SEO Content Marketing Strategy to Drive Leads and Sales

Content marketing is the indisputable king of driving organic and paid sales. If you don't emphasize content, you're doomed to failure.

SEO-driven content marketing is the key to helping Google recognize you and improving your search rankings. SEO acts as the blueprint to determine how we should create our content so that search engines can deliver the message to the right audience. The more efficient we are with targeting users, the more likely we are to improve our sales.

In this article, we're going to dive into the types of content marketing that exist along with their unique purposes for existing. Then, we'll deliver an SEO content marketing strategy to drive leads and sales to your business like never before.

What Are the Types of SEO Content Marketing?

When we discuss content marketing and sales, we can be speaking about several different types of content marketing that are deployed for different purposes. Examples of these are as follows:

1. Blog Content

Blogs provide many open-ended opportunities for content creation. These are articles that you will use to drive organic traffic to your site by creating topics based on popular keywords or focusing on trending news. Blogs are meant to provide informational content. However, they can naturally present opportunities to highlight your products and services and explain how they fit in with the topic of the article.

2. Social Media Content

Social media is also a multipurpose content creation tool that allows for shorter, less informal conversations with your audience. You can highlight products or promotions, provide quick takes on trending topics, promote blog content, or tell stories with images or videos. With this, you'll want to take advantage of platform-specific content creation tools to fit in better with your target audience.

3. PPC Ads and Landing Pages

This type of content is meant to highly target your audience to push conversions. We typically use these marketing tools to gather and segment leads or to drive sales on a specific item or promotion. The content is still key here as it educates customers, alleviates pressing concerns, and creates a sense of FOMO that helps capture important marketing data.

4. Videos

Videos can include content from all of the above but differ greatly in how it is presented and received. A Social Media Week study suggests that 78% of people watch videos every week and 55% watch them every day. Seeing and hearing information is much more dynamic, and videos allow audiences to associate your material with a friendly face. You can use videos for social proof, to provide visual education, or to create short snippets that are primed for widespread sharing and viewing.

5. Podcasts

Podcasts are still young as a medium but are growing at a rapid pace. Insider Intelligence claims that by the end of 2021, monthly US podcast listeners will reach 117.8 million. This form of talk radio allows brands to discuss long-form content in a way that allows listeners to feel like they are a part of the conversation. It's also widely accessible as users can consume the content from their mobile devices wherever they are at any time.

The SEO-Driven Content Marketing Strategy to Drive Leads and Sales

With all the types of content marketing and their purposes fresh in your mind, let's dive into our SEO marketing strategy example. This step-by-step process will help you establish your goals, create engaging topics, and track your key performance indicators for marketing success.

1. Realize Your Brand's Ideal Customer

A common problem, especially for newer companies, is that they make the mistake of attempting to appeal to the largest audience possible. After all, it makes sense that more clicks would lead to more sales. However, what happens is that your content tends to be incredibly vague, neutral in personality, and doesn't offer strong appeal to anyone. You're left with a lukewarm audience and will look for alternative brands that manage to light their fire.

Instead, you need to think about the particular type of customer that's most likely to benefit greatly from your offerings. You will think about why this person needs your product, the type of problems they face, the questions they may have, and the concerns that will need alleviating. By tapping into this buyer persona and walking a mile in their shoes, you're better prepared to create content that would appeal specifically to them.

Creating relevant and engaging content that feels highly personalized is the true key to building visitor retention. When your content feels personal to them and empowers them to solve a particular issue, it establishes trust and rapport between them and your brand. This type of confidence converts one-time visitors into repeat visitors and window-shopping leads into customers.

2. Determine Your Immediate Goals and Select Your KPIs

It's always an excellent business strategy to clearly define your goals and expectations for any marketing campaign you pursue. SEO content marketing can serve a variety of purposes and you want to ensure that yours is working properly toward your goals.

