There's a powerful marketing strategy you've yet to utilize effectively.

The best part of this technique is that it's absolutely free.

Using customer reviews in marketing is a powerful method of swaying an audience. While skeptics may hesitate to believe your words, they have little reason to disregard third-party opinions.

First, we will talk about how you can get customer reviews at no cost. Then, we'll show you the best ways to use that content for satisfying results.

How to Get Customer Reviews?

Obtaining honest reviews from customers is a simple task.

However, the exact process will vary depending on the method you intend to use to gather data. We recommend that every business take advantage of every review and testimonial channel that the internet offers.

Let's start with arguably the most important platform.

1. Google My Business

Every business is eligible to create a Google Business Profile.

A Google Business Profile allows business owners to control their online presence and any data about business operations.

Your profile will allow you to:

• Add business photos
• Establish NAP information (Name, Address, Phone Number)
• List your website
• List business hours
• Post status updates
• Collect and respond to customer reviews

Google's study purports that 60% of customers utilize a GMB profile found in search results to contact a business.

This is because a business with a complete GMB profile appears more legitimate than results without one. Additionally, the accessibility of information makes choosing one of these results, particularly from the local 3-pack, a no-brainer.

Furthermore, those featured brands show off their customer reviews with ease. These require a star rating, at a minimum, while also often featuring direct statements from the user.

Any brand can get customer reviews from its Google Business Profile. To create or claim one, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Google Business Profile Manager here.
2. Search for your business. Even if you’ve yet to use this tool, it’s possible that a profile already exists.
   If your business appears, look for the link that reads Claim this business. Click this. Then, skip to step 5.
   If your business does not appear click on Add your business to Google.
3. Enter your business name exactly as it’s registered. Then, select the most appropriate industry category.
4. Add the necessary information to complete your business profile.
5. You will now need to verify business ownership with Google.

In some scenarios, Google may choose to validate your business instantly. In all other cases, you will need to provide a verification code sent to your phone or email address.

Just like that, you now have your own GMB profile! Any time a user searches for your brand or uses related keywords, they can find your profile and leave a review.

To gather more customer reviews, you want your profile to show up in rankings. To achieve better rankings, be sure to optimize your profile frequently. Ensure that you fill out information for all categories and that it is consistent with other descriptions of your business online.

2. Get Your Brand on Social Media Platforms

Social media is an excellent way to get customer reviews. Although, the method will differ from the process described above.

The only social media platform that provides aggregated reviews like GMB is Facebook. There, like Google, you can create a separate page and profile for your business. This allows you to distinguish your profile from the business entity.

To create a Facebook business profile, you'll first need to create a personal profile. You can do so here.

Then, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your account. At the top of the page, click on Pages.
2. Click Create New Page.
3. Follow the step-by-step prompts to create and categorize your business page.

You can similarly use this page for your GMB profile. You can upload business photos, add business information, and post regular updates.

Customers will then be able to post reviews and comment on your updates freely.

Though other platforms may not allow for a similar experience, audience interaction remains invaluable. These next ideas apply to platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, etc.

Users will still be able to search for businesses on these social media platforms. While they cannot find obvious star ratings or a dedicated review section, follower comments are still visible.

These comments effectively act as reviews and testimonials. You may also ask your followers directly to share their experiences, positive or negative, in any given thread.

3. Sign Up for Local Directory Listings

Though listings sites may not be as powerful as they once were, they still offer legitimate SEO value.

Examples of local directories are Yelp, Yellow Book, and Foursquare. These sites categorize local businesses by industry to help local customers make connections.

These platforms function similarly to Google My Business or Facebook. You'll need to create a new profile or claim an existing one for your business. You'll then need to verify yourself as the owner.

After claiming or creating the profile, proceed to optimize the page with up-to-date business details. Then, users can readily find your company and leave reviews about their experiences.

Keep in mind that certain industries also have niche platforms available to them. For example, restaurants can sign up for services like UberEats, which lists your full offerings along with qualified customer reviews.

Be sure to run a quick search and investigate which directories apply to your brand. These sites are generally free and offer potential benefits to your overall SEO strategy.

4. Business Rating Sites

Business rating sites are not unlike directory listings. However, these tend to be primarily focused on consumer education and holding businesses accountable.

Examples of the sites we're referring to would include the Better Business Bureau or Trustpilot.

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Because these organizations take business ratings seriously, maintaining high review scores there may prove valuable for your success. They carry trust with consumers simply due to their brand power alone.

You can create your profile for free on sites like the BBB. While you're at it, you can also apply to get your company accredited by the BBB itself.

5. eCommerce Reviews

This tip applies specifically to brands that sell products or services online.

If you sell your products through a third-party distributor like Amazon, Overstock, or eBay, a customer review feature is available by default. Those platform owners want customers to understand the quality and trustworthiness of their sellers upfront.

If you choose to build your eCommerce site through Shopify or Weebly, you should enable customer reviews for each listing. After all, as much as 90% of customers search for reviews first before buying. Listing reviews right next to the product not only helps you collect more of them but may help to drive sales overall.

6. Direct Customer Surveys

Our final tip may seem obvious, but it's often underutilized.

If your brand is looking for new reviews, ask for them.

Too often companies focus purely on the data collection aspect. However, talking with your customers or prospects about their experience is an excellent way to show that you care and are listening.

One strategy is to utilize email marketing to fetch reviews from existing customers. Not only will it benefit you, but it can be an effective way to re-engage customers and keep them thinking about your brand.

If you're having a tough time getting cooperation, consider presenting a limited-time offer. This could be exclusive discounts or vouchers they can obtain in exchange for leaving a customer review.

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Using Customer Reviews in Content Marketing

Now that you've amassed a healthy number of customer reviews, it's time to put them to use.

Customer reviews serve as a persuasive marketing tool. These reviews can offer and help with:

• Social proof that your products or services are quality
• Relatable stories to help customers identify use cases
• Attracting new followers
• Generating new, compelling content
• Opportunities to show you care (particularly when responding to negative reviews)

Customer reviews can offer these benefits by simply existing on any of the aforementioned platforms. However, you can leverage them for even greater effect when leveraging the following strategies.

1. Feature Customer Reviews on Your Website

Your website is like a dynamic business card.

It's the core way that new and existing customers learn about who you are, what you offer, and how you can help them. Website content serves to educate, while also calling your audience to take action toward a purchase.

Customer reviews can help with that act of persuasion.

Consumers are savvier than ever. They're well aware that every brand is going to speak to their believed strengths and how they're better than the competitor. While that's all well and good, letting your customers do that work is more effective.

It's up to you how you choose to present reviews throughout your site. You can choose to have a dedicated section for them. However, we recommend interspersing them throughout the content to drive home key selling points.

For example, if a paragraph is speaking about a specific service, it features a related review. That testimonial serves as the exclamation point and can push prospects to take the next step.

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2. Leverage Customer Reviews in Paid Campaigns

This functions effectively the same as using them on your main website.

However, you’ll want to dial in on reviews that primarily speak to the campaign offer or promotion. These then offer the same powerful social proof as to the ones on your business profiles.

