Off Page SEO: Why Content Marketing is Important for SEO?

 What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing involves creating and distributing content that is relevant to a business’s audience to help educate and inform customers. Content marketing does not include sales pitches or marketing gimmicks, it’s intended for building trust and authority in the industry. An effective content marketing strategy will help improve SEO and increase inbound traffic and leads (Content Marketing Institute, 2021). Figure 1 below illustrates some interesting statistics on the benefits of content marketing.

Figure 1: Content Marketing Statistics (Petrova, 2020)

By producing and publishing new and fresh content that is relevant to your target audience, you can build trust and authority among your customers and leads. This content can help improve conversions by providing educational information to the audience in the form of articles, videos, infographics, webinars, and blog posts (Sinha, 2019).

Creating an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Creating a content strategy is an important first step. A long-term plan helps to maximize the benefits of content marketing. The following are some key steps to creating a content marketing strategy (Petrova, 2020).    

1. Perform an audit on existing content. Analyze your content to determine what content worked best and evaluate what may need improved.
2. Establish the content marketing goals and KPI’s to measure.
3. Define the target audience, create buyer personas and determine the audience’s needs and pain points. Establish the solutions your product or service can provide.
4. Create an editorial plan, choose topics and implement a content calendar.
5. Determine a content production plan using a customer journey map. Include different types of content (videos, infographics, webinars, PDF manuals, blog posts, etc.)
6. Determine/plan best methods for content distribution.
7. Evaluate the content performance and make adjustments as necessary.

Once an effective content marketing plan has been established and content has been created, off-page SEO tactics can be used to improve search rankings. This includes using the created content to generate more inbound links to your website.

Using Content Marketing to Increase Backlinks & Improve SEO

Link building is a process that involves increasing the number of quality inbound links back to your website. This process is a great strategy for improving search engine rankings, but it’s important to focus on quality over quantity inbound links. Fleischner writes in his book, SEO Made Simple, that quality links are ones that come from websites with the following attributes (Fleishner, 2020):

•          The website ranks higher or equal to your website
•          The content on the website aligns with the industry where you conduct business
•          The website has been around for several years
•          The website also has several quality inbound links

Content marketing is an effective way to increase these quality inbound links. When other websites link back to your content that will influence and potentially improve search rankings (Fleischner, 2020).

 Tactics to Increase Backlinks Using Content Marketing

Guest Blogging: By writing articles or guest blogging for other websites that share content related to your business a business can increase their credibility and drive relevant traffic to their website. Great places to start guest blogging could be trade publication websites or trade groups and associations. After choosing a website, it is also important to research the audience to write content that will be of value to them (Desai, 2021). When a guest blog post has been submitted and accepted, the value for inbound links comes from the about the author section. In this area is where an embedded link can be created to link back the business’s website (Fleischner, 2020).

Use Social Media to Share Content: Once quality, relevant content such as blog posts, webinars, or even how-to videos are created the content needs distributed to reach the audience. Although Google has indicated that no relations exists between social media and search ranking, social media is a great way to increase reach. As the content gets shared over and over again, this could indirectly help improve the SEO. Additionally, the larger the audience the more chance of getting inbound links to the content.

Create Newsworthy Industry Content: When creating industry related content, do so in a journalistic way by sharing studies, reports, or surveys and pitch it to the media for publication. Choosing an industry related media publication would be a great place to start. This will help increase the amount of quality backlinks to the content (Milligan, n.d.).

What to Avoid when Using Content for Inbound Links

After creating great content it could be tempting to go after as many link building opportunities as possible, but this could actually hurt a business’s SEO efforts. Google’s algorithm will actually punish websites that have a large amount of links from low-quality sites. Make sure to avoid a strategy that focuses on quantity over quality and ensure that the backlinks to the content are from high quality sites (Perry, n.d)

It is also important to avoid excess link exchanges between two domains. When content is shared it’s often common for the other website to ask for a reciprocal link, while this is common and doing so on certain occasions is okay. Excessive “if you link to me, I’ll link to you” behavior should be avoided. Google will penalize if an unnatural number of links between two domains exists (Perry, n.d).

References

Content Marketing Institute. (2021, August 23). What is content marketing? Content Marketing Institute. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/.

Desai, P. (2021, January 28). 6 proven link building strategies using content marketing that drives backlinks. Digital Agency Network. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://digitalagencynetwork.com/6-proven-link-building-strategies-using-content-marketing-that-drives-backlinks/.

Fleischner, M. H. (2020). Seo made simple: Insider secrets for driving more traffic to your website. Independently published.

Milligan, A. (n.d.). The 14 most important benefits of content marketing. The 14 Most Important Benefits of Content Marketing. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://blog.frac.tl/benefits-of-content-marketing.

Perry, G. (n.d.). The do's and don'ts of link building. Investis Digital. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://www.investisdigital.com/blog/link-building/the-dos-and-donts.

Petrova, A. (n.d.). The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing Strategy. Semrush Blog. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-marketing-strategy-guide/.

Sinha, N. (2019, February 15). Why Content Marketing is Vital for Your Brand in 2019. Customerthink. Retrieved September 22, 2021, from https://customerthink.com/why-content-marketing-is-vital-for-your-brand-in-2019/.