While our ultimate goal is to generate more sales with our content, it may not be the immediate goal we need to achieve. For example, a newer brand with little online presence will greatly benefit from using content to build brand awareness. While it's possible to gain some sales from cold customers, it's not a reliable or healthy way to do business in the long term. Instead, you'll want to set expectations that your content will serve to increase traffic and improve awareness for the first few months.

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On the other hand, your goals may be defined by setting micro-conversions along your organic traffic pipeline. Some may utilize a series of blog posts to push attention to specific product pages and aim to see an increase in clicks from the blog to that page. If our content strategy helps us achieve this goal, we then know we are one step closer to converting an everyday reader into a customer.

Our goals serve to define how we want to structure our content and the types of things we need to emphasize within it. Once you establish your immediate goals, you'll want to select the key performance indicators that are most important to you. If you primarily want to improve your readership, you'll want to focus on key performance indicators such as website traffic, page clicks, average session duration, or subscriber count.

Analytics is the key to getting the most out of any type of digital marketing strategy. But, it's easy to get lost in all the data if you don't have a plan. Make defining your goals and KPIs an early part of your SEO content marketing strategy to avoid future analysis issues.

3. Dig Deep for Your Topic and Keyword Research

You defined your perfect customer, clearly outlined your business goals, and determined the scale you will use to gauge your performance. Now, it’s time to determine what you need to write about and how to compose it. This is where the “SEO” part of “SEO Content Marketing” comes into play.

4. Researching Keywords

Your keyword research will lay the foundation for the topics you will select. Not only will keyword research reveal the volume of search traffic that each receives, but the nature of the keyword itself can also expose the user's intent. Popular SEO tools such as SEMRush and Moz Keyword Explorer can not only help you analyze keywords relevant to your industry but can also suggest topics based on the terms that you select.

However, don't just pick high-volume keywords and run. It's essential to know that three primary keyword types describe user intent: navigational, informational, and transactional.

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Navigational keywords are words or phrases that users enter to navigate to a specific destination on the web. Examples of these are “DashClicks” or “Amazon.”

Informational keywords express the user’s desire to learn about a particular subject. These generally come in the form of questions with words such as “how,” “what,” or “why.”

Finally, transactional keywords express an intent to buy a product. These might include words or phrases such as “where to buy,” “cheapest” as in cheapest product, or “best” as in best product.

Understanding the intention behind using a keyword will better help you determine two things: the type of content you should create with the keyword and whether or not the keyword can help you find the right audience to meet your goals. Furthermore, because we identified our ideal buyer persona first, we understand which types of keywords will best help us serve our audience to drive leads and sales.

5. Generating Engaging Topics

While researching keywords is the ideal place to start, there are also other ways to generate high-quality topics. Our first recommendation is to get involved and active on forums and Q&A websites. Sites such as Quora can help you target popular informational keywords as users already pose their thoughts in the form of questions. Finding questions with a high amount of traffic can clue you in on the fact that people need expert help with the subject.

Industry-relevant forums or subreddits are also an excellent way to keep an eye on what your audience is discussing on the internet. It’s ideal for you to stay active and look for opportunities to help your audience and correct misinformation. Furthermore, you can build awareness of your content by actually posting responses and sharing a link to your content directly within the forum. Not only does it help you to send that traffic to your site, but it can build rapport and trust by meeting users on their level.

Google Trends can also be a handy tool for keeping an eye on the most widely searched keywords in a particular geographic region. You simply enter a keyword and allow the tool to generate data such as interest over time. However, you want to focus on the “Related Topics” and “Related Queries” at the bottom of the page. In our example search for “Content Marketing,” we see possible bases for topics such as “content marketing startups” and “content marketing analytics.”

6. Identify What Works for Competitors

Our final tip for content generation strategies is to closely examine competitors that currently implement a great content strategy. Rather than worrying about who's ahead in the content game, think of this as an advantage that can tell you what performs well with the audience you also want to target.

Pay attention to the type of content they create, the typical article length, and their headline structure. Also, look into where and how often they implement their target keywords. If you find that your content creation efforts are failing to generate traffic, then look at what works and stop trying to reinvent the wheel. In many cases, creating better content than your competitor is simply attacking the same topics they doing it in an improved manner that's unique to your brand.

