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. When updating content, focus on identifying vague information and making it clear and engaging for your audience. A paraphrasing tool can help with this process. Using an AI-powered paraphraser, you can enhance your text by replacing words with suitable synonyms and restructuring sentences. This not only brings clarity but also gives your content a fresh, polished look. 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.

Content marketing is more competitive than ever. While 78% of organizations are approaching content strategically, more than half do not or are not able to due to workflow issues, lack of resources, and failure to prioritize either.

In this article, we want to show you how to scale content creation with minimal to moderate time and monetary investments. You’ll improve your team workflow, the quality, and the quantity of your posts, and learn how to repurpose content for widespread marketing success.

How to Create a Step-by-Step Workflow for Content Marketing?

Many businesses make the mistake of failing to allocate the appropriate number of personnel and resources to creating great content. You are often seeing one individual left with the responsibility of researching keywords and topics, writing 3,000+ words, proofreading their own content, finding or creating graphics, uploading the content, addressing SEO, etc.

Not only does this overburden make it impossible to scale content creation, but it also ensures that each of these processes is not optimized and lowers the quality of your post overall. While you may have staffers that are capable of these tasks with varying degrees of skill, you want an expert to oversee the various steps of content creation to ensure the best results possible. By breaking down the process of content creation into multiple steps, you can better visualize the process and delegate tasks as necessary to your team.

The typical process of creating a single post entails the following:

SEO Keyword & Topic Research →  Gathering Data to Outline the Post →  Writing the Post →  Editing the Post →  Creating Graphics or Selecting Images →  Formatting the Post on the Site →  Proofreading & QA →  Revisions →  SEO Page Optimization → Schedule for Publishing → Scheduling Your Emails or Social Posts for Content Sharing

Assigning all of these tasks to one individual is not ideal for scaling. Instead, take each step as a unique task and assign it to a person that is capable of accomplishing the task efficiently. For our team, we lean on our SEO specialists to perform research well in advance. This gives us a content calendar complete with keyword research so that our writers can plan their writing efforts.

Graphics and images are also assigned to an appropriate specialist capable of producing high-quality content. Assigning a separate individual for editing and/or QA provides a highly-valued second or third look to remedy all errors. An SEO specialist will then format and schedule the post, while ensuring that the page itself follows SEO best practices on the front and back-end. Finally, the social media team can utilize our calendar to coordinate their posting to promote the latest posts.

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By appropriately divvying up your workflow, you ensure that your experts can do what they do best, while giving your writers more time to produce additional posts. Your workflow does not need to mimic ours, but instead should reflect adequate use of the resources your company has at its disposal.

1. Research in Advance and Create a Content Calendar

With your new and updated workflow processes, you'll need to start generating your keywords and topics well in advance to avoid unwanted interruptions. Your old method of looking for one or two topics at a time will do little more than leaving other members of your team with no ability to help push the content creation process further.

Instead, you need to create your company's content calendar immediately. This can be an actual calendar or a company-wide spreadsheet that details numerous topics and the supporting keyword research. We recommend dedicating several days to research, so that your writers and media team can plan months in advance if necessary. Instead of listing 2-3 posts at a time, start thinking 2-3 months worth of posts at a time.

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The content calendar provides a host of benefits including the assurance that you will always have new posts moving through your workflow pipeline. As your writers push their post for editing and graphic creation, they can begin working on the next post immediately. This reliability works its way to each team member and ensures that no backup occurs that could delay your posting strategy.

A calendar also allows your team to better visualize opportunities to enhance your strategy beyond the benefits of a single post. Many companies utilize an approach called clustering where multiple posts within a given period relate to a central idea or theme. It's easy to internally link these posts due to their relevancy and helps promote returning visitors that express interest in the initial post. This type of momentum is what you need to ensure that you get the necessary readership to support your content scaling.

Visualizing your future posts in advance also allows your team to identify any potential problems long before they interrupt your processes. If you identify a problem with your calendar at any point, it's easy enough to supplement these posts with others that are planned for a different date.

In short, the content calendar allows for clear and effective communication between all departments. Communication prevents issues and work delays, which presents the greatest opportunity for the successful scaling of content creation.