Once you have the review in hand, the creative possibilities are endless. You can utilize the review within the ad itself or disperse them throughout the landing page.

Specifically, try to create video content out of your reviews. If you can, ask clients to shoot a quick view of their experience. Almost everyone carries a smartphone with recording capabilities, and a basic video is all you need. In many cases, a “budget” video may appear more authentic and trustworthy than something that’s produced.

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3. Utilize User-Generated Content

User-generated content is any text, pictures, or videos created by your audience rather than your team.

Thanks to platforms like social media, the everyday individual has more of a voice. They might use that voice to express loyalty or passion for the brands they love. If you're doing your job well, you may find yourself receiving UGC periodically.

You can also incentivize your audience to create UGC.

For example, some brands may choose to promote giveaways. The giveaway itself promotes attention and brings in new leads simply because you're giving back to the community with free goods.

However, rather than just asking for names and numbers, task your followers with content creation.

You can start with something as simple as asking for real customer stories. These are like reviews, but give your followers a greater opportunity to elaborate about themselves and how your company impacted their lives.

Alternatively, you can prompt followers with a creative prompt. A great example of this is Coca-Cola's #ShareaCoke campaign. They added names to all of their bottles and asked users to show themselves sharing a coke with someone in their lives. This resulted in a massive influx of user photos posing with the drink.

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Even though those photos don't have text, the photo tells the entire story. That's the power your brand can have with UGC.

4. Use Customer Feedback to Guide Future Content

This final tip focuses less on presenting reviews to others. Instead, you'll be reading the testimonial for feedback. This applies to both positive and negative reviews.

Look carefully at what your audience is saying. Identifying negative patterns is particularly important as it indicates a problem worth addressing.

Let's look at our own company, DashClicks, for inspiration. While most of our clients fully understand the tools we offer, others may need more direction.

Rather than ignoring and alienating potential customers, we created a video series showing off various use cases for each software. Not only does this allow us to get ahead of potential concerns, but it also helps us create legitimately worthwhile content for our audience.

Look to your reviews and customer experiences for similar inspiration. Then, plan out new and compelling content that speaks directly to what your audience needs.

Get Customer Reviews to Work for You

Customer reviews are a requirement for businesses to survive.

In a world where the internet gives access to so many options, audiences need proof that your brand is worth the cash. Few things are more persuasive than the opinion of an outside party.

Remember, customer reviews offer:

• Social proof that your brand offers quality
• Insight into how others use your products or services
• Emotional connection from hearing audience stories
• A final push to convince prospects to become buyers

You can leverage these benefits in several ways. Primarily, you want to always seek out ways to disperse relevant reviews into your existing content. Let it serve as the punctuation on any selling points.

If you need more customer reviews, make sure that your brand is listed on the available listing sites online. That also includes social media platforms, business review sites, and more. Finally, ask for specific stories from your customers when possible.

As your brand grows, you'll find that more customer reviews will appear organically. Be sure to stay on top of these reviews, respond to your audience, and become a business that puts the customer experience first.

Content marketing has become a trend, especially in the highly competitive B2B marketing landscape. More and more companies are now investing in it as it works wonders for all types of businesses and produces better results than most other marketing tactics.

Content marketing is also a proven strategy to grow audience engagement, enhance your brand authority, and drive sales. For many businesses, content marketing works even when other tactics stop working.

Producing consistent & high-quality content can be a game-changer for your business. Here are some of the major benefits of content marketing that you should absolutely consider.

1. It Improves Organic Visibility & Search Traffic

To rank higher on Google, you need to have higher domain authority, and for a higher DA, you need to publish content that can earn quality backlinks. Google also prefers authoritative content and ranks it higher.

To earn Google's love, your content should also meet the E-A-T factor, i.e., Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

You can check the overall content quality of the page based on the following factors.

• The Purpose of the Page: Your page should have a beneficial purpose. It should offer value and information that helps users. Let's discuss what it means.

• The Beneficial Purpose: It's a major quality indicator according to Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (SQEG). According to these guidelines, you should create a page to help users and provide them with the relevant information. In other words, it shouldn't be designed just to make money.

• Expertise, Authoritativeness, and TrustworthinessLet's see how Google determines the E-A-T of a page.

• The E-A-T Factor:
• Ā Expertise: It stands for the expertise of the main content creator. Adding information about the website or the main content creator helps a page rank higher, as Google will consider the creator's credentials while evaluating the content.
• Authoritativeness: It refers to the authoritativeness of the main content creator, the main content itself, and the website.
• Trustworthiness: It refers to the reliability of the main content creator, the main content itself, and the website.
• Quality and Volume of Main ContentBoth the quality and volume of main content are crucial for ranking. You can also create pillar content for this purpose.
• ReputationGoogle also considers the reputation of the website or the author of the main content.

Traffic also increases along with improvement in rankings and search visibility.

To attract tons of traffic, you should do the following:

A. Create quality content

B. Optimize it for the relevant keywords

C. Offer a beneficial purpose to the readers

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The SEO advantage you get through these activities is one of the major benefits of content marketing.

2. It Builds Brand Awareness

Brand awareness defines your customers' level of familiarity with your brand. So, beyond a basic knowledge of your brand and its logo, brand awareness conveys everything that differentiates your brand from others. It also entails why someone should choose your products or services from the different options available on the shelf.

New brands have a long way to go to establish their brand identity. They can start by asserting their presence and getting their "foot in the door."

Pro Tip: Use content to build brand awareness and differentiate your brand from others.

Here are a few steps to build brand awareness.

• Know your audience and analyze their behavior
• Determine your goals and create a content strategy
• Create brand awareness using your blog content
• Create communities and regularly interact with them
• Leverage email marketing to amplify your reach

3. It Increases Brand Affinity

Brand affinity is synonymous with a customer's natural liking for a product or brand. It's the kind of customer relationship every business strives for. It represents the collective feeling that the customer feels while experiencing different brand elements such as content, quality, user experience, website, sales, customer support, etc.

Since it's directly related to the utility, it also conveys that the brand is relevant to the buyers' needs and best suits them.

Forging such affinity adds loyal customers to your brand who are most likely to make a purchase. Content marketing helps you achieve brand affinity if you consistently publish quality content. Remember that your objective shouldn't be limited to assisting the customers. Rather, it should be to delight them.

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4. It Helps You Build Thought-Leadership

Some business leaders go beyond the traditional route and attract the limelight by building thought leadership. Seth Godin, Oprah, Anthony Robbins, Dave Ramsey, and John Assaraf are thought leaders who are highly acclaimed professionals and experts in their respective fields.

As a marketer, people expect you to be an expert in your field so that they can trust your word. Apart from that, thought leadership is not limited to personal branding; it's much more than that. To establish yourself as a thought leader, you must exhibit some social proof. It includes driving traffic to your website, building brand authority, and nurturing and converting leads.

Thought leadership is also used as a strategy by content marketers to build credibility and differentiate themselves from others. When someone is recognized as an expert, people consider them a go-to resource for advice and information in their field. It leads to hundreds of marketing benefits. Therefore, they are expected to create and promote tons of educational content to help others and strengthen their position as a thought leader. They are also supposed to be active in their community and social media.

