5 Ways To Use Content Marketing For SEO

Many companies have embraced content marketing as part of their business plan, and almost everyone agrees that SEO is vital to long term business success. 

But how do you use content marketing for SEO? Specifically, what are the steps you should take when creating content to achieve effective SEO results?

Read on to find out!

5 Ways To Use Content Marketing For SEO

1) Research your audience

The first step towards using content marketing for SEO is knowing who your audience actually is. That’s because to make content that your target customers truly care about, you need to understand them on a personal level. And you get this through audience research.

There are a couple of questions you should be trying to answer when you do audience research. By doing so, you will come to understand your audience, the problems they face, and how you can position yourself as the solution. These questions include:

• What is the biggest problem that my customer faces?
• How can my product or service help them with this problem better than my competition?
• Which of my competitors have they already used, and what was their experience like?

As for where you can get these answers? Well, anywhere that your audience hangs out, really. Options include social media networks like Facebook or Instagram, and even sites like Amazon where your audience is likely leaving reviews for products similar to your own.

2) Understand search intent

Now that you know your audience, you need to start making content for them. This is the information that will drive them to your website and work to convert them into a customer. But before you start making content, you need to check out what the search intent is of different search terms. 

Search intent, to take a simple definition, is essentially the type of information your prospect was attempting to find when they entered in a search term. Let’s take the search term “chocolate chip cookies” as an example. When you put this into Google, the majority of the results are recipes, not cookie vendors. Because of Google algorithms, this means that the majority of people are actually looking for recipes, not different brands for sale.

So what does this mean if you own an online baked goods shop? Well, your post on “chocolate chip cookies” should aim to be the best recipe on the internet, not a product page advertising your own brand of chocolate chip cookies. This is inline with what people want (their search intent) and so is likely to rank better over time.

By aligning search intent with the content you make, you are giving readers what they want. Multiplied over many pieces of content, this increases the odds that your content marketing works to improve your SEO. 

3) Make content that attracts backlinks

We have written numerous times how important backlinks are for your SEO. They are signs of authority to search engines and drive increasingly more traffic to your site over time. 

The reason they are useful when using content marketing for SEO is that content is usually where you will get most of your backlinks from. Companies typically don’t want to link directly to product pages. This is too much of a threat to their own company and can drive away potential customers.

But as for your content? Assuming it’s helpful and informative, many companies will gladly link to it. The fact is that companies don’t have the resources (or expertise) to make high quality content on every topic that their audience might possibly be interested in. That’s where you come in.

For a good guide to making content that receives a ton of backlinks, give this guide by Ahrefs a read. Essentially, the trick is creating content that is “10 times better” than whatever else exists. While this can be difficult and time consuming, it’s almost guaranteed to attract a large number of backlinks with its quality.

4) Keep user experience at top of mind

Following the first two steps will put you on the right track to making amazing content. This will lead naturally to the third step, and you will get even more backlinks if you prioritize them as part of your content creation process. 

But good SEO also considers the actual experience of the user when they are consuming your content. Think about it. Even if the subject matter of your content is great, a poor user experience will result in a high bounce rate. People will leave your content quite quickly, and search engines will start to prioritize other sites instead. 

Simply put, content marketing for SEO considers a high quality user experience as a top priority. For more information, give our post on user experience a read.

5) Get technical SEO right

We have written before about the importance of off-page SEO. But if you are going to take your content marketing for SEO to the next level, you can’t forget technical SEO. These are the things that you have direct control over and can make a huge impact on your content’s ability to influence SEO. Indeed, even if a piece of content is high quality, technical mistakes will negatively impact your SEO over time. So you need to make sure to get it right!

While many marketers view technical SEO as complicated, it doesn’t have to be. In fact, most of the results you get come from a  few key actions. Give this post a read for more information on what you need to pay attention to. Even if you are pressed for time, implementing just a few of the changes can have a significant impact.