2. Write on Topics with Firsthand Experience

The best way to ensure that your content is unique and of high quality is to allow your writers to focus on topics where they possess firsthand experience. While it's not always a possibility, it provides a litany of benefits that are key to expediting the process of scaling your content marketing.

If you were to ask a writer what type of content they like to write best, it is certainly going to be materially related to a subject to which they have familiarity. If someone is an expert in programming custom style sheets, it would take little to no research to create a quality piece of helpful, informative content that demonstrates their expertise in the area. Conversely, that expert would likely have a very difficult time writing something authoritative about HVAC equipment without additional, extensive research.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the latter approach. In fact, most content on the internet is created this way as companies lack the ability to write or the resources to create content with firsthand knowledge and experience. However, performing that research effectively enough for content adds a substantial amount of time to your content creation workflow. What can hurt worse is that content written from a third-party perspective is generally apparent as nothing can substitute for hands-on knowledge. It will be that much more difficult to tap into what that audience wants, so that you can answer their most pressing questions.

For that reason, you may want to rethink who on your team can fulfill the role of a writer. For example, an article on advanced SEO tactics would fare better if scribed by an actual SEO expert on your team. You'll still have your editors and QA personnel available to ensure that the piece is presentable for audiences. In exchange, you'll have the unique insight of a seasoned expert, which is far more valuable to your success than a particular writing style.

3. Where You Lack Experience, Do Your Research

The reality is that many companies will lack the resources to write content with firsthand experience, at least all of the time. However, you can still give your content the best chance of success by using your content calendar and looking into future topics well in advance. Rather than starting on a foreign topic a week in advance, give your writers what they need, so that they can appear as authoritative as possible on the subject matter.

If this is your business situation, you'll want to revisit your own workflow process we explored in step one. You'll want to account for this additional research time and incorporate it into your regular process. Failure to create content that demonstrates authority and is backed by the appropriate sources will do little more than clutter your blog and harm your overall website value.

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Your writers should also look to work with an expert for an opportunity to ask questions and get a little hands-on. For example, if an HVAC business from the previous example hires a freelancer, it would be worthwhile for them to work closely with the content creation team to ensure they have a strong understanding of the topic they are writing about. The expert can provide the unique insights you need, while your writers can adequately translate their thoughts into well-written articles.

An alternative method is to network and partner with experts on the subject matter that do have the time and resources to write content. This not only provides your blog with excellent, unique content, but presents new opportunities to establish relationships and support a link-building strategy. These types of partnerships aren't typically paid, but are transactional by providing guest content for one another to obtain the coveted SEO benefits.

4. Start Writing Content with an Outline

The act of writing a content piece requires deliberate strategy and planning. Making the mistake of starting with a blank document and attempting to write beginning to end will likely result in a confused mess of unrelated thoughts. Even if there are good ideas to be found within, it will be difficult to trace a throughline and even harder to focus your ideas around the relevant keywords.

Instead, you should always begin the process of writing by creating a solid outline of what the article will contain. This way, you can plan your ideas out in a list even if it is initially disorganized and unstructured. I, personally, will create bullet points that capture the key concepts that should be expressed for the topic at hand. With a clear visual, I can look for any elements that may be lacking and look for ways to incorporate them into the overall picture. After I'm satisfied with the elements I have, I then look to align them in a way that helps the content flow naturally to the reader.

SEO experts recommend a blog post to contain at least 3,000 words of high-quality content in order to boost the page value. With our outline, that large document suddenly becomes many, interconnected smaller ideas that are more approachable. While you build out these ideas, you'll keep your guideline handy to ensure you're writing those thoughts in a way that connects to other ideas and the greater subject. Even if you need to step away from the article and create it over the course of a few days, your guideline will always ensure that you stay on track.

An outline not only helps you to stay on task, but ensures that your content complies with SEO best practices. This outline should contain each of your H1 headers, any H2s or H3s if applicable, which keywords to highlight in each section, and any other technical notes of importance. The outline creates the blueprint and all that's left to do is fill in the blanks with your ideas.

