SEO and Content Marketing: Creating Effective Content

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Forbes Books author content

Search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing are two different though integral components used to enhance user experience and build credibility through content. As you develop a content marketing strategy, it’s important to consider how to best leverage SEO to grow your business. 

What is SEO?

SEO refers to a specific set of actions, both on the front and back end, that optimize a website for search engines. This allows your webpages, blogs, landing pages, and forms to be found by users searching on Google, or an alternative search engine.

There are four areas of SEO, technical, local, on-page, and off-page. When combined, your website has a better chance of appearing for more related search queries. Your content on your website, when aligned with SEO best practices, can help you grow brand awareness, visibility, and authority.

What is Content Marketing?

Successful content marketing uses content to enhance brand awareness and drive more traffic — and potential leads — to your website.

Most content marketing strategy involves creating and/or promoting content across a variety of destinations and assets that make up your digital footprint, such as:

    • Landing pages
    • Blog posts
    • Social platforms
    • Whitepapers
    • Podcasts
    • Case studies

Your blog and web pages should be a priority as you develop your content calendar. It’s best for you when a potential customer lands on your website directly.

This allows the reader to engage with your service pages and even fill out a form. This is accomplished with greater ease on your owned platform — as compared to third-party or “rented” platforms, such as social media. Further, you will have more control over the SEO execution on your owned environment.

The Role of SEO in Content Marketing

Great writing is essential for effective content marketing. But it must incorporate SEO to see a satisfactory increase in your organic traffic.

This includes implementing:

  • Keyword research
  • Readability and UX practices
  • On-page SEO optimizations
  • Linking strategy
  • Content refreshes
  • Content optimization
  • A regular posting cadence

1. How to Use Keyword Research for Content Marketing

Semrush Keyword Overview Tool

Half of the battle for effective content creation is knowing what your target audience wants to hear or learn about. Your audience’s interests shouldn’t be a mystery to you. Keyword research should be part of every optimized blog or landing page you write.

For the best results, use a leading SEO platform, such as Semrush or Ahrefs. These platforms offer keyword research tools, allowing you to enter phrases related to your topics. Explore data on their difficulty level, global search volume, related keywords, and more.

This enables you to see if the topic is viable. Ideally, you want to find a few related keywords that have a decent amount of traffic with a medium to low difficulty level. This gives you a greater chance of ranking well for these keywords.

Now that you have your keywords, you’ll want to make sure you implement them naturally throughout your content.

Also, make sure that it is in the following places:

  • H1 (first header or title of your post)
  • Meta description
  • Within the first 100 words of your post
  • Other headers as appropriate

When you combine this key rule of SEO with your copy, you’re optimizing your content marketing strategy to get the most out of each post or landing page.

2. Readability and UX Best Practices

Consider the following example. You’ve posted a blog and filled it with your experience. Time passes and it still doesn’t perform as you thought it would.

You have a ton to share, but the search engines don’t seem to eat it up like you thought. You crafted your content with care, but it doesn’t even pull up on the first few pages.

As most writers can attest, this is a common phenomenon. Awareness of digital best practices and reader habits can help you restructure your content so readers don’t bounce off the page after a few seconds.

A 2022 study from Hootsuite and We Are Social found that the average internet user between 16 and 64 spends nearly 7 hours a day online. People have a limitless amount of content at their fingertips. With this comes intense competition for a user’s attention and difficulty keeping it.

If your article is dense, hard to read, or visually unappealing, your traffic will probably bounce before they get to your second paragraph. This is bad for your brand and bad for your business.

Consider implementing the following changes for a better user experience for your readers:

  • Short paragraphs, have plenty of whitespace
  • Less complex sentences
  • 6-8th grade reading level, on average
  • Frequent headers
  • Colorful CTA buttons
  • Larger font, no smaller than 16px for body copy

3. On-page SEO Optimization

Example of Featured Snippet in Google

Besides what we’ve already covered in this post, there are more advanced on-page SEO optimizations that can boost your content in search. 