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Tips to Implement Thought Leadership

• Know your audience well and keep on learning about them
• Be active on various social media platforms
• Publish educational content and distribute it aggressively
• Do thorough and regular competitor analysis
• Create content that adds value and helps people stay on top of trends
• Be original and genuine

5. It Helps You Establish Your Expertise and Brand Authority

You may not be able to achieve brand authority overnight, or even after a lot of time, yet it's essential to succeed as a business. It comes with unmatched benefits. The biggest challenge for a new business is to build trust, which you can easily overcome by building brand authority.

At some point, trust leads to sales. Here are a few tips for building brand authority through content marketing.

• Use your content to answer people's queries in your niche
• Develop case studies and create newsworthy reports and updates
• Collect proof of expertise by promoting reviews and case studies
• Collaborate with other brands with authority
• Leverage the authority of experts, both in-house and freelancers
• Share secrets, strategies, and tips that are not so common

Apart from the above tips, here are other ways to help you build your authority:

• Pick a topic and conduct in-depth research on it
• Increase your knowledge through
• Attending training programs and courses
• Networking
• Attending industry events, seminars, and webinars
• Reading reputed blogs in your niche
• Tracking the latest trends through social media
• Keeping yourself updated through forums and channels like Reddit
• Creating unique content based on the insights gathered

6. It Allows You to Use More Touchpoints to Generate Quality Leads

A viable sales lead requires 6-8 marketing touches, and you need content to create these many touchpoints. Unlike a few decades ago, when a customer had exposure to just the print media or TV, they go through lots of digital content these days before making a decision. So, the path to purchase has become complex. There can be many twists and turns here, and you never know which touchpoint can turn out to be decisive in helping them make the final purchasing decision.

Customers' apathy towards traditional marketing and advertising methods is increasing. Sales methodologies are also changing rapidly. People don't trust advertising completely these days; instead, they prefer to conduct more independent research before getting convinced. Since different people are exposed to different touchpoints, their journey is also not always the same.

Here are some popular brand touchpoints:

• Product reviews
• Videos
• Blog posts
• Ads
• Social media posts
• Business Listings

Content marketing ensures that the prospects pass through the appropriate interactions to determine sales-readiness. At the beginning of the buyer's journey, customers need more informative content to raise their awareness about your products and services. But, this information is often inadequate.

At the next stage, they need detailed information to compare your product with other similar products available in the market.

Pro Tip: Create content according to the different marketing and sales funnel stages.

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7. It Helps You Build and Maintain a Loyal Customer Base

According to MarketingProfs and CMI study, 75% of B2B marketers have successfully used content marketing to build trust and create a loyal customer base.

The ultimate objective is to create a foolproof reputation for your business that makes customers' purchase decisions easier. Content marketing allows you to build a loyal fan base that regularly engages with your content. A powerful content-led brand can achieve its objectives and maintain an existing customer base, all the while adding new customers.

Here are seven steps to building a loyal customer base.

• Define your target audience with vivid detail
• Establish honest dialogue and have an authentic voice
• Maintain high standards of content quality
• Use storytelling wherever possible
• Discover your passion and focus
• Entertain, inform, and engage using your content, don't just sell
• Offer outstanding customer experience and incredible value

8. It Leads to Improved Social Media Engagement & PR

Social media engagement is measured using likes, comments, and shares. The number of followers is always a positive indicator of your success on social media. Ultimately, the engaged audience drives tangible results, sales, mentions, click-throughs, and revenue.

So, what should you do to improve engagement on your website and social media channels? Here are a few tactics to try -

• Use social media analytics and track the sudden ups and downs in engagement
• Define your social media engagement goals such as conversion, changing the customers' perception of your brand, and attracting business leads.
• Know your customer, so you can define the language, tone, and resources that resonate with your audience
• Keep the conversation going
• Show your human side
• Keep your response timeless

Knowing your customer will also help you figure out the right social media channels and brand voice for your campaigns. It also allows you to determine the type and timing of publishing content.

To know more, read the 30 Content Marketing Tactics You Can Try.

9. It Helps You Build a Robust Sales Funnel

Content is not created just for its sake. Every piece of content that we consume is created for a specific purpose. Online content is produced for several objectives such as:

• To achieve a business goal
• To create awareness
• To get sign-ups for a newsletter
• To educate readers about a product
• To help customers make a purchase decision

Even the seemingly funny and silly pieces of content are created to stimulate a specific response. The content we consume online 24x7 is part of a specifically crafted content marketing funnel strategy. The ultimate objective is to attract customers' attention and make them loyal towards a brand.

What is the Content Marketing Funnel?

When a potential customer considers a purchase, he goes through a journey, which we can visualize using the content marketing funnel. It is now an integral part of content marketing strategy formation.

Different content pieces are needed to support the customer journey at different stages. For example, a person who is not yet familiar with your brand will not be interested in a product comparison study.

It can happen at a point when the customer is fully aware of the product and the brand. Good content pushes the customer to the next stage in the sales or marketing funnel.

The four major stages in the content marketing funnel are categorized as follows:

• Awareness
• Evaluation
• Purchase
• Delight

Every customer has a different journey as there can be more touch points involved before someone makes a purchase. This is what creates a diverse customer experience. As each stage has a distinct purpose in this journey, you should present different types of content in those stages.

Here is an overview of how content can be used to match different stages in the overall customer journey ā€” right from discovery to purchase. This customer journey map will help you leverage content marketing to achieve your marketing and sales objectives.

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10. It Helps You Save Money on Your Marketing Strategy

Content doesn't come cheap, so content marketing is considered expensive and beyond the reach of startups and cash-strapped small businesses.

A blog content might cost you around $150 to $3000 a post if you hire freelancers to write it for you. However, hiring a full-time writer will be more cost-effective as you need content regularly.

Content marketing wins the battle over other forms of marketing such as paid ads and traditional marketing in the long term, so investment in high-quality content will always pay you back.

Conclusion

To drive results from content marketing, you should have a well-documented content strategy, and you should audit it periodically. There is no reason for it not to work if you implement it in a wise, timely manner. Regular audits and measurements will ensure that you are working in the right direction. It will also help you discover what works best for your business.

If you are new to content marketing, please go through this Beginner's Guide to Content Marketing.

Further reading:If you want to know how content marketing helps businesses, go through the following articles.

11-Point Content Marketing Checklist Proven to Boost Your Engagement

Ep.3 ā€“ How We Multiply One Piece of Content and Overflow the Web to Get High Valued Incoming Leads

Almost every organization is developing unique and engaging content these days, which is why there's a shallow entry barrier for content marketing. Though easy and cost-effective, most brands are unable to utilize it to the fullest to achieve their organizational objectives.

It happens partially because the bar is getting higher and higher every year. What worked yesterday may not be working today. High-quality and appealing content receives the lion's share of traffic and eyeballs, and the remaining brands end up fighting for a tiny amount of traffic.

According to a 2020 AHREFs study, around 90% of all content online receives almost zero traffic from Google. It might not sound very comforting for the startups, especially those not having sufficient cash to spend on content marketing.