5. Expand Your Team with Content Creation Experts

We broke up our typical content workflow in the first step, so that we could determine who we needed on our team at this point. With your content calendar planned, your research complete, and the content written, you're well on your way to publishing your content. However, instead of leaving your writer to deal with the technical aspects of finalizing the post, you need to delegate the remaining tasks to content creation experts that can help you get the most mileage possible out of your article. If you do not have these individuals on your team, you need to start looking if you want to take scaling your content creation seriously.

The number of people your content department needs depends entirely on how large you plan to scale and how quickly. Skilled individuals that are able to focus completely on content marketing may be able to generate several high-quality posts per week so long as the necessary roles are covered. You are likely looking at writers, editors, graphic designers, SEOs, social media managers, and a project manager to oversee everything. It's possible to see some of these areas fulfilled by one individual, but consider the impact it may have on your unique team and their ability to produce.

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An expanded team will enable your writers to focus on writing to the best of their ability. Your graphics experts will boost the value of your content by creating unique images instead of using boring, stock photography. Your SEOs will ensure your website receives the maximum benefits, and your social media expert will look to boost your post around the web.

6. Utilize a Variety of Content Delivery Methods

When you invest all of the above time and resources into creating high-quality content, it's a waste to let it die after hitting publish. The top-ranked websites for content generation utilize the strategy of repurposing their high-performing content for use on other channels and in different formats.

Think of a great piece of video content you love that's well scripted and well-rehearsed. There's an excellent chance that the script, or at least parts of it, began as a blog post. Efficient companies do not generally have teams creating editorial content, video content, and social media content separately. Instead, they repurpose ideas that they've already put together and reformat them to fit a different medium. A high-performing blog post that's run its course can suddenly get a new lease on life as a well-edited YouTube video.

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Understand that despite your best efforts, even your greatest content may not appeal to your entire audience in long, written form. By converting your hard work into unique formats such as videos, PDF eBooks, an email series, or a series of social posts, you get more out of your investment by reaching out to new audiences.

The key to successful scaling is increasing your output and returns while spending as little additional resources as possible. Therefore, you need to capitalize on the various content delivery methods available to help you maximize your ROI out of each new piece of content that comes out of that department.

7. Revise Your Outdated Content

Carrying on from the point above, you don't want your existing, older content to go to waste either. Furthermore, older content that's outdated or contains irrelevant or inaccurate information can actually harm your website's overall SEO value. It's in your best interest to ensure your content team dedicates time to revisiting and revising older content on your website or social media channels.

Revising older content requires a minimal time investment. As long as the article was previously well-researched and optimized, the bulk of the content should still be applicable in the current time period. Instead, you'll want to comb through the content and look for any facts or figures that have since changed since the time of posting. Additionally, you could update the article with news or discoveries that directly impact the material that is discussed in the body.

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This is especially important for content that previously performed well and has tremendous SEO value. When users search for that keyword, there's a great chance your article will still appear high on search engine results pages. Google will recognize updates to the page and potentially push your article higher among its list of relevant content. You can also alert users that may have previously read the post that it contains new content by adding Updated or YEAR Update to the page or post title.

Keeping an organized content calendar for every year or every period will help you to easily keep track of any content you have that's relevant to a topic or keyword you're researching. If there is an opportunity to boost your existing content library by making simple updates, you need to do so to continue extracting additional ROI.

8. Optimize Your Content for All Devices

Most, if not all of your company's content creation likely occurs on a desktop or laptop device. However, those engaging with your content may utilize technology with much smaller viewports and slower processing such as mobile devices or tablets. For this reason, you must ensure that your content, videos, and web pages are optimized for on-the-go viewing.

In fact, a Statista study indicates that over 50% of all worldwide web traffic comes specifically from mobile devices. As content generally takes longer to load on mobile, especially if it's complete with high-quality images or video, your content creation must include mobile optimization to ensure your scaling efforts are worthwhile.

To make your mobile experience better, be sure to highlight your most important ideas in smaller paragraphs that can fit completely on a mobile viewport. You can also utilize lazy loading methods to hide bigger files such as photos from view until the reader scrolls closer to that section of the article. If possible, you'll want to use AMP (accelerated mobile pages) to enhance the content viewing experience.

