If you have a basic understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), then you likely know the basics of targeted keywords, meta data, backlinking, and headers galore. But did you also know that search engines love to read long-form content almost as much as your website users do?
In fact, there’s no better way to keep users and Google’s crawlers happy and coming back to your site than with high-quality, relevant content that’s consistent, and ongoing. Additionally, because search engines follow user experience statistics like click conversions and low page bounce rates, most crawlers can identify when you’re writing to satisfy search engines before your users. With the rise of AI-generated content, it’s more important than ever that your content still satisfies human readers first versus hitting all your SEO goals.
A thoughtful SEO content marketing strategy:
- Gets your primary message across to more users
- Allows users to find what they need, when they need it
- Solves a common problem your users
It also builds your brand persona to differentiate you from competitors, so you connect with more customers on a more personal level.
What is Content Marketing?
Now that you know why content marketing is important, let’s get into how to optimize your website pages so you can boost your organic search engine rankings in 2023.
First, Some Content Marketing Examples:
- Blogging
- Videos
- Social Media
- Landing pages
- Pillar Articles
- Website Content
- Email Marketing
- Infographics
- E-books
- And Much More!
The goal of a great SEO content marketing strategy is to use these different channels and marketing collateral together to engage target audiences and provide better value to their search queries.
Think about the snippets you see when you Google “how to change my car’s oil” or “how long do I need to boil chicken?” Google’s crawlers will search high and low for the best quality content on the internet to answer this question.
Usually, a snippet of the most relevant answer will appear at the top of your search results page with the exact information you’re looking for. This snippet will also feature a link to the source of the info. And guess where the majority of answers to search queries come from?
Your business’ blog page.
Do I Really Need to Use Blog Marketing?
We get this question a lot. And our answer is always the same: absolutely!
Blog marketing is a simple way to keep your website updated with fresh content that search engines like Google can crawl and index. This way, more people can find you and get what they need to solve a problem they have. It also provides an effective platform to naturally incorporate targeted keywords or long-tail keywords, which can improve organic search engine rankings!
There are other benefits of blogging for your business, including:
- Building a unique brand voice.
- Connecting customers to your brand messaging.
- Providing valuable insights about your brand/industry.
- Positioning you as a thought leader.
- Generating new leads.
- Making you the “go-to” for questions related to your industry.
How Google Updates Affect Blogging
Google’s regular algorithm updates often reveal how pages that feature thin content and heavily rely on backlinks for site rankings experience a decline in rankings. Thin content is considered useless copy with a minimal word count, poor readability, and no original insight to the topic in question (Content Marketing Institute).
The impact doesn’t just come from poorly written blogs, either; web pages that feature thin content also hurt your organic search engine rankings. So, what can we take away from this information?
To Rank Better, Your Content Must:
- Provide value to the reader
- Be grammatically correct
- Include headers and bullets to help break up the text
- Feature helpful resources
- Answer the question your customers are searching for
Additionally, you might consider adding to your SEO content marketing strategy to keep up with these 2023 content marketing trends:
- Prioritize natural language and include more questions as keywords to optimize for conversational search queries
- Include more effective internal linking to remind search engines of all your great site-wide content
- Refresh older content or blog marketing to keep your content useful and relevant to your users (and the search engines that index it)
- Create content that remains important and helpful to human users who will want to share it with others
Partner with Brandography for a Quality SEO Content Marketing Strategy
Companies who use a smart SEO content marketing strategy have seen an increase in nearly every relevant statistic for marketers, from generating leads to educating the audience, to building loyalty with existing clients or customers (Ahrefs.com). Therefore, the question shouldn’t be, “Do I need content marketing?” but “How do I expand my content marketing efforts further?”
We hope this article has helped you begin to answer that second question. If you still need help with any aspect of boosting your organic search engine rankings with content strategy, Brandography has the experts you need. Our content marketing agency in Minneapolis is skilled in everything from SEO optimization to blog marketing, and we’d love to help you capitalize on the latest best practices to increase your conversions, please your customers, and become the top-ranked choice for users and search engines alike.