This article discusses how to implement content marketing in the lowest budget to achieve the desired results.

Plan Your Content Marketing Campaign

When you begin implementing online marketing, you are confronted with multiple choices. Running PR and social media campaigns and creating podcasts and videos can be on top of your mind, but soon you may find it overwhelming. It can grow even more overwhelming when your budget is tiny.

According to a Microsoft study, people start losing attention after about 8 seconds, and it is falling further every year.

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Content is exponentially increasing in volume. So, to grab the user's attention, you need to be diligent and focus on quality and engagement.

The sheer number of online marketing channels used for your online marketing campaigns can be devastating as it decreases focus and leads to poor management.

In this competitive environment, you need to choose one or two channels and put in your best performance.

To compensate for the users' decreasing attention span and content visibility, you may run short-term campaigns like getting featured on prominent platforms, news sites, and channels.

For example, you can promote your products on Product Hunt or increase your visibility by getting featured in Hacker News.

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Find opportunities to speak in industry events. Create podcasts and share them on different platforms.

Through these action steps, you can increase your market understanding and create better opportunities to be in front of your target audience.

Here are the four tips to crack the content marketing code for startups.

1. Set Your Goals

Goal setting is a crucial step as it serves many purposes, such as communicating the business objectives to the team, tracking progress, and team management. It also helps provide direction and focus to the team and optimize team performance.

Your organizational goals keep your team motivated even after a setback.

Pro Tip: You will find your goals easy to achieve if you split them into smaller objectives and even smaller targets for better measurement.

Setting goals is essential to keep your eyes on the bigger picture and prevent your team members from feeling overwhelmed.

To create awareness and buzz around your brand, you can do the following:

• Organize an industry event for better networking and build industry relationships
• Organize PR activities
• Build a blog or set up a podcast channel to create awareness and drive traffic to your website

2. Define Your KPIs

With well-defined content KPIs, you can easily measure your performance. It would help if you had exact and specific targets to easily track your performance. Here are some of the content marketing KPIs you can follow:

• Unique Website Visitors
• Downloads
• Time (spent) on page
• Inbound Links
• Shares
• Comments and interactions
• Cost per Click (CPC)
• Cost per Lead (CPL)
• Number of Leads
• Annual Contract Value (ACV)
• Influence (Leads, opportunities, or closed deals)
• Conversion rates
• Followers and subscribers

You can have specific targets such as publishing 30 press releases by September or 10 keyword-oriented blog posts every month as pillar content on your website. You can also set marketing targets by hosting five meetings with micro-influencers every month.

3. Use Appropriate Messaging

Your marketing messaging is crucial to your startup's success as it helps you convey the value and benefit your product or services offer your target audience. You should carefully plan it as it's used everywhere, from social media posts to ad scripts and blog posts.

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Conveying the right message moves your prospects down the sales funnel, helping you convert your prospects into leads and paying customers. You can engage with your audience by discussing their pain points and how you can offer a unique and practical solution for the same.

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Pro Tip: Content marketing messaging should be educational and not salesy.

Pro Tip: Every time you create content, your audience anticipates a story from you. So, be a storyteller.

Your messaging should vary according to the stage of the user in the marketing funnel. The message for the first-time website visitor shouldn't be the same as you would like to flash in front of someone who is in the consideration phase and have already received a couple of drip emails.

4. Use Various Promotion Techniques

When you plan to implement online marketing, you are confronted with numerous choices. Running PR and social media campaigns and creating podcasts and videos can be on top of your mind, but soon you may find it daunting when you realize you have budget and time constraints.

Would you like to know the secret recipe of success in content marketing? Publishing more and more content is not a standard formula. On the flip side, it can be counterproductive. To drive maximum value and ROI, focus on generating fewer content pieces. What you can do instead is to repurpose and reuse this content into various other forms of content and take it to the audience by scheduling and rescheduling it on social media.

For example, we can create a webinar or a long tutorial video and split it into small videos and audio clips. You can reuse these small clips as social media posts or blog posts to turn them into rich media. People work hard on producing content, but once content is published, they gather dust on their website or YouTube channel.

The best content strategy for startups is to extract the maximum juice from your content by repurposing it into a blog post, pro tips, actionable insights, a slide deck presentation, an infographic, a picture message, a small video, a podcast, etc. This way, you will have enormous content to share on social media for a long time, eventually decreasing your content product cost and increasing your content marketing ROI.

So essentially, you can implement content marketing for startups without an astronomical budget if you know how to effectively reuse it.

The success rate in content marketing is relatively low because the bar is getting higher and higher. With 79% of the marketers using content marketing, the competition increases almost every day. People are no longer happy with regular content that adds little or no value. They want powerful yet compact content that adds value. Such content also increases engagement and ROI. Complacency can kill you even if there is no entry barrier in content marketing.

The big brands produce excellent content because they have the funds and resources to invest. It has raised the bar for midcap and smaller companies. Apart from that, millions of writers, marketers, and brands create free content because they want visibility.

How to Make Content Marketing Work for Your Startup?

Another major issue responsible for the deteriorating visibility of content is people's waning interest in branded content. So, unless your content resolves the reader's issues and addresses their pain points, they are unlikely to spend time reading your content. Here are a few things you can try to make content marketing work for your startup.

• Focus: Don’t work on multiple channels as it may overwhelm you and bring down your overall performance. Master just a few channels and put in all your efforts.
• Quality: Acquiring proficiency and producing quality content takes time. So, rather than focusing on the metrics, you should focus on the quality, especially in the initial phases. When quality becomes a habit, it becomes easier to produce content people love.
• Consistency: If you think the compounding effect is applicable only to finance, you might be wrong. Content marketing is also an excellent example of the compounding effect. As you start building your content repository, you start getting noticed by the search engines and attracting traffic through them. Gradually the traffic starts increasing exponentially. That is probably why the big brands term content marketing as miraculous.

But, simply because content marketing is so effective, you shouldn't deduce that producing more content is akin to achieving the best results. Holly Pels says that creating more content can be counterproductive as your cost shoots up and quality worsens.

Create Memorable Content

Startups use content marketing to produce their go-to marketing messages. But here's the catch. Lots and lots of companies are making similar content to get noticed. So, to differentiate your content from others, you need to create remarkable content. That's perhaps a significant reason why startups don't succeed in content marketing.

SEO and social clicks should lead to fan following and conversion. If it doesn't happen, your website fails in its ultimate objective ā€” brand building.

Writing is about crafting content that matches your audience's interest, resolves their problems, embodies your tone of voice, and creates a fan base. Uniqueness is the essence of successful content marketing.

Pro Tip: Create unique content and make it memorable. Creating poor quality or generic content equals creating no content at all. With the run-of-the-mill content, you won't succeed in content marketing.

Good content strengthens your brand and makes a product top of mind when your prospect decides to buy the products or services similar to yours.

Some famous brands share a slice of their office life, employee stories (workplace storytelling), and an inside look at company culture, which often generates curiosity. It also helps make the content go viral. It works both ways. When employees are encouraged to share their stories online, it builds an attractive and lovable work culture. On the flip side, your customers trust and respect your organization when they see that employees are valued, and the information comes directly from them.

