
Why Search Engine-Optimized Content Marketing Gets the Best Results
We know it can be hard to balance great content writing with search engine optimization (SEO), but if you want people to see your content it is a must! We have seen proven success with SEO content marketing, and we’re willing to share a few SEO best practices with other industry professionals.
Why is SEO important for content marketing?
Content marketing is all about giving your audience useful information that they find interesting or can engage with. That’s why search engine optimization and content marketing are the perfect pair. Using an SEO content strategy means you can see exactly what people are searching for and be the person to give them the insights they need. This makes SEO content marketing pretty different from most advertising methods that agencies rely upon.
A lot of marketers only use social media or email blasts to get their blogs out to the public, but these methods require the perfect combination of showing up at the right time and in front of the right people. Instead of mapping out your target audience and the best time and place to reach them, SEO content strategy brings the most interested and engaged users directly to you.
You’ve also got to think about the bigger picture. While email and social are good tactics to help boost traffic for a short amount of time, SEO content marketing has more of a long-term success rate and will keep bringing traffic back to your site months after the original content was released. SEO content strategy is also more inexpensive to get traffic, unlike social media marketing where you need to pay to appear to your target audience.
Executing SEO Content Strategy
At Blue Compass, we are an SEO company that writes content focused on search engine optimization. We recommend optimizing articles to follow the latest Google algorithm updates since this is the largest search engine in use today, and also the one with the toughest guidelines for success. This translates to less work for you, as well, since when you optimize for Google, you generally have checked all the boxes for the other players in search. There are countless benefits of SEO content marketing, and when you write useful and keyword-rich content that answers the public’s questions, you’ll see a lot more traffic coming to your website.
Before one of our team members starts writing a blog or website content, we perform keyword research, usually on Moz or SEMrush, to see what the most popular topics and inquiries are about the subject. One of the challenges of SEO content strategy is we’re sometimes surprised by the most searched items and will have to rethink how we want to structure our content to rank for the most popular keywords.
After choosing a few keywords we want to rank for, we determine how to fit those words into a quality piece of content. The most important thing to remember when optimizing your content for search is that it still needs to make sense and flow to readers. Cramming in as many keywords as possible seems like an easy way to optimize, but Google bots are very smart and will demote your rank if you try to pad your content with keywords and it ends up not making any sense to the reader.
Success With SEO Content Marketing
One of our team’s success stories includes an infographic we created for our pest control client. There’s a surprising number of Iowans that are interested in spiders, so we created a blog that was all about spiders in Iowa. This infographic is the top-ranking content when locals search the popular keyword “spiders in Iowa,” thanks to our SEO efforts, and it continues to drive a large percentage of the website’s traffic.
In fact, it’s so popular in search, that over the past year the Spiders in Iowa infographic has had more than twice the amount of page views from organic searches than their homepage. The best part is, we don’t pay for these pageviews like we do social media or paid search campaigns!
This is just one successful SEO content marketing example that proves how valuable search engine optimization is for website content and article creation.