If you're unsure if your page is properly optimized for a mobile experience, be sure to use Google's free tools such as the Mobile-Friendly Test. You can enter any URL and the software will automatically scan for errors and recommend options for improving your performance and eliminating errors.

Scaling Content Production with These Easy-to-Follow Steps!

By following these guidelines, any business can begin to take steps to scale its content creation. These ideas will guide you along the process of not only coming up with and writing new topics but how to squeeze every last bit of engagement you can out of both your new and old content.

If you take nothing else away from this post, ensure that you have a plan in place both via a monthly content calendar and through a guideline for each individual piece of content. To enable your writers to create at a high volume without sacrificing quality, you'll need to expand your content creation team to include experts in SEO, editing, graphic design, content planning, and content promotion be it through email marketing or social media.

To become a content powerhouse, make sure your library is a living, breathing entity that continues to foster engagement and empower the community. If you create content worth reading, it will take a life of its own and continue to circulate around the web. The more engagement you attract, the easier it will be to continue growing your audience and to justify expanding your content team even further.

As a business owner, you know that digital marketing is no longer optional in 2021. However, you can only continue your ongoing success by choosing the form of marketing that's going to get you the best return on your investment.

In this article, we will give you the inside knowledge you need to become an expert when it comes to content marketing vs paid ads. You will also learn how the two work effectively together to make a good business like yours stand out among the best.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a mostly free method of advertising your business online. The focus of content marketing is to educate and/or entertain your audience as opposed to being an explicit promotion of your brand.

This form of marketing includes anything that attracts and retains an audience including blog posts, well-researched articles, video content, social media posts, and more. You and your team can produce all of this content, and the advent of technology has made it easier than ever for anyone to produce quality content marketing.

Not only is content marketing accessible, but it is also effectively mandatory. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 91% of B2B survey respondents use some form of content marketing to drive profits.

Sources: Content Marketing Institute

The Pros and Cons of Content Marketing

The Pros

Perhaps the most attractive benefit of content marketing is its cost-effectiveness. When compared to paid advertising and other digital strategies, content marketing is a minuscule investment. It can be virtually free if you choose to create content yourself as opposed to hiring a content marketing expert.

Content marketing also comes from organic searches. Users are Google searching questions every day to become more informed about a product, service, or industry before spending their hard-earned dollars. Answering those questions is an excellent step into content marketing and attracts a better quality of lead than you would get through expensive paid advertisements.

By suggesting valuable content to your audience naturally, you get to look like the hero that provides something meaningful without asking for anything in return. The knowledge gained through your content marketing also builds your reputation and helps you stand out as an authority in your field. Over time, that organic traffic will accumulate and you will have users coming to you without needing to pay them for their time.

The Cons

The largest downside of content marketing is that it simply takes time. Creating a few videos or posting a few articles will do little in the short term to help your business turn a profit. If you are a business that lacks an online presence and needs new customers now, you'll need to look to other solutions like paid advertising to get your foot in the door. While still a very much worthwhile investment, content marketing is for the long term.

The additional con is that while anyone can create content freely, there's more to it than putting words on a page or talking into a microphone. Not only does your content need to provide legitimate value, but it also needs to work together with your overall marketing strategies including your SEO, which determines your overall search rankings online.

Fortunately, this con is mostly alleviated by the availability of knowledgeable writers that provide affordable services freelance or through digital marketing agencies.

What is Paid Advertising?

Paid advertising is a marketing strategy that involves bidding for keywords or phrases to secure premium advertising at the top of search engine results. Paid advertising is also commonly referred to as PPC or pay-per-click. You pay every time a user clicks on or engages with your paid advertisement.

Paid advertising is a commonly used, and often necessary, marketing strategy employed on websites such as Google, Bing, Facebook, and YouTube. You can differentiate paid ads versus organic results by looking for the Ad tag next to top results with true, organic results appearing below.

According to a survey conducted by Statista, brands spent 110 billion dollars on paid search in 2020, with that value expected to rise in 2021 and 2022. Paying to cut to the front of the line will always remain a valuable strategy as commercial activity transitions more and more to the digital landscape.