Pro Tip: To automate employee advocacy programs, you can use an employee advocacy tool like EveryoneSocial.

Buffer's Open Blog and Vanguard's employee stories are great examples of how you can use employee stories to enhance branding.

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Adobe's workplace storytelling on the Adobe Blog and social media is also an excellent example of it.

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Content marketing is highly effective for startups, but you shouldn't expect immediate results for keyword rankings, links, or views. However, in the beginning, it will help you get market validation for different ideas.

In the later stages, you'll learn how to leverage different content pieces to attain your SEO, lead nurturing, and PR objectives. Startups have an advantage over established brands in terms of agility, so they should focus on building a community first. Later on, you can produce 10X content to beat your closest rival.

How to Do Content Marketing on a Small Budget?

Here are a few things you can try to implement content marketing for startups at a small budget.

• Create a YouTube channel
• Join or launch an industry podcast
• Seek speaking opportunities at industry events and conferences
• Host and record webinars and share them on social media
• Create branded content
• Leverage influencer marketing
• Join online communities
• Create industry reports, stats, manuals, and trends
• Exert your presence on ProductHunt
• List your products on AppSumo and eBay
• Share your blog posts and articles on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium
• Repurpose your content into different content formats
• Split large content pieces such as a long video or a blog post into small social media posts

Conclusion

Content marketing is the best strategy for building communities, conducting online marketing, increasing organic visibility, and generating and capturing demand. Still, many people don't succeed because they lack focus, commitment, and consistency.

The key to success is focusing on a limited number of channels and initiatives as soon they start getting overwhelming. Choose your initiatives according to the interests and preferences of your audience, so you can get immediate feedback and leads.

Choose the channels where your target audience spends most of their time. Try to master one channel before jumping on to the next. If you try to manage too many things simultaneously, even the best startup marketing campaigns will fail.

Continue tracking and measuring to explore what works best in your niche and repeat those activities with a fresh perspective.

Suppose you canā€™t afford quality content or have a problem finding excellent writers. In that case, you can avail DashClickā€™s white-labeled content services to deliver your clients beautiful and unique written content like clockwork. Itā€™s the best way to generate more organic traffic and leads.

SEO and content marketing are the two primary entities that drive all of digital marketing. However, average business owners often fail to understand what makes these two practices unique and what binds them together.

While both practices are distinct and require varying levels of expertise, they are inextricably bound together and cannot provide results without the other’s assistance.

If you’re unsure where you land in the discussion of content marketing vs SEO, you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to provide you with clear-cut definitions of each service, explain why they need to work together, and the steps you can take to get powerful results with SEO content marketing.

Content Marketing vs SEO – What’s the Difference?

Before we dive too deep, let’s establish our foundation by exploring what these digital marketing strategies are in isolation.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a digital advertising technique in which brands strategically create content to market their business and achieve specific goals. Content marketing can help fulfill a variety of purposes including promoting brand awareness, acquiring new leads, and driving sales.

It’s also a common mistake to assume that content marketing refers to blog writing only. In truth, any content, whether it be on your main website pages, landing pages, or paid ads is content marketing. What changes in each of these instances is the tone and objective of the content in order to meet your audience’s needs at specific stages in the buyer’s journey.

Examples of content marketing can include webpage text, articles, newsletters, email blasts, blogs, or social media posts. In each scenario, a content writer is looking to identify the best way to communicate with a segment of your audience to achieve a specific goal or conversion.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the act of optimizing a web page, so that search engine crawlers can easily interpret the type of content it contains. When the crawler is able to accurately identify a page, the search engine algorithm can successfully deliver it to the right audience on search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO not only increases the visibility of your website pages but will help you to connect with better-qualified leads. Without best SEO practices, it’s likely that algorithms can make mistakes in understanding your webpage and deliver it to less interested individuals browsing the internet. This results in fewer page clicks and increased bounce rates.

Low or nonexistent activity on a web page over the course of time will actually hurt your SEO and impair your brand’s discoverability.

What’s the Relationship Between SEO and Content Marketing?

With the definition of each subject clear in your mind, it becomes clear why the two are inseparable and are meant to operate in unison. Content marketing performs the heavy lifting when it comes to attracting and converting your website visitors, while SEO ensures that the right users can actually discover your new content at any given time.

It’s not a contest between which marketing strategy is more helpful for your brand. Rather, an SEO strategy without content marketing is incomplete and vice-versa. Utilizing SEO to attempt to make your pages visible will mean very little if there is no content. Furthermore, those efforts would be in vain because the structure of the content and what it contains is an integral part of making SEO work.

You can find an introduction to SEO and some recommended guidelines courtesy of Google here. While we recommend recruiting an SEO expert to improve your website and guide the content creation process, it is beneficial for all team members to grasp the basics of the best practices for SEO.

Effective SEO generally includes the following:

• High-quality, informative content
• Using high-volume keywords effectively within the content
• Structuring content with short paragraphs and engaging headlines
• Optimizing page URLs and website navigation
• Improving page load speeds
• Optimizing for all devices

This simply scratches the surface as technical SEO will take you from the content on the page to the HTML and JavaScript code that makes up your website. To learn more about how to create an SEO-friendly website, head here.

How to Implement SEO Content Marketing Effectively?

Next, we’re going to provide you with expert tips for combining both. By deploying these tactics, you and your team can benefit from effective SEO and content marketing that synergizes for maximum effect.

1. Create Content That Speaks to Both Users and Search Engines

Because SEO and content marketing are complementary, you need to create your content with SEO in mind from the ground up. Writing first and thinking of SEO as an afterthought is likely to result in an incoherent product that doesn’t excel as an informative product nor as an effective SEO tool. Instead, you’ll want to focus on some vital principles before you ever start typing your first words.

2. Perform Extensive Keyword Research and Focus on Keyword Intent

Keywords are the bedrock of how users communicate with search engines to discover new content. These can consist of a single word, short phrases, or long-form questions, otherwise known as long-tail keywords. When a user enters a keyword into the search field, the search algorithm automatically locates indexed content from web pages and displays the most relevant results that contain that keyword.

This means that to create effective SEO content, you need to investigate the keywords your audience is using to discover brands such as yours. However, you want to focus on additional factors other than search volume such as keyword difficulty and average cost-per-click. This will help you determine how difficult it will be to outrank competitors for that keyword and whether or not the estimated ROI will be worthwhile.

Secondly, don’t make the rookie mistake of ignoring the intent behind the keyword. If you were looking to rank for keywords related to “SEO content,” for example, you might find keywords such as “what is SEO content” or “best SEO content.”

These two examples may have entirely different intentions. The first is unquestionably an informational keyword, meaning that the user wants to gain knowledge and is not immediately looking to buy a product or service. The latter example is a little more ambiguous. Terms like “best,” “worst,” or “affordable” are typically transactional keywords, which express an immediate intent to buy. But, it can also be informational in that the user wants to learn how to create the best SEO content.

Understanding the intention behind using a keyword is key to creating effective SEO content for your readers. When you use a keyword effectively as the basis for your content marketing, search engines will have an easier time knowing how to rank your content and serve it to the ideal audience.

