of marketers believed that creating relevant content is the most effect SEO tactic. According to the Content Marketing Institute, a website with blogs tends to achieve 434% more search engine-indexed pages than websites without blogs.
In this article, we’ll talk about various content marketing tactics you can implement for SEO success.
Content Marketing Tactics for SEO
1. Understand user intent and searches
You should be able to know what your customers like about your website and what kind of content they would like to read more. Understanding the user intent and searches help you determine how people interact with your landing pages.
Consider identifying the following metrics to understand user intent and searches:
— Average time on page
— Bounce rate
— Pageviews
— Conversions
Also, look at the content your competitors are ranking for the same keywords. This insight will help you with what kind of information you need to provide to your audience for ranking high on search engines.
2. Find the right audience-oriented long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords of three words or more are the best for SEO because:
— They are more relevant and broad
— They encourage the searcher to take action – either buy a product, sign up for a service, etc.
Make use of keyword tool like BuzzSumo to get a solid list of related keywords. Export this list onto an excel sheet and incorporate them into your content strategy.
3. Create valuable content
Using keywords in your content can help you get viewers to your website, but it can be difficult to retain the viewers if the content is not valuable.
3 out of 4 SEO experts believe that high-quality content is the most important element of an SEO friendly website. (Source: QuoraCreative)
So, create engaging content for your target audience so that they keep coming for more. Recurring visitors improve your website’s search engine performance significantly.
An increase of 5% in customer retention will increase profits from 25% to 95%. (Source: Tech Affinity)
Some tips on creating engaging content:
— Create content that is useful, informative and entertaining.
— Make use of a content optimization tool to improve the quality of your content.
— Analyze your existing content that ranks for the chosen keyword and use content optimization tools to compete with top-performing webpages for the same keyword.
4. Update old blog posts
Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, got 260.7% more organic traffic in 14 days by updating old posts. Additionally, Hubspot admitted that they got a 106% increase in organic traffic when they updated the old posts with relevant information and relaunched them.
It is a tried and tested tactic, so implement it, if you want to achieve the same results.
ProTip: Add internal links to improve the site structure and enhance the flow of link value.
5. Build high-quality backlinks
Backlinking adds authority, quality, and trustworthiness to a website. By building high-quality backlinks to your website, you are increasing your likelihood of ranking higher on the search engine. And this can do wonders to your website traffic.
According to E2M, 90% of the participants in a study admitted to using content as a link-earning tactic.
Tips for creating backlinks:
— Write website blogs
— Offer guest blogging for another website and get redirects to your website.
6. Incorporate meta
Your metadata gives insight into what your content is about to the potential visitors and the Google bots.
Once Google bots crawl through your metadata, they will decide how to rank your page. So, make sure you optimize the following:
— Slug (the URL)
— Meta title
— WordPress tags
— Meta description
— Image ALT text
7. Work on content distribution
Many marketers neglect to promote and distribute content effectively. It is important because SEO might help you in search, but if you want maximum traffic to your valuable content, you need to have a content distribution strategy in place.
Some tips on effective strategies for content distribution:
— Create a flexible and cohesive content plan. Write content that can be utilized in various ways to maximize your resources and lead your visitors to take action.
— Customize your content as per your customer segments for increased relevancy and better conversions.
— Pay for distributing your content by running ads on various platforms.
— Build relationships with influencers and ask them to share your content.
Summary
SEO and content marketing are two sides of the same coin. To rank higher on search engines and to improve your website traffic, it is important that you put your readers first. Find out what they are looking for and create content that gives them that information.
Updating old content with relevant information and creating backlinks can help boost your website ranking. Also, don’t forget the content distribution. Without it, you might find it difficult to get your audience to read your valuable content.