Sources: Statista

The Pros and Cons of Paid Advertising

The Pros

The number one pro that comes from using paid advertising is guaranteed visibility. For the right price, your brand will be the first thing users see any time they type a keyword or question into the world's most popular search engines. Seeing your brand at number one will always be valuable, and will be necessary for brands that otherwise have no foundation built online yet.

While the cost varies greatly depending upon the industry, each of these platforms offers incredible technology that can automatically adjust campaigns and regulate your budget so that you never overspend or waste time pursuing dead ends. That same technology also allows for precise targeting of individuals from varying demographics as well as those at varying stages of the buyer journey.

Paid advertising effectively offers dependable, predictable results and is one of the best ways to start building your brand online. This gets you the results you need upfront, while you cultivate long-term strategies to improve your organic rankings over time.

The Cons

The largest drawback of paid advertising is the budget required to compete with other businesses bidding for the same advertising spots. However, this is more of a warning than a guarantee, as some industries are far less competition for keywords, making PPC ads more affordable. With that said, when you stop paying, you lose your spot immediately.

Paid advertising may also prove more difficult as consumers are catching on to our marketing strategies. The truth is, we all dislike advertisements. They are everywhere we look - television, emails, online videos, search results, website browsing, and so on. Seeing the word Ad stamped next to your brand may be off-putting and make you appear less authentic or trustworthy. Additionally, more and more consumers are using ad blockers to remove your paid ad campaign from the equation altogether.

Should I Use Content Marketing or Paid Advertising?

Based upon the pros and cons of each, you can see that content marketing and paid to advertise actually complement the other's weaknesses effectively. Digital marketing experts will consistently recommend the use of both to help build your brand online and earn you results both in the short term, while you build of a stronger foundation for lasting results.

For example, Business A has no experience in digital marketing and needs to see a return on its investment immediately. They began a PPC ad campaign on Google to start getting customers into your digital storefront. In the meantime, they also begin publishing informative articles, engaging videos, and other forms of content that keep the audience engaged after the paid advertisements get them inside.

Over time, that content library begins to speak for itself, and search engines begin to trust Business A's website more, allowing them to rank higher organically. Brand reputation improves, consumer loyalty and trust improves, and your paid advertising budget goes down as you no longer need to pay for higher rankings.

Finally, consider that your paid ad campaigns also require great content to be effective. No matter what you pay, a user will ignore an ad that's bland, boring, or uninspired. Content marketing strategies work effectively in paid advertising campaigns by empowering your audience with the information they need to make informed purchasing decisions.

When considering the question of content marketing vs paid advertising, the answer is clear - use both whenever possible. Take advantage of the powerful PPC tools the industry has to offer to get immediate results, and cultivate a library of engaging content that builds your reputation, earns consumer trust, and ensures that your ROI remains consistent well into the future.

Take a moment and think about what brings people to your business?

In a lot of cases, it begins with a question and they visit your site expecting a solution. At this stage, you need to understand that they are not just interested in your product, but also seek valuable information.

In many cases, content is what starts your relationship with the customer. Moreover, content remains with them through all the steps of the customer journey. Therefore, it is fair to say that content plays a significant role in how your audience interacts with your business.

The Importance of Content Marketing in 2021

In order to make the most of your content marketing, you need to create content that is detailed, unique, and useful. This is because content marketing is extremely helpful in:

• Bringing people to your site
• Engaging customers by providing value
• Generating leads
• Moving people through the customer journey
• Driving sales
• Giving post-sale care

However, simply knowing that content marketing can help your business isn't enough. You need to know how to create an effective content marketing strategy. As per the latest statistics, 64% of marketers wish to know how to create a better content strategy.

There are different tactics that make content marketing strategies effective. As there are many content marketing tactics out there, you have to decide which ones can help your business grow.

How to Select the Right Content Marketing Tactics For Your Business?

Before building your content marketing strategy, spend some time brainstorming. Understand your aim, what your business stands for, and how you want to represent your values. Armed with this knowledge, you will be more informed to pick suitable content marketing tactics for your business.

Here are 30 content marketing tactics to help you pick one that works for your business:-

1. Know Your Audience and Provide Them What They're Looking For

To create successful content, you need to know your audience. The first step you can take is to conduct keyword research to gain insights into your potential customers and their needs.

