Two common trends in digital marketing are SEO and content marketing. Content marketing aims convert visitors into leads by encouraging people to leave their names, email addresses or other contact information.
However, without web traffic it is difficult to convert leads because you will have nothing to convert. Visits are the backbone of this type of strategy and without them, even if your conversion rate is high or your loyalty program is excellent, you won't get the results you're looking for.
The biggest source of global web traffic is Google. Therefore, if you want to increase traffic to your site, you have increase your ranking on the SERPs (search engine results pages) and position yourself well.
The average person assumes that results on the first page of Google are of good quality. Therefore, if your page appears there, this will make a positive first impression. From there, you can build on that positive impression by having quality content on your website.
The one downside with this is that you can have a high bounce rate. Many of the people who enter your site through Google results tend to leave once they have read what they were looking for. But, this is where a good content strategy can be implemented to generate leads to ensure that that does not happen.
Content marketing is one of the most important and effective strategies for successful SEO. A strategy based on content marketing helps increase brand awareness and therefore, more and more companies are beginning to implement these types of strategies to improve their SEO.
To get the best results from your content marketing strategy, here are some tips to get you off to a great start!
1. Multiply web traffic: the first benefit of creating content with SEO in mind is an increase in web traffic. This can take a website that received 100-150 visitors a day to one that receives more than 1,000 in a short period of time.
2. Discover trends in your industry: if you want to convert traffic into leads, you must stay current just repeat what others have been saying for months. Identify trends and emerging queries over time by analyzing keywords and searches.
3. Organize your website in a traceable way: a poorly organized website makes navigation difficult for the user and can cause them to leave quickly. To avoid this, structure your website in a clear, clean way. Get rid of unnecessary sections, graphics, etc. as this will make it easier for Google to "crawl" your site and understand what you have to offer.
4. Create an editorial calendar: content creation is key in SEO content creation but sometimes it may be difficult to choose topics to post about. Thanks to keyword analysis and tracking trends, you can develop an editorial calendar with topics that are current and therefore generate more interaction and interest from your audience.
5. Avoid possible penalties: if you get on Google's bad side, they can make you disappear from the search results or decrease your ranking so that you will be very difficult to find online. Having an SEO specialist on your team can keeps this from happening. SEO is a vital discipline within content marketing and if you're not careful you could be losing visitors who could convert into leads and thereby increase your sales.
6. Give more visibility to your content: though this seems obvious, not all brands manage to reach their target audience with their content. And achieving good visibility is key to better SEO positioning so it's important to share your content on different channels. To do this, make sure your brand has profiles on all (relevant) social networks as this will increase the visibility of the content you share on them.
7. Use engaging titles and descriptions: another basic SEO tip is to use descriptive, catchy titles and fill in meta descriptions for the content you create. This description should be a brief summary of what is in the text. Search engines, such as Google, are very sensitive to this kind of description and show it in their results. Therefore, it is an excellent tool to show the reader a bit of what they can expect to find in the content and encourage them to click on it.
8. Choose your keywords wisely: keywords are essential for search engines like Google as they can make your content stand out. For this reason, choosing the right keywords is an essential part of an SEO content marketing strategy. Tools like Google Adwords can help you to select keywords with the highest search volume and relevance, according to the subject or audience that you are trying to reach with your content.
Have you included guest blogging in your content marketing strategy? Although this technique get overlooked, publishing articles as a guest author is a fantastic way to improve your SEO and boost your influence in your industry.
If you want to improve your brand awareness and perception among consumers, there is no better way than to surround yourself with experts. Authority and knowledge generate trust, especially if you are targeting millennials, a generation that tends to be rather skeptical of more traditional forms of marketing.
So how can you get the members of your team to show their expertise? That’s right: by publishing articles on the best blogs in your industry. If, on top of this, you are able to get your article as a guest author on the top results for keywords related to your industry, you will attract and influence countless users.
That being said, prepare yourself for hard work. Just as in any other part of digital marketing, there is high competition when it comes to using this technique. You will have to show your expertise in a high quality and useful way.
Improvements in your SEO are a marvelous side effect of guest blogging strategies. If you are up to date on the latest SEO trends, you will surely know that search engine algorithms evolve constantly and as they change, so do the guidelines on how to improve positioning. As search engines become more and more sophisticated, organic and natural positioning becomes much more useful than filling a post to the brim with a given keyword. What’s more, results are becoming much more personal and adapted for each individual user.
As you most likely already know, posting as a guest blogger on a third party blog generates a direct link from their website to yours, making it a vital part of any search engine optimization strategy.
Part of any content marketing strategy is to reach out to as large an audience as possible, provided they fit the criteria you defined when creating your buyer persona.
Thanks to guest posts, you can reach out to an audience that goes beyond your own readers. If your publish in the right places, your brand’s messages can go much further.
For this strategy to work however, it is key to choose the right blogs. Not only should they have lots of readers, but also these readers need to be the right audience for your brand. If you take some time to identify your industry’s influencers, you can find the right places for your post. You job now is to make sure you create content your followers will find useful, engaging, and inspiring.
Last but not least, one of the biggest benefits of guest posting is that it's an excellent way to do some quality networking and any business needs to network. Whether you are a small local business or a global ecommerce, creating a community is essential for your company to grow and prosper. When getting in touch with a colleague or an influencer to publish on their blog, you are showing them that they have earned your professional respect.
To make the most of all the networking opportunities offered by invited blogging, program updates into your social media accounts thanking them on the day your article is published. This way, not only will you be showing your appreciation and good manners, but you will also be returning the favor by introducing them to your audience. Another option is to open your blog up for collaborations as well.
If you nurture these relationships with other blogs, over time you will build up a contact network from which very interesting and valuable opportunities for your brand can show up.