3. Optimize Metadata

Every web page on the internet possesses metadata. Metadata is information that describes other data. Examples of this include a page’s meta description, which summarizes all of the content on a webpage in roughly 160 characters. Other examples include the page title, the author, alternative text for images, and the date of publishing.

Optimizing a page’s metadata for SEO further assists search engine crawlers in determining what your web page contains. Not only does it add clear descriptors for parts of the webpage, but it can also serve as additional opportunities to sell your content and further your keyword usage.

For example, the best practices for a meta description are to include your primary keyword and advertise your content in a succinct 150-160 characters. Your search will feature any keywords in your description in bold for increased visibility. You also have full control over your messaging, meaning you can create intrigue and sell users on the value of your webpage over others. Just be sure to keep your information and accurate and avoid misleading the user.

4. Link Relevant Content Pages Together for Improved SEO

A core aspect of an SEO strategy is link building. Link building is the practice of linking two pieces of related content together in an effort to drive additional traffic to those pages. As the number of quality inbound links pointing to a page increases, so too will its search rankings. This consists of two types of links: internal links and backlinks.

Internal links are links between two pages on the same domain. These are easier to implement as you have full control over your own content and how you choose to incorporate these links. You’ll want to seek out natural opportunities to reference your other content whenever it becomes relevant. You do not want to stuff internal links onto a page just for the sake of doing so. Providing irrelevant links can confuse crawlers or even prompt them to flag your content as misleading or intrusive advertising.

Backlinks are links that a page on your site receives from an external domain. When it comes to backlinks, SEOs typically use the analogy of viewing connected websites like neighborhoods. If you receive backlinks from websites with poor reputations and SEO, it can hurt your site’s SEO even if you are utilizing best practices. Conversely, a healthy number of quality backlinks can significantly improve your SEO and search rankings.

Acquiring backlinks takes more effort and will require you to connect with others online through social outreach. However, the benefits of obtaining healthy backlinks are worthwhile in helping you to increase the visibility of your content. You should also regularly examine your backlinks profile and look for any toxic domains you want to disavow.

In both examples, search engines utilize these links as yet another way to understand your website’s content and how it relates to other content online. These links help to define relationships, which then creates a clear picture of your entire brand and what you have to offer to users discovering your brand through a search engine.

5. Create and Upload an XML Sitemap

You can further help your SEO content by speeding up the indexing process. Webmasters can do this by creating an XML sitemap. A sitemap details all of your website’s most important pages and which are available for crawling. Your sitemap can also list exclusions of any URLs you might wish to exclude from crawling for specific SEO purposes.

Faster indexing means that your positive SEO updates get indexed faster, meaning improved site quality for search rankings. It can also help you to avoid penalties toward your SEO regarding known issues that your team is already working to address. You can learn how to build and submit a sitemap with Google here.

6. Consistently Update Your Site with New and Accurate Content

Search engines not only check content for structure and quality but also take note of how often you publish and update pages on your domain. If you allow your website to grow stagnant, search engine crawlers will take notice and begin to view your content as old or outdated.

Limiting the content on your website not only allows you to look dated, but it ultimately limits how many gateways that users have to access your content. When you regularly create new pages that target new topics and keywords, you’re essentially creating alternative avenues for users to discover your brand. Planting more seeds and watering them regularly is more likely to produce a strong harvest than letting your plot run dry.

One of the most popular and effective ways to do this is to add a blog to your website. Every business online can benefit from adding one for the reasons described above. It also gives you more freedom to discuss industry-relevant topics that don’t necessarily fit on any of your core website pages. Quality, informational blogs are also prime bait for encouraging users to share your SEO content on their own site or through social media.

However, it’s important to avoid cannibalizing your existing content by producing repeat topics or overusing targeted keywords. You can avoid this by creating and utilizing a company-wide content calendar to plan out your posts ahead of time and avoid any gaps in publishing. Even as your number of website pages grows, you’ll always have an outline available to help inform future keyword research.

Content Marketing vs SEO: It’s No Longer a Competition

Before search algorithms advanced to where they are today, webmasters often focused on content for SEO instead of content marketing for the customer. What resulted was a lot of poorly-written content that existed just so the owner could stuff high volume keywords. Luckily, those days are long behind us.

Instead, content marketing is now a vital component of any SEO strategy worth it’s salt. Businesses can now create more high-quality content that serves the needs of their customers while also helping search engines interpret all of the data that exists on the page. Both must be present, however. Without SEO, your content won’t be focused enough on user needs to be seen. Without content, your SEO is working to deliver nothing of value to the user.

If you’d like to learn more tips on how to create better, SEO-friendly content, you can do so here. For more tips on how to make your overall site SEO-friendly and improve your search rankings, click here. If you lack the ability or team resources to implement your own SEO and content, check out DashClicks expert fulfillment services to help get your website running.

Final note – While SEO and content marketing can produce powerful results when combined effectively, it requires time and commitment. Stick to the best practices, update regularly, and stay the course. Don’t miss out on the powerful benefits of both by disrupting your strategy prematurely.

SEO-friendly content is the number one marketing tactic for driving organic traffic to your website.

The issue that companies face is that creating content and optimizing it for SEO can be a time-consuming venture both in development and payoff. Furthermore, you may not know how to use SEO in a blog effectively.

In this article, we'll explore the meaning of SEO content writing and provide you with 13 tips to help you create SEO-friendly content starting today.

What is SEO Content Writing?

SEO content writing refers to the act of creating content for a page that is effectively optimized to communicate with search engine algorithms. There are many strategies you can implement to optimize your blog content, many of which we will explore further down in this article.

The broad strokes include implementing popular keywords in your main headlines and throughout the body of the text. It also includes properly structuring your URLs, correcting on-page UX errors, and even optimizing images for quality and appropriate loading speeds. The problem for many users comes with the belief that you cannot speak effectively to an algorithm and write for a user simultaneously.

The truth is that Google's algorithm is rapidly improving every day and prefers that you write in a way that's natural and valuable to your actual readers. As long as you put your audience first and do your best to fall in line with best SEO practices, you can expect your content to boost your website ranking. The better your content performs, the more traffic you will receive, which then increases your site's SEO value overall in the long term.

Now you're likely asking, how do I use SEO in my blog? Below, we're going to give you thirteen powerful tips to help you create SEO-friendly content like a marketing professional.

Tips for Creating SEO-Friendly Content

Content is the soul of digital marketing and SEO, and your success lies in creating content that is helpful for the users and optimized for the search engines. To rank your content better in search engines, follow these tips:-

1. Research Keywords and Match Content to Keyword Intent

All blog writing generally begins with the act of researching popular keywords that are relevant to the topics you want to discuss on your website. You want to look for keywords that not only have a high search volume but are directly relevant to your brand and feature an appropriate level of competitive difficulty.

You can search for keywords and generate topics in several ways. The primary way is to utilize popular SEO tools such as SEMRush. This will not only reveal popular keywords, but provide important analytics such as the competitiveness, cost-per-click, and average search volume. You can also generate a list of popular keywords that are similar or related for additional inspiration.

