If you’re wondering how SEO can be improved via a proper approach to content marketing, this article is for you.

Many people in the SEO world invest in content marketing because content is the gateway to links, gains, and search traffic.

Content is the gateway to countless SEO benefits across multiple sites. With even a little experience, you can implement SEO strategies to improve your website’s search engine rankings. If you’re wondering how SEO can be applied, you’ve come to the right place.

Niche Groups

If you can identify small niche groups in your community, they could be people who create content and have a relevant interest in your topic. Then help them reinforce their favorite projects or reasons. For example, when serving a group of people engaged in the transportation of products, you might think that the content is too niche. If the content improves quickly, that’s good. This can lead to earning links and traffic in this small community.

You can also build brand protection within such a group if the community is small and needs to be advertised elsewhere.

Goods and Services

Find products or services for your audience. After that, create a resource that can list, rate, rank, recommend the best options. Thanks to such a resource, the audience will read your content. At the same time, there should be no other advertising but useful for your audience. In such a situation, you have a chance to earn links since your selfish motives are not visible. Thanks to this algorithm of actions, you can collect an objective set of resources specifically for your audience. This way will help you succeed in promoting your content.

Content Creators

Have you ever thought about which text will interest the visitor of the page and which, on the contrary, will make them leave it as quickly as possible? The copywriter makes the text logical, coherent, and correct in relation to the SEO requirements. Such a specialist knows how to find keywords and arrange them correctly. In this case, you need to take into account the number of keywords. For excessive use of keywords, the site may fall under the filter, which significantly affected the search results. For the resource to rank well, SEO copywriters fill the pages with keywords and work on brand citations and mentions.

Signs of Good Content Marketing

Like numerous other activity fields, efficiency in content marketing is defined upon a set of key performance indicators.

Good content is, first of all, content for users. It considers the target audience‘s needs, provides solutions to painful problems, and gives useful answers to site visitors’ questions. Working with good content can convey the main idea to every reader without additional explanations and transcripts. Let’s take a closer look at all the signs of good content marketing.

Unique Page Visits. Shows how many hits received your piece of information, in other words, page traffic. May be monitored on whatever timeframe you like – a day, a week, or a month.

Downloads. More than just a unique visit as downloading normally indicates interest. It is especially true if specific requirements are fulfilled before downloading, such as obligatory registration.

Time on Page. Accidental landing on the page that lasts a couple of seconds is one thing, but a sign of a user’s true interest is studying the content or filling in the application form. It takes time in both cases.

Backlinks. From where do visitors come to your website? Backlinking is itself a whole strategy of web marketing, but if your company uses it, and it works, your content is gaining trust.

Sharing. It has long been a standard in content marketing to supply almost any page with buttons for fast sharing content in social media. Not only it raises recognition, but it also demonstrates interest, confidence, even appreciation by visitors.

Comments and likes. Likes are more common for social media posts. In some of them, they are even differentiated, yielding a whole range of indicative reactions to your post from a dislike and anger to real love. But even without such instruments, user engagement – or absence of such – may be indicated by comments below the post.

Followers. Another measure that is traceable more easily on social platforms rather than on corporate websites, although the number of registered visitors or subscribers may be used as a proxy. It is an indication of your brand awareness.

Growth. A summarizing indicator with many equally legitimate ways to measure – leads, traffic, conversions, and other quantitative characteristics is traced for changes on a specific time frame.

Cost per click (CPC) and cost per lead (CPL) are two monetary KPIs commonly used with pay-per-click advertising models. This one implies that costs are incurred with every click on an ad on a publisher’s resource – or with every generated lead as a result.

Further monetization of content brings more monetary indicators in addition to CPC and CPL above, such as ACV – Annual Contract Value. It allows tracking yearly returns on content marketing campaigns.

Leads. Lead generation is one of the main marketing goals. Naturally, a qualified salesperson that uses content marketing for distribution is deeply interested in how many leads are generated by a particular piece of information. According to Review42 facts and statistics about content marketing for 2020, the vast majority of surveyed businesses are sure of its great capability to increase leads number.

Conversion rate as a KPI follows naturally as it indicates not only a successful lead, but a transformative lead which makes a new customer out of visitors.

Influence is a hard-to-measure, qualitative rather than a quantitative characteristic of marketing content as a source of leads or even successful deals. In other words, it answers the question of how influential the piece of information was in bringing you clients.