You can begin by using Google Trends to get a good idea about the current demand for a particular topic you have in mind. All you need to do is enter the main keyword in the search box to see the number of searches it has got within a defined time period.

For more detailed information, you can use Ubersuggest. Here's how you can use it to unlock a plethora of keyword opportunities:

1. Click on your browser and open Ubersuggest
2. Type in your domain
3. Tap on the keyword analyzer located on the left sidebar
4. Select keyword ideas
5. Enter a keyword
6. Get related keywords along with search volumes

2. Segment Audience To Improve Engagement

You should always remember that different people are at different phases of the buying cycle. That's why the content you produce can't suit everyone. For instance, if you produce content for the purpose of creating awareness among new customers, then it will not work for repeat customers.

Hence, you must segment customers according to their personas. A buyer persona is a profile that talks about one segment of your audience. Buyer personas are based on research and describe your ideal customers. It talks about how they arrive at a decision, the challenges they face, and other useful insights.

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3. Create Content Based On Your Core Values

Core values serve as the building blocks of any business. Dedicate time to articulate the core values of your business in your content. It will help you generate solid content for your audience.

You can also use Storytelling to create content based on your core values. It is always easy to tell stories based on what you believe and know. A marketing effort that appears effortless to your reader will appeal to them the most.

4. Get On The Local Platform

Let's explain this point with an example first. Let's suppose you are a local brick-and-mortar business in California, but your website gets thousands of visitors from Florida. This may not do you much good. 46% of Google searches are made for getting local information. A major chunk of location-based mobile searches leads to an offline purchase. So, it is important to get on the local platform if you haven't already.

For getting on the local platform, you must know about local SEO. It is a fantastic tool that helps people find your business, which can drive sales.

Local SEO is defined as an SEO strategy that helps your business become more visible in Google's local search results.

To drive your local SEO, ensure you produce valuable information for your audience in your target area. When creating this content, concentrate on local keywords.

To know local keyword opportunities, use Ubersuggest.

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5. Provide Your Audience A Behind-the-Scenes Experience

If you want to increase your site traffic and attract a loyal audience, pre-sell your product or content. Let's suppose you are going to publish a new post next week. Share details about its writing process to your readers.

6. Create An Editorial Calendar

Marketers use editorial calendars for the purpose of planning, organizing, and scheduling the content they are required to share. An editorial calendar helps in creating a winning content marketing strategy. This is because it offers a variety of benefits. Here's how:

1. It enables you to track content events
2. It helps you see the performance of your distributed content
3. It helps to establish expectations and deadlines

Tip: These three steps can make your editorial calendar effective:

1. Understand your audience and the type of content they have an interest in
2. Conduct thorough research for your topic
3. Produce content and measure its effectiveness

7. Reply to Twitter Mentions

Responding consistently and quickly to people's comments and concerns shows people that you care. It humanizes your brand and demonstrates a level of dedication. Hence, following this content marketing tactic creates a great impression on your followers.

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8. Encourage User-Generated Content

User-Generated Content refers to content in the public sphere in which the creators share their experiences with your services and products.

A lot of businesses encourage user-generated content. Doing so not only helps the businesses save money, but they are also able to distribute engaging content.

UGC comes in different forms such as-

• Images
• Blog Comments
• Audios
• Videos
• Online Ratings and Reviews
• Social Media Posts
• Testimonials

9. Educate Your Customers

Give yourself some time to think about questions like - Do people want to know how your products work? Do they want to know the complete process of how you created the product? A lot of times, people are actually interested in learning more about your product. This helps them gain knowledge on something new, and they are likely to inform their friends as well. So, you must focus on customer education, especially if you are on a low advertising budget.

Let us give you an example of the kind of content you can create to educate your customers about your products. For instance, you want to educate your audience about HVAC systems. You can tell them how they work, what their advantages are, and what to watch out for. Your customers are more than willing to learn about your product, especially if few people are educating them about something similar on the web.

10. Use Trending Topics

Something or the other is always trending online. What you can do is, search for a way in which you can connect your brand with a trending topic.

To know an easy way to figure out trending topics, go to Google Trends. On the homepage, you will find certain topics. These topics are the ones that are currently getting plenty of search traffic on Google.

