Content is at the crux of being successful in both SEO and your business credibility. When you are able to effectively communicate what you know about your industry your potential client views your expertise as consumer confidence in you as a business. Google also sees this confidence and your organic traffic is increased by placing you in more places in search engines. Content marketing helps you stay relevant and establish authority by assessing what the customer is thinking and providing descriptive answers. If you are posting content and your competition is not you will be light years ahead.

How does Content Marketing Benefit Your SEO?

Content Marketing Tips

You can generate a higher placement in search engines. The more quality content you produce, the more likelihood of improving your ranking on SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This is how the algorithm works. What makes content quality? First, longer content does tend to perform better BUT there is not a magic number you should be shooting for. Your goal should be to cover the topic better than anyone else does, it’s that simple. If it takes 500 words to do then great but, it might also take 2,000 words to do that. It all depends on what is out there right now. Google is searching for the most authoritative webpage on the query that is presented in searches. Thoroughly covering a topic and also linking to related content on your website makes you authoritative in search engine algorithms on the subject and therefore a higher placement. They want to help the end-user, and you have helped them by being knowledgeable on the subject.

Another benefit is that it allows you naturally stay competitive with knowledge. Creating content that answers the questions that people have about buying your product or service allows them to see that you are knowledgeable and trying to help. Today’s consumer wants to be informed before they buy and there are constant questions that your sales reps, technicians, marketing teams, front office employees and more that get asked all the time. Provide the resources on your website so you can stop recreating the wheel every time someone asks.

Also, you can improve the content in your emails. If you are not using email to communicate to both existing clients and future clients then you are missing out on building relationships with them. You should at absolutely bare minimum have one newsletter a month going out that has blogs in them that you have written for the past month. Helping them be more informed about questions that would lead them to need your product or services. If you are getting to this point, and you haven’t signed up for our newsletter, well now’s your chance!

How is Content Marketing Different Than SEO?

We consider content marketing a subset of SEO. As we explained in the blog post on what is SEO, SEO has a lot to it and there are a lot of what seems like little things that are adding up to having good SEO. But one thing that is arguably the most important with SEO is having good content.

Organizing Content on Your Website For SEO and The Consumer

So Where Do You Start?

The content on your website should be organized correctly to make navigation easier for the user and well search engines too. When you do that you not only help your consumer better understand that you are authoritative on a subject, you help Google know this too, therefore, improve your SEO.

The best way to organize pages would be based on your funnel to purchase. When you layout content on your website in a manner that effectively leads someone down the path of purchase, everyone wins. All this and more plays a role in choosing and optimizing content for your website.

At the beginning of content the funnel, you would be more focused on people who don’t know you. Creating pages with content describing your overall business and what you offer might be your main goal and seems like the easy way to go, but you have to go deeper.  These are sometimes called “structure pages” of the website. After you have structure pages you want to dig deeper down with the “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, and “why”.

Another way to think about this is what are the questions that people would have asked that would lead them to believe that they need your product or service. At this stage, they are not sure THEY NEED YOU yet they just know they need to solve a problem, they Google the problem.

When you are taking the approach of answering the questions someone has about your products or service you will end up including what is called keywords/long-tail keywords in your content. Long-tail keywords are those composed of three to five words. Also, their CTRs (click-through rate) are three to five percent higher than regular searches, according to Smart Insights.

The steps of the AIDA Model

Then the end of the content funnel would be dedicated to sales and why they should choose you. These pages would be ones that have content that would contribute to a transaction, and these customers within this section of the funnel are ones that are not new to your company. They should follow the best practices of a landing page.  There are lots of stages of content in between understanding that they have a problem to solve all the way to you are the answer to their problem.

The funnel of your content should take the AIDA model which is a breakdown of the process of when an individual is purchasing a product or service from your business. Each step leads to the next one.

The first step is Awareness, and you have to consider how to attract the attention of the consumers. The second is Interest. The consumer is aware of want they want, now it is your responsibility to increase their interest level. The third is Desire, and this is where you want the customer’s mindset to go from “I like it” to “I want it”. The final stage is Action, which is the customer completes the purchase of their desired product or service.

You should think of every page as being a landing page. Essentially it is a landing page because that is where someone is at on your journey through your website. When they are on that page, what is the next logical question or questions someone might have about your product or service? There should be internal linking to these questions so that you may bring them down your funnel of purchase. Someone might want to skip ahead through and this is where your structure pages clearly laid out in the navigation will get you there.

How Much Content Should You Have?

Content Marketing Tips

Quality over quantity, do not just be making content to make content. Whatever type of content you are creating, there needs to be a purpose or a message that you are trying to convey. You do not need to waste your and the customer’s time. In most cases, content that is more detailed will take longer to create meaning that it will be considered longer.

Longer content can provide more of an opportunity to rank higher on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) but is not necessary. Your goal should be to clearly define and clearly cover the topic at hand. Hitting a certain amount of words will not gate the fact you did not answer the consumer’s answers more clearly than anyone else.

Review the results page of a question you have, did you answer it better than anyone else? When you are providing high-quality information the end-user will “dwell” or spend more time on your page or website. Dwell time is another content and design ranking factor to search engines because a short dwell time means that a page is lacking in information and considered irrelevant which can have an impact on potential rankings.

Wrap-Up

Creating your own content and consistently doing so will help enhance your SEO. No matter the part of the funnel you are creating content for, understanding that the content should be as high-quality as you can make it is very important. This establishes credibility and will help you rank higher. The content on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) should be able to catch a customer’s attention. It should not be bland or since a customer could easily just check out your competitors. That is why optimizing your title tags, meta descriptions, and URL to their fullest will be very valuable.

There are many resources available that help you understand certain factors within your certain industry. Although, utilizing these resources may be costly, but they are definitely an investment worth looking into. Digital.com, a leading independent review website for small business online tools, products, and services, suggests that if you need help with your SEO goals, you should reach out to one of the best SEO agencies in the Indianapolis area.