If you’re looking to strengthen the SEO of your content, implement the following:

  • Original images: Stock imagery doesn’t hold as much value as original images. 
  • Image optimization: Consider linking images, as appropriate. Specifying what type of link it is (no-follow, do-follow, etc. Also, include alt text, and optimize the size for faster page-load speeds.
  • Optimize for featured snippets: If you’re already ranking on the first page, you have a chance of winning the coveted featured snippet spot. This will increase your CTR and visibility. Emulate what Google is already ranking for the keyword you’re after for a greater chance. 
  • Comprehensive Content: In general, comprehensive content outperforms short-form content. This will vary depending on the topic or the keywords you’re targeting. Yet, longer-form content provides the user an in-depth understanding of the topic at hand. 

4. Backlinks and Your Content

Another critical SEO component of your content strategy should include links. When you create a winning piece of content, you will likely gain backlinks from other websites.

The more backlinks you gain, the more your site is seen as an authority. The best way to gain backlinks is by creating content that people want to link to, though backlink campaigns may help as well.

Interlinks, however, are entirely within your control. As you craft the content, consider what other content would help expand the topic further or help the reader move through the buyer’s journey.

Each page you create has a level of difficulty based on its subject. If your blog is detailed and aimed at an informed audience, you could consider linking to a whitepaper or case study. If the blog you’re writing is for someone with minimal prior knowledge, link them to a post that moves them a step deeper.

By naturally hyperlinking relevant content you help your audience understand the topic, or your services, in greater depth. This increases your chances of converting the lead and growing your customer base.

5. Refresh, Don’t Duplicate

Avoid duplicating your content throughout your site. As much as possible, try not to reuse keywords for different pages. This way, your internal copy won’t compete with each other on the search engines. This is a precedent referred to as keyword cannibalization.

However, you will want to refresh your content as it loses relevance, loses keyword positions, or ages. Most likely, you have a trove of existing content on your site. This can be repurposed and refreshed to bring new traffic to your site — with minimal hassle required.

You might implement a calendar of refreshed content. This will keep you accountable to make the most of your existing content and help keep your website fresh, relevant, and optimized.

6. Establish a Content Optimization Cadence

Part of an effective content marketing strategy is an established content calendar. Publishing regularly will help you grow your authority, audience, and increase your organic traffic.

Create an integrated editorial calendar that combines all content efforts on your team. This may include social media content, blogs, email promos, etc. This will help keep your content aligned and can give social media teams insight into what blogs they can feature on your social channels.

Also remember to include copy refreshes in your calendar. This will help you update and optimize your content regularly to make the most of your existing content.

Your content calendar can live anywhere from a complex management system to a basic Google sheet. How you choose to manage your content calendar is entirely up to you. Yet, a content calendar is essential to continued success for your content strategy. It will provide the clarity needed to execute your strategy well.

7. Conduct Striking Distance Optimization

When creating your content strategy, don’t forget to make use of low hanging fruit. Conduct striking distance optimizations to make the most out of your existing content. To do this, evaluate what pages are performing well, but not as well as you’d like.

These will be the keywords on the second or third page of search. It may also be pages that have recently slipped in their ranking.

After creating this list, add these pages to your content calendar and begin optimizing the content. Conduct research on the top articles for your target keyword and optimize your copy accordingly.

Consider the following factors:

  • Increasing/decreasing word count
  • Optimizing the H1
  • Adding semantically related keywords
  • Hyperlinking relevant sources

Republish the content and track the results in Google Analytics to monitor performance.

Grow Your Organic Traffic With SEO

Grow your organic traffic and digital presence with SEO best practices and magnify the impact of your content. Refresh and leverage your existing content across your website and social channels for even greater impact. Learn how Forbes Books can enhance your digital media and engagement and support your brand authority.

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Lissie Hoover Headshot

Lissie Kidd

Sr. Marketing Copywriter

Lissie Kidd is a Sr. Copywriter with several hundred articles in her portfolio and even more edited and published under her supervision. Lissie holds a MA in Communications from Grand…

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