Remember, at the time of selecting trending topics, always keep your brand image in mind. Ensure you are only selecting the right trends.

11. Use Video Content

Viewers retain 95% of a message they see in a video and 10% of it when they read it in a text. With these stats, you can very well gauge the power of video content.

To produce useful video content for your audience, you can always consider starting a Youtube Channel. With the help of video, you can capture the attention of people who want to learn visually or want to hear useful advice rather than reading it in lengthy guides.

If you decide to make videos, you have to do it the right way. Ensure you have high-quality software and a good camera. Brainstorm what types of topics you can explore in the video form. Brands create product demonstrations, webinars, and video tutorials to showcase their expertise.

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12. Evaluate Your Competitor's Content

You need to carefully assess what your competitors are putting out there. For this, make it a point to check the types of content your competitors are producing. Also, check the things that they might be doing better, know the keywords they are ranking for, and figure out a unique way of covering the subjects they have already covered.

13. Produce Engaging Visual Content

With the amount of content being put out there, you may find it difficult to break through the noise. Fortunately, visual content can help you do so. People can be really busy and engaging visual content can help you capture the attention of your target audience.

So, start now and create GIFs, infographics, imagery, or illustrations to publish on your social media profiles and site.

14. Repurpose Your Content

Different people consume content differently. So, you can always think of presenting the same information in different formats. This is called content repurposing. It provides you two main benefits:

1) You can cater to more people

2) It saves a lot of time

An example of content repurposing can be:

Choose one of your articles and transform it into a PDF report and provide it as an ebook.

Tip: Repurpose only high-quality content that gave significant results the first time.

15. Create Content According To Common Customer Queries

If you receive a lot of similar questions from your customers, you should create content that answers those questions. Here's how this will benefit you:

1. It saves a lot of time for your customer service team
2. Answering FAQs works well for your SEO
3. It offers you relevant content ideas that you may not find in your keyword research
4. It engages your customer even more

To receive as many customer queries as possible, offer a number of ways in which your audience can get in touch with you. Provide contact or email details. Inform them that you will be answering queries on social media. You can also answer queries via live chat.

In addition to doing this, inform your team to write down any frequently asked questions. You can then consider addressing those questions in the form of video tutorials, comprehensive guides, and more.

16. Try Out New Technologies

Your strategies should acknowledge the current trends in marketing technologies and you must adapt to them accordingly. Nowadays, content marketing has moved to AI, AR, VR, vlogs, and podcasts.

Using new technologies improves user experience and resolves concerns they may have regarding a new service or product. To consider new ways of adopting the latest technologies, assess your competitors to check what they are using. It will give you a fair idea of what you should do.

17. Turn Your Attention To Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging is fast becoming a notable aspect of content marketing. A lot of brands are now approaching experts, influencers, and writing professionals for tips, experiences, and advice in a specific field. Businesses are even asking their own marketers to guest blog on other websites.

18. Personalize Your Content Marketing

There is a high chance that individuals scrolling through their social media will find information about a new product launch uninteresting. This is because they are tired of being sold to. Now, you may think how are you supposed to sell your products and services? We have an answer to your predicament.

You must try to showcase how your product or service adds value to the lives of your customers. To achieve something like this, personalize the way people experience your marketing. Provide tricks, tips, DIY tutorials, and how-to guides that can help your audience. This will help build a connection between your business and your customers.

19. Create Evergreen Content

Make sure to produce evergreen content for your site. This type of content must contain information that will always hold relevance. When you have evergreen content, you give a reason to your potential customers to check your site all year round.

Some evergreen content ideas include:

• How-to-Choose Guide
• Beginner’s Guide
• Buying Guide
• How-to-Make Guide

20. Increase Engagement on LinkedIn

LinkedIn provides better opportunities for businesses to increase their organic reach than Facebook.

To make your content viral on LinkedIn, make sure it is informative and impactful. Also, instead of sharing your blog's link, repost your blog content as an article on LinkedIn.

21. Email Promotion

An effective distribution channel, email marketing is known to bring traffic and leads to a site. To use email marketing for the growth of your business, you can send a monthly or weekly newsletter to your subscribers. Put fresh content in it to engage the reader. Your newsletter should also follow a mobile-friendly format as a majority of people check their emails on their mobiles. Do not forget to write eye-catchy headlines and subject lines for your newsletter and use videos and images wherever applicable.