7. Implement a Company-Wide Content Calendar

If you want your content to consistently generate leads and sales, you need to implement a content calendar as soon as possible.

This serves a variety of purposes, but the primary benefit is that your team will always have a visual of all of your scheduled content months ahead of time. This helps your team to plan their efforts accordingly to avoid missing deadlines or to avoid gaps in posting. Being consistent is essential for every type of content creator. This study from Marcom suggests that a fragmented content schedule can lower revenue by as much as 11%.

An easily accessible content calendar also helps drive creativity and coordination between otherwise separate teams. While content marketing is important, it's one piece to your overall marketing puzzle. You ultimately want all of your marketing materials for your brand to synergize and support one another. Allowing your employees to keep track of planned content simplifies this process.

Finally, planning a calendar will allow you to coordinate key team members for specific types of content throughout the year. When and how you publish content can be just as important as what it is. Rather than expecting team members to drop tasks and prioritize sudden ideas, you can ensure optimal efficiency by planning as much as you can ahead. Efficiency also allows you to generate high-quality content at a higher output.

8. Build Content with SEO Best Practices in Mind

SEO and content are two vital parts of the overall puzzle. Prioritizing one and leaving the other as an afterthought will not get you the results you are looking for. Instead of writing and posting just any idea, you want to build your content from the ground up with best SEO practices first. This will ensure that your content reads as natural and clean without awkward keyword phrases or headlines that plague so much of the internet's content.

9. Create a Content Style Guide

You can ensure that all of your content is built for SEO by creating a style guide that all of your content writers must use. This will dictate the standardized writing style you want to use, the tone of voice you want to express, and address other issues such as crediting sources or using profanity. This will promote uniformity in your brand's content regardless of who is writing.

For each content piece, we recommend creating guidelines before you begin. This SEO skeleton will dictate important parts of the content such as headlines, where and how often to implement keywords, and present opportunities for internal linking. The more specific these guidelines are the better as it creates a clearly defined image of the product, which leads to more efficient work.

10. Content Length

The content length may vary depending on the nature of the subject and where you are posting it. For blog content, more is generally better for SEO and you should aim for 2-3,000 words. You can produce quality content with less, but fewer words present fewer opportunities for search engines to pick up keywords.

Rather than necessarily worrying about the length, focus instead on whether or not the content fully meets every possible user need or expectation. A bulk of internet content tends to be thin or surface level, and, therefore, gets very little traction online. Give yourself enough time to create quality and you'll find that even simple topics can raise many questions and concerns that your readers will want to be answered. How well you answer those concerns will directly impact how likely they are to convert.

11. Break It Up with Subheaders

Modern writers and SEOs typically outline all content with keyword-rich headlines. These primary headlines, known as H1s, not only help your readers but also help search engines to understand what the content is trying to express.

There are additional subheaders (H2-H4) that can further segment portions of your content for easier reading. The reality is that most readers typically will not read an entire long-form article in one sitting. If you present a wall of text with no images or headers to provide a pause, you're likely to see your bounce rate increase.

Instead, you can help readers get the most out of your article by clearly defining each section with the appropriate subheader. This way, readers are free to skim through and focus on the sections that are most interesting to them. The subheader also provides a necessary break to absorb what you've already read and an easy way to remember where you left off for continued reading.

12. Internal Linking

Link building is a powerful SEO strategy that can improve your website metrics and SEO across the board. When writing content, be mindful of how the topic can relate to other content on your website. For example, in an introductory article about SEO, you won't have time or room to get too in-depth on backlink strategies. However, you can include an internal link naturally when broaching the subject to another blog post that discusses the subject in greater detail.

The benefit of this is that it ensures your content meets the needs of every type of reader. The internal link is not disruptive or intrusive and simply allows the user to learn more if they desire. When the user moves from one piece of content to the next, it increases the average duration of that session. The longer time a user spends on your website, the more time you have to convince the lead to become a customer.