Another popular method is to get more involved with the discussion among your target audience. Many blog writers turn to sites like Quora, which features an enormous list of popular questions and answers regarding any number of topics. For example, if someone asks Quora, How do I create better content for my blog,ā  and that page sees a lot of activity, you can extrapolate that there's a need for content regarding that question. You can also source ideas like this from community groups on social media sites or forums such as Reddit.

We also strongly recommend examining popular blog content that your direct competitors produce. If a particular brand ranks in the top five on Google SERPs, you know that their content is something you want to emulate. Rather than copying content and running into issues with plagiarism, think about how you can uniquely approach similar topics and create content that is better than theirs.

Focus on the Intent Behind Keyword Usage

Something that is often overlooked is the true intent behind using a particular keyword. If you simply choose a popular keyword and start writing, you might miss the mark entirely. Instead, you want to select a topic that matches the reason for the search, so that your content meets the needs of your audience.

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To better understand keyword intent, know that there are three types of keywords. Navigational keywords are terms or phrases that direct users to a specific location. If someone searches “Netflix,” then they are simply trying to go to that brand’s homepage.

Informational keywords help users find content that educates or informs them. These often come in the form of a question that asks what, how, or why. The user wants to educate themselves and isn’t necessarily looking to make a transaction.

Transactional keywords more directly indicate the intent to purchase a product or service. They may search “buy” or use product qualifiers such as “cheap” or “best.”

Understanding this intent will guide you in the process of matching your content to reflect the person’s actual needs. If you select informational keywords, make sure your content provides helpful knowledge and avoids overt advertising. If you want to push sales on a particular product, highlight transactional keywords on that page, instead.

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2. Develop an Outline First Before You Begin Writing

Classrooms around the world should feature this in every Writing 101 course. While it’s technically possible to write a content piece from start to finish, creating an outline or a skeleton of the piece first will allow you to stay much more organized. The outline becomes especially vital for SEO as you can plan out your keyword usage and headlines well in advance.

You’re already aware of the basic article structure through previous reading experience. Every piece will have an introduction to the topic, the body that contains the bulk of the information, and closing thoughts that summarize or link users to further reading.

With SEO content, you’ll want to plan out how to structure those segments to organize information for users, while also catering to SEO best practices. Planning your headlines will also help you to keep your content paragraphs short for easier, more fluid reading. It will also optimize the research process as you’ll know exactly which details you need to focus on as opposed to filtering through which data to keep and which to eliminate.

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3. Make Your Paragraphs Concise

This tip follows suit with the previous tip regarding structure. To get the best SEO benefits, the general rule is that more content is better. However, your average user is generally unwilling to give the attention required to absorb 3,000 words through continuous reading.

Instead, your SEO content writing should read differently than your latest novel draft. You’ll want to segment your ideas into smaller paragraphs that allow for quick skimming, while still allowing users to retain the key points. Even if you need to convey additional data under the same subheading, look for opportunities to break your thoughts into smaller paragraphs.

Creating an outline and keeping your paragraphs short will also assist you in keeping your writing on task. As soon as your language becomes overly drawn out, your reader will also begin to tune out. Understand that you only have a limited time to grab your audience. Otherwise, your bounce rate will increase, which negatively impacts your website SEO over time.

However, some may find it difficult to remain concise and informative. For them, tools like Paragraph Writer can help streamline their writing process, making it easier to create clear and impactful paragraphs while maintaining brevity.

4. Your Content Must be a Minimum of 500 Words but Shoot for More

Content length is a tricky topic when it comes to search engine optimization. For a long time, it was widely accepted that 300-500 words were the expected amount of content required for a webpage. Anything less than this will prompt Google's algorithm to mark your page as having thin or meaningless content. The idea is that fewer words cannot possibly say anything substantial or worthwhile regarding a particular topic.

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While short-form blogging is a thing, it’s incredibly difficult if not possible to do if you’re just starting. Search engine algorithms look through the content and constantly examine it to determine what it’s talking about and whether or not the material is valuable to readers. The less content a page has, the less information the algorithm has to make its determination. We would also argue that it’s seldom possible to address your audience’s needs in 300 words only, either.

For this reason, long-form content inarguably works best when attempting to improve your SEO and search engine rankings. Different sources will argue for different lengths, but we generally recommend aiming for 2-3,000 words of high-quality information. The trick is that this can vary greatly depending on the subject matter at hand.

In other words, a 3,000-word article that’s stretched not to provide better information, but to meet a quota, is not working in the service of your readers. If you’re confident that your content delivers powerful information with fewer words, then feel free to post with confidence. You can analyze the performance and make adjustments later.

5. Always Optimize Your Meta Descriptions

A meta description is a short snippet that appears directly beneath the website and page name listed within search engine results pages. Text will always appear here regardless of whether or not you manually optimize the text or not. However, implementing the best SEO practices here can drastically improve your content’s clickthrough rate.

Here is an example of a strong meta description for a result when using the keywords “SEO Content service”:

There are several things to note here. First, the meta description utilizes the keywords appropriately within the limited number of characters. Google bolds the words and phrases that match your query, making your result stand out better than descriptions that lack them.

Second, the entire meta description fits on screen. The writer or SEO specialist managed to capture the essence of the page’s content without running over the character limit. You want to aim to keep your descriptions between 150-160 characters. Otherwise, it will cut off and feature ellipses at the end.

Third, the actual meta description content attempts to intrigue us and sell us on the click. It understands that when we search for “SEO content service,” we are looking to potentially purchase such a service for ourselves. It uses transactional qualifiers such as “best SEO content” and “quality SEO content.” The prospect of getting the best SEO content service available is appealing and is likely to draw traffic.

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Finally, it includes multiple call-to-actions. It encourages the user to connect and sign up now to benefit from their offerings. All of these factors create the right blend of a clean look, effective keyword highlighting, solid information, and a sense of urgency. This is exactly what you want to achieve when creating a meta description for your blog content.

6. Add Images to Your Blog Content and Optimize Them

Our society feeds on visual media. For this reason, you can drastically improve the performance of your blog content by enhancing the experience with high-quality, relevant imagery.

Specifically, we recommend that brands create and upload their custom images to add a sense of personalization and authenticity to their articles. Not only are unique and personal images more attractive to consumers, but they can also positively impact your SEO as no other blogs will have access to these assets.

Compare this to the use of stock imagery. While having a licensed image is superior to having no images at all, consumers that make the blog rounds will likely see the same types of stock photographs time and again. It has the opposite effect of implementing custom images as it can make your content feel recycled and too similar to competitors.

Your images can include shots of your company, your products, or your services so long as they are relevant to the topic you’re writing about. Custom infographics also perform well and are prime material for social sharing and acquiring new backlinks. Be sure to include some form of branding in any custom images that you own to avoid having your content stolen without receiving any credit.

Remember to Update the Image Alt Text

Regardless of the image you use, be sure to set your alt text before publishing your SEO content. Alternative text is an HTML attribute that prompts descriptive text to appear on the page whenever it is not possible to view the image. You can boost the SEO value of your page by adding this easy-to-implement accessibility feature for your readers.