The depth of view is estimated by search engines and affects the position of the site in search results.

A user experience map shows the journey that a consumer takes when working with a product or service. It also shows you what you and your competitors are doing along the way. Mapping interactions from a customer perspective helps organizations identify strategic opportunities, customer vulnerabilities and generate innovative designs.

Search visibility is the share of impressions a website gets in a given search engine for a given search query. Putting it in other words, website search engine visibility shows the percentage of users who will see the site upon entering a particular search query into the search box.

The ranking of positions can be found on the seranking.com website. If you are promoting a website, then an analysis of its positions is needed to track such promotion effectiveness.

Organic traffic is generated due to user clicks from organic search engine results. You can check your website’s traffic using services such as Semrush, Ahrefs, or SE Ranking.

Bounce rate is a metric that reflects the percentage of site visitors who were on the landing page and did not interact with it, that is, did not go to other pages. It is essential to understand that bounce rate is a relative, not an absolute metric. And in general, this indicator is very individual.

Scrolling depth. Do you know which part of the page your visitor saw and where he did not scroll to the end? To solve this problem, Google Tag Manager is increasingly used.

Tips for Good Content Marketing

Taking into account all the key facts and performance indicators of content marketing, it is time to develop a working marketing strategy, taking the following important nuances into consideration.

Content type

Distinguish between selling, entertainment, cognitive, interactive, user-defined content type.

Content that is being sold might look like this:

• Product reviews, comparisons, testing;
• Examples of using;
• Backstage – what is hidden behind the scenes, a look from the inside;
• Cases – social proof in the form of stories of interaction with customers, demonstrating the process and relevance;
• Screencasts – screen recording;
• Lead magnets are free and useful value.

It is desirable to use entertaining content in a metered manner. Aesthetic content, engaging stories, videos, and humor create a positive impression and emotional response. This is how you become a brand with a human face.

Educational and training content solves the problems and problems of people and also relieves their fears. It contributes well to the formation of an expert image and greatly increases the value of the community.

The category of interactive content includes everything that encourages users to be active:

• Contests and sweepstakes;
• Flash mobs;
• Answers to questions;
• Live broadcasts;
• Marathons.

The custom content type includes those that were created by users or with their direct participation:

• Suggested news;
• Self-publishing on an open wall;
• User reviews;
• Audience questions.

Platform

It follows from the choice of content type, although in many cases, its nature allows parallel choice like with an article or news being first posted on your corporate website, then shared via multiple social media platforms.

You can share reviews of your product that appear on different sites and blogs, both as content and as social proof. Find out what people have to say about your brand, then highlight the highlights from the review to share on your platforms.

You can also take screenshots of conversations about your products on social media and share them on your website.

Mixed content is of no benefit to your site. In different browsers, the mixed content message may be displayed in different ways, but the essence is the same – the user receives a warning and will not be able to view the entire content of the page. This, in turn, has a negative impact on the conversion of the site as a whole.

Curated content. Content curation is also a strategy of content marketing that comprises systematic monitoring, accumulation, and systematization of info on any particular subject with an intention to republish it later in a processed form as part of your pose. According to Curata, curated content comprises 25% of marketed content on average, while created content holds 65%.
What are the remaining 10% made of? It is called syndicated content – the type of content taken from other websites. If your content is, on the contrary, syndicated by external resources, then content syndication is seen as a valuable resource of backlinks. It is still up to you to decide on optimal proportion, but as the majority of content marketers are now sticking to the 65-25-10 formula, there has to be something in it.

Conclusion

Some colleagues have pitted SEO and content marketing against each other, positioning one as a panacea. Sometimes this is reasonable, but in most cases, this approach will be wrong. SEO has a more specific focus in terms of driving traffic to your website. Content marketing is aimed at gaining a wider audience reach. The best way to drive traffic to your website is to provide distinctive and valuable content that cannot be found anywhere else on the Internet. Follow our tips to create unique material and take advantage of what content marketing offers you.

About the author: Oliver Smith is a talented writer and editor. He specializes in content related to digital marketing, SEO, SMM, eCommerce. Also, Oliver is a freelance guest post writer and an enthusiastic blogger who helps B2B companies reach their audiences more effectively.

Title image from Pale pack on Ouch illustration library

Learn how to work on user experience for multilingual websites and design for mobile ecommerce, check how to design user-friendly product pages and billing forms for ecommerce websites, and review the UX writing blunders to avoid.