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You're not limited to internally linking from blog to blog. If the opportunity presents itself naturally, you can clue customers into the products or services you offer. However, ensure that you only do this in a non-disruptive way so that it does not betray the original purpose of the article. Otherwise, Google will recognize this and penalize your site for misleading content.

13. Properly Credit External Sources

Don't be afraid to utilize widely accepted information from other sources within your content. However, you must always credit the source, typically by linking to the site where you obtained the information. Not only will this help you to avoid plagiarization, but it shows the reader that your brand is trustworthy and willing to give credit where credit is due.

The external source will generally be happy to let you use their data as they get a backlink in return. Ideally, you'll also want to create content that's worthy of quoting and linking back to other sources online. Those backlinks to your site create new access points for audiences to discover your brand. It's another way of demonstrating how content creation can be worthwhile and drive the number of potential leads and sales you can obtain organically.

14. Promote Your Content Like You Want Leads and Sales

One of the worst things you can do is put a strong effort into a content piece only to post it and never look at it again. While you will get some clicks from organic search, it's a waste to let your content stagnate when you can use other platforms and strategies to promote it.

A popular method of getting more eyes on your content is by integrating an email list for your website. Those who are interested in the latest updates and offers from your brand can simply enter their email. With this address in hand, you can send regular notifications to your subscribers about new content that might help them or be of interest. You can increase the effectiveness of this strategy by further segmenting your audience by interest, age, and demographics.

Social media is also prime real estate for sharing all of your content. This is another way that the content calendar we explored above can prove vital. Not only can your social media team curate unique types of content based on the content you create elsewhere, but they can also plan ahead to fill content gaps by promoting new blog posts or news blasts that you publish on your website.

Finally, paid ads can be an effective way to promote important website content. While PPC ads are commonly used for things like sales funnels, they can also be a low-cost way to gain additional impressions and build brand awareness with new audiences. While paid ads will take from your marketing budget upfront, the idea is that you will attract new users that will visit your website organically moving forward.

15. If It's Not Performing, Analyze and Refine

With how in-depth and precise marketing analytics can be in 2021, there's very little reason why you should settle for poor-performing content. This step calls back to earlier in the article when we expressed the importance of having clearly-defined goals and key performance indicators. If your SEO content marketing strategy is proving effective, you should see these metrics gradually improve with time.

If months go by and you are not seeing improvements to website traffic or retention, the error most assuredly lies within the content. You can approximate the exact issues with your strategy by implementing A/B tests or utilizing heatmaps within Google Analytics. If you notice that users are spending time at the start of the page and bouncing away in a similar area, you can start experimenting with content changes. When tests reveal which performs better, you'll gain valuable insights into how you need to formulate future content.

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When it comes to generating sales from your new leads, we also recommend setting up micro-conversions that are specific to your organic traffic pipeline. The buyer journey does not go from a blog post to checkout but demonstrates several steps in between. You may want to set smaller tracked goals like page-to-page clicks, adding items to the cart, entering payment, and completing checkout. The goals with the lowest conversion rates will reveal the aspects of your content that require additional work.

To summarize, you’ll generally want to keep a close eye on these KPIs:

• Organic web traffic
• Email list signups
• Impressions on social media
• Average session duration
• Bounce rate
• Goal conversion rates (especially for custom goals)
• Overall search ranking
• Newly acquired backlinks from high-quality sites

Conclusion

SEO content marketing is a long-term strategy that is proven to boost lead growth for small businesses over time. While your initial growth may be small, remember that the cost of a comprehensive content marketing strategy is very little when compared to paid alternatives. SERPWatch tells us that content creation costs 62% less and happens to generate 3x as many leads as outbound marketing.

To summarize, you can drive leads and sales by doing content marketing the right way. You should spare no effort when performing topic and keyword research. Always look to compare to competitor strategies that are regularly taking up the top slots on search engine results pages. Look to the content they create as a template and aim to do it better. Analyze, test, and refine, and your KPIs will improve with a commitment to consistency.