Four Ways to Use Content Marketing to Boost SEO…
We live in the age of online content marketing, and even if you’re not familiar with the term you may be engaged in it without knowing. Content marketing, as the name suggests, involves the creation and distribution of content for the purpose of marketing your company to prospective customers.
Rather than going for the hard sell and pushing advertising messages down their throats and out their ears, content marketing takes a subtler approach to customer relations. It seeks to provide value and generate interest, resulting in goodwill towards your brand and enabling you to build long-term relationships with your customers. It can also at the same time improve your position within the search rankings. Here are a few simple ways in which you can leverage content marketing to bolster your SEO efforts and generate extra interest in your website.
1 – Blog regularly
Blogging should be at the heart of your content marketing strategy. Your own blog is a perfect channel for outputting all manner of content, from news and topical discussion to informative features. A regularly updated blog can give people a reason to come back to your site, and can increase the chances of it being discovered by new customers. The search engines also favour websites with frequently updated content, particularly if it naturally attracts links and shares.
2 – Beef up your social media presence
Choose the social network(s) that work for you, whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest or another, and have at it. Having a consistent and lively social personality online can give your brand extra depth, and ‘social signals’ (‘likes’, shares etc) are starting to have a growing influence on SEO. A word of warning, though – consider carefully what you post, even in light-hearted threads, and never, ever get involved in ‘flame wars’ or online arguments, no matter how petty or unconnected to your business you may think they are.
3 – Create whitepapers
This kind of in-depth content generally requires a substantial investment of time and/or money, but if your whitepaper offers fresh and distinctive information it may be widely read and shared.
4 – Tell people ‘how to’
Sometimes the most effective content marketing is that which tells readers how to solve a common problem or undertake a specific task. As well as pulling in additional traffic to your site, well-written ‘how to’ content may be linked to by other respected sites in your sector – good news for your SEO efforts.
