Chances are, you’ve heard the notion (or perhaps you’ve read it on this blog) that ‘content is king’ when it comes to improving your organic reach and driving more traffic to your website. However, when quoting this marketing mantra, people tend to forget content’s partner in crime – SEO.
If content is king, then so is Search Engine Optimisation. While the world of SEO, content marketing and digital content creation is perpetually changing, there is one thing that stays the same, and that is that SEO and content simply work better when aligned.
Furthermore, when dealing with SEO, it’s important you keep up to date with Google’s latest updates, making sure your content is relevant to not only your target audience, but search engines too. This is where having a content strategy comes in handy. I have no doubt you’ve put lot of time and energy into creating valuable content – content you want your buyers to be able to easily find. But how do you make it easy for them to find? By working within the realms of SEO.
As SEO best practices are constantly changing, here’s a little recap on how it works today. Today’s best practice for SEO is the ‘topic cluster model’, which you can read more about here. Essentially, the topic cluster model ensures you are telling Google that your website is an authority on the particular topics you write content about, and therefore should rank accordingly for the keywords that relate to those topics. The purpose of this article is to share with you three compelling reasons why SEO needs to be part of your content strategy.
1. Superior Organic Reach
Nobody creates content just for the sake of it, right? You create content because you want to inform, educate and entertain your customers and prospects. However, in today’s overly saturated digital landscape, it can be hard to make yourself heard above all the noise. Social media and email marketing are great when it comes to ensuring your audience actually sees your content, but what about the people within your target audience who are actively looking for the type of content you’re publishing, but don’t know your brand exists? This is where SEO comes in. You need to optimise your content for search engines to make sure people searching online are more likely to find and connect with your business. Implementing the topic cluster model is one of the most effective ways to optimise your content and significantly improve your organic reach.
2. Attract The Right Audience
It’s all well and good to get extra eye-balls on your content, but if it’s the wrong people reading your content, even a thousand views of your blog post isn’t going to get you more sales. While SEO definitely helps make your content more visible, you want to make sure it’s visible to the right audience – that is, people who would actually be interested in buying what you’re selling. How do you make sure your content is being read by the right people? To begin with, it’s vital you have some clearly defined buyer personas. This will help you align your content to what your buyers are looking for by helping you choose the right keywords and topics to cover when creating content.
3. Helps You Convert More Leads into Customers
Creating buyer personas and optimising your content for keywords and topics buyers are looking for doesn’t just mean they’ll have an easier time finding you online. It also means the content is going to be interesting and relevant to where they are in the buying process. By creating and publishing relevant and helpful content (ensuring it is quality content), you will greatly increase the number of people who know about your brand, which will therefore increase your chances of generating more leads and converting those leads into customers.
To Conclude …
SEO is an important part of your content strategy because it helps with brand awareness, traffic, leads and customers. Optimsing your content for keywords your buyers use will do more than just boost your organic search results, it will ensure the content you're publishing is of interest and value to your buyers. This means they are more likely to click on the search result, visit your website and find content that is relevant to them. Having the right content on your site will boost conversions driving more customers and revenue for your organisation.