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If possible, you should claim this opportunity to utilize your primary keyword once more. Because your image immediately relates to the article topic, you should have very little issue achieving this.

7. Integrate Internal Links Throughout the Body

A key component of an effective SEO-friendly content strategy is to utilize internal links throughout the body of your article. This serves three primary purposes that can boost your SEO.

The first is that you enhance the value of the content by providing additional resources for customers to learn about related subjects. For example, an article providing general SEO tips typically won’t provide a deep dive into alternative text. But, the user may want to learn more about the subject, and providing an internal link to another article on your site is the best way to satisfy this need.

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Secondly, by linking to related articles on your site, you’re maximizing the benefits you can obtain from a single visitor. Instead of reading your article and leaving, they’re more likely to click around to new pages. This increases your number of daily page clicks and the average duration of a session. More time spent on your site means more opportunities to turn a casual reader into a repeat visitor.

Finally, utilizing internal linking appropriately assists search algorithms in better understanding the content on your entire website. Not only do search engines look at headlines, keywords, and text, they can understand the relationship two pages have with one another through direct links. The easier it is to understand your website’s content, the more valuable it will be to search engines.

8. Optimize Your URL for SEO

In our continuing efforts to optimize content for search engines, the next item to visit is the page URL. If you do not manually edit your URL, your website will automatically generate one that does little to describe the page to readers.

An example of a poor URL might look something like this:

www.dashclicks.com/884321/show.html

This does not define what type of content you can expect to find on the page. We can see that the pathway is taking us from the home page, to services, and to a specific service page. However, this automated number is created by the website as an identifier, but it doesn’t help readers or your SEO.

Instead, we optimized our page URL to make it much more accessible to readers and search engine algorithms:

www.dashclicks.com/white-label-seo

This optimized URL removes the arbitrary numbers and instead defines the subject of the page. It accomplishes this by using as few keywords as possible. It is not necessary nor is it recommended to include articles such as “the” or “a.” Additionally, when defining the page title, you want to communicate the relationship between words by using the dash symbol as illustrated in the example above. It’s also much easier to remember this URL if you want to navigate there directly.

Finally, though some sites utilize dates in their URL, we recommend against it. The reasoning behind this is that dated content will appear old and irrelevant to users who discover it at a later date. Instead, you want to uphold the value of your content and allow it to be evergreen. For example, if you’re writing an article about SEO tips, the chances are that the information will still be relevant at a later date regardless of the posting date.

9. Optimize the Page for Mobile Viewing

Did you know that 54.8% of web traffic comes primarily from mobile devices? Because of this fact, you need to make mobile optimization of your site a priority if you want your content to perform well.

In addition to this, Google promises to rank mobile-ready websites higher than those that are not. You can review their recommended guidelines for your website here. This is part of an effort to make the internet’s content more accessible to users around the globe regardless of internet connectivity or browsing device.

Regarding mobile optimization, you’ll want to ensure that your entire article is clear and easy to view within most mobile viewports. Most drag-and-drop website editors allow you to customize your mobile page view and preview it before publishing. You may also need to update the mobile version of the page to accommodate for increased loading times caused by images or videos.

You can utilize Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to see how your site fares. It's free to use and will reveal a list of errors that are present on your site. It also will recommend optimizations to improve mobile performance. You can also look into creating AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) versions of your existing website pages.

10. Classify Your Articles Using Schema Markup

Schema markup (commonly referred to as structured data) is an HTML language that classifies and categorizes elements on a webpage. It’s also referred to as the language of search engines and is a primary way to help algorithms better understand the content on your website.

Without schema markup, search engine algorithms are left to interpret the content itself without any guidance. Even as Google’s algorithm rapidly improves, it still can misunderstand your content and present it to the wrong audiences. This is the opposite of what you want to happen and it can negatively impact your search engine optimization efforts.

For SEO blog content, you’ll want to mark each new page as an article. There are more elements of a page you can markup, and you can utilize Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to simplify the process. Simply enter your URL, select the page type, and start tagging the attributes that are relevant to your data type.

It will then automatically create the HTML markup code for you to add to the web page’s existing code.

11. Integrate Social Sharing Links on Every Post

You can boost the amount of traffic visiting your blog by making it effortless to share your content. We recommend embedding social sharing links to as many social media platforms as possible. More pathways to your website not only makes your SEO content more accessible, but your enhanced backlink profile will improve your overall SEO.

Backlinks are direct links to your domain from an external source. When you receive a backlink from a trusted domain with high SEO value, some of that confidence gets shared with your website in the eyes of search algorithms. To improve your SEO, you want to build a backlink profile to be reckoned with, and you can boost your efforts by making your content easily shareable across social media.

12. Update Your Blog Consistently

SEO content marketing is not something you can pick up and run with whenever you’re up to it. It requires your team to consistently create new, exciting content on a predictable schedule. If you allow your blog and website to grow stagnant, search algorithms will begin to view your content as outdated and less valuable due to low activity.

You can ensure that your blog continuously maintains its SEO value by posting new content and updating existing content whenever applicable. To get the most benefits possible, you’ll want to strive for 4-5 new posts per week. However, it’s understandable that not every business has the resources to accomplish this. It’s better to emphasize quality over quantity and ensure that you deliver valuable content on a schedule that readers can count on.

Finally, keep track of the content you post and be mindful of how information can change. If an article you wrote on SEO previously performed well, but now contains outdated data, it can begin to negatively impact your website's SEO. Instead of creating a brand-new article from scratch, you can modify the article's content to feature discoveries and updates. Be sure to tag older article updates as Newā  or Updateā  for better discoverability.

13. Use Machine Learning Tools to Improve Content quality

Our final tip for producing SEO-friendly content is to lean heavily on machine learning and analytical tools to create and improve your content. There are a variety of free and paid tools you can use to find keywords, select topics, write content drafts, correct content errors, and much more.

You should also look to Google Analytics to keep track of how your content performs with audiences. This platform allows you to create custom goals to help you drive conversions that are most relevant to your immediate business needs. You can also A/B test your content to try out new headlines, swap images, or view how different writing styles play with readers. You’ll be able to track your results in real-time and use the data to improve your content creation process.

For assistance in creating content – Articoolo

To quickly correct content errors – Grammarly

To create custom images or infographics – Canva

Finally, you can easily acquire SEO-friendly content for your website by purchasing a content marketing fulfillment service through DashClicks. Our team of SEO specialists and content writers can deliver ready-to-go content on your schedule and handle the posting on your behalf.

Conclusion

Creating SEO-friendly content is not necessarily difficult in technique, but requires time and dedication to perform properly. Taking your foot off the pedal even for a short duration can negatively impact your ROI from content marketing. This is the reason why more brands are planning to invest more resources toward SEO and content marketing in 2022 and beyond.

However, utilizing these tips to guide you in creating SEO-friendly content will prove a worthwhile venture. It is the best way to generate organic traffic and acquire new sales for the lowest cost possible. If you invest in SEO-friendly content for the long-term, your web traffic will improve and you’ll see more inbound sales than ever before.

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.