22. Concentrate on Your Headlines

Put a considerable amount of thought into creating your headlines. Your headlines can impact how well your content performs.

Let's discuss some tips that will help you write attractive headlines:

• Use digits
• Ask questions
• Write different versions and read them out loud to see which one works
• Include the problem or the product
• Choose the most important benefit and include it prominently

23. Create Data-Driven Content

The sales and marketing team have so much data available to them. Thanks to this data, you can produce data-driven content that will appeal to your target customer. Use customer data for planning content for each stage of your buyer journey.

Note: When you dedicate time to analyze your collected data, you save a lot of time and become aware of what your buyers need. By doing so, you can create content that your audience will not overlook.

24. Share Your User's Story

Ever wondered who the best salespersons for your products are? They are the people who have used them. That's why we recommend that you put testimonials on your landing page. Doing so will help a majority of people feel confident about purchasing your product. They would know that people have tried your product and they have liked it.

25. Invest in Learning About Your Target Customer

Content marketing will continue to give high ROI if you put your time and effort into thoroughly understanding your target audience. For this, you need to consistently upgrade your skills and knowledge. Now, you may think how can you do that?

In this day and age, there are so many affordable and effective knowledge resources available. Use these resources to develop useful skills and gain valuable knowledge that will eventually help in the growth of your business.

26. Always Be Ready For A Change

As the content marketing and business world continue to evolve, your business should remain viable. For instance, you should be thoroughly aware of Google's algorithm updates, as doing so will help generate sufficient search traffic.

In case you notice that you are not getting satisfactory results, it is time for a change. Your goal is to satisfy your target audience and for that, you need to adjust and be flexible. The ideal way to stay competitive is to work with the most recent information.

Note: Look for ways in which you can keep up with the ever-changing nature of content marketing. Take a content marketing course or stay abreast of the current trends.

27. Target Gen Z and Millenials with Adaptive Content

If Gen Z and millennials comprise a considerable portion of your target audience, make sure you produce content keeping their needs in mind. Both of these groups have high expectations for how brands use technology. Also, they highly value the experience they have with a business.

A way to target both Gen Z and millennials is through adaptive content. This type of content supports meaningful interactions across every channel. It offers a personalized experience. For instance, you can suggest content based on their previous interactions with your business.

28. Offer Free Tools That Can Address Your Customer's Pain Points

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Are there any common problems your customer may have?
2. Is there a free tool you can provide them to help resolve them?

When you offer free tools that are relevant to your business, you can attract high-quality traffic to your website and gain more customers.

29. Make Your Product Shareworthy

If people tell their friends about your product, then more people are likely to buy it. So, think outside the box and look at ways to make your product more shareworthy. For example, take a look at Coca-Cola's Share a Coke campaign. They put people's names on Coke bottles to give a personalized experience to their target audience. The brand then encouraged individuals to share a Coke with their friends, take a picture, and post it with the hashtag #ShareaCoke.

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The campaign resulted in 235,000 tweets with the hashtag. They sold 150 million+ Coke bottles, too.

30. Support a Social Cause

A lot of brands avoid taking this route. Although, getting behind a social cause can reap significant results for businesses.

The two groups that are the most vocal on social media platforms are Generation Z and millennials. There is a high chance that they will align themselves with a business that supports a social cause. So, if you want to target younger generations, this is one of the most effective contents marketing tactics to try. With this tactic, you can create real change and also expand your customer base.

Conclusion

These 30 content marketing tactics will help you become more efficient in the way you produce content and help you reach more customers. Just concentrate on creating amazing content and use these content marketing tactics to grow your brand. Do make it a point to test these tactics to check which ones are successful in engaging your audience as not every tactic is going to suit your brand.

Quick Note: Trying different content marketing tactics is important for the growth of your business. However, it is equally important for your business to have an SEO-friendly website. Creating an SEO-friendly, professional niche-based website can take a lot of time. With the DashClicks' agency website tool, you can create an SEO-friendly, custom-branded agency website in just a few seconds.