So, you’ve got your SEO campaigns up and running and your website is hopefully performing better and ranking higher for you. That’s great. But how can you boost those rankings and make SEO work a whole lot harder?
Answer: with a content marketing strategy.
Content marketing involves moving a website visitor through the sales funnel by offering them helpful and interesting content pieces. What you may not realise is that it is possible to create a content marketing strategy for SEO – a strategy that helps your website rank better, for more keywords, and reach more customers.
Changes to Google’s algorithms mean that the search engine favours many elements of a good content marketing plan— so fresh quality content with good keyword targeting on specific pages.
How does content benefit SEO?
Let’s look at specific ways that a content marketing plan can give you an edge over your competitors in search engine rankings.
Google doesn’t see websites like we do. It has no way of knowing what a website is about and what its purpose is unless you tell it with words.
Content marketing allows you to go beyond the small paragraphs of homepage copy and alt text descriptions on photos, where your opportunities for keywords may be limited. Articles, blog posts, guides, and other content allow you to use more keywords that are relevant to your website and what it’s about. Also, and more importantly, what people are searching for.
For example, if your website sells gardening products, you may want to rank well for keywords related to lawn mowers. Instead of trying to cram all the mower related words and phrases you can think of into one small space or page, you can write a useful guide like “How to choose the right lawn mower for your garden,” or a blog post about the types of mower – hover mower or rotary mower, electric or petrol driven are their benefits – in your store. This content is helpful and interesting and it’s also a great opportunity to use keywords and rank well in searches! Pages that rank the highest in Google’s SERPs tend to also have the highest amount of content.
That said, longer content isn’t always best. If your article, goes on and on and on without making a point or any kind of information, visitors will get bored and leave and that will damage your rankings. The more informative and detailed the content the longer people will stay and that correlates with the highest rankings.