Once upon a time, SEO was made up of keyword stuffing your website content and building as many backlinks as possible. Those days are over, and whether we like it or not, SEO is now well and truly is about the long game.

But what does this mean for SEO-ers and small business marketers looking to improve their SERP positions? In simple terms, successful SEO practices must centralize around three factors: quality, consistency, and relevance. One aspect of SEO that can tick all of these boxes is content marketing. The phrase ‘content marketing’ has become a bit of a buzzword in the world of SEO – but what is it, is it really that important, and should you have a content marketing strategy in place? We’ll explore everything about it in this article to determine whether or not content marketing really is the future of SEO.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the process of creating high-quality, valuable, and relevant content that will drive traffic to your website, raise brand awareness and eventually convert into sales. The aim of content marketing shouldn’t be to just create a stream of content that you push down people’s throats. Instead, you should focus on creating a content marketing strategy that’s informative and engaging and made up of content that your audience actively wants to consume (relevance!)

Content marketing should offer value to your target audience, whether that’s by answering a question or providing additional information or inspiration. Behind every piece of content should be a clear purpose and aim for how you want your audience to react to it (quality!)

The type of content you create as part of your content marketing strategy can be anything from blog posts to eBooks and infographics, downloadable guides or even videos, graphics, and animations. Content marketing should empower your audience with regular information, positioning you as an authoritative and reliable voice in your industry (consistency!)

How Does Content Marketing Impact SEO?

High quality and relevant content are major aspects of a successful SEO strategy. It’s all well and good having a high number of visitors to your website, but without quality content, they aren’t going to stick around for very long. Aside from the obvious waste of time associated with attracting people to your site that don’t stick around, users that exit your site quickly will increase your website’s bounce rate. In turn, this metric will communicate to Google that your site isn’t retaining visitors and therefore isn’t high quality or relevant for the user’s search terms.

Content marketing is a means of producing high-quality, relevant content that Google can judge and rank well for your target search terms. This also gives you the opportunity to optimize your content with the keywords you’re targeting so that when Google crawls your website, its bots know exactly which search results you should be appearing in.

Additionally, content marketing can also support your backlink strategy. If you have high-quality, informative, and engaging content, then other users and websites are more likely to share your content and link to it on their own site. Having a strong backlink profile is essential if you want to climb to the top of Google’s rankings.

What Does Google Have to Say?

Google loves quality and relevant content. In fact, there’s probably nothing it loves more. Relevant and quality content is at the core of many of Google’s key ranking factors.

When the search engine first began ranking websites, it was all about how many backlinks were pointing to it and how many times a web page featured a keyword. Now, however, the search engine will only rank a website if the content matches the user’s search intent (i.e., what content is the user looking for when they make a search?)

Many of Google’s updates have been focused around content – such as the Bert update back in 2019. Bert focused on weeding out poor-quality content and understanding the use of natural language to better understand search queries. The Bert update was the culmination of Google’s transition away from websites made up of spammy links and dodgy SEO tactics to instead focus on websites that provide the very best content for users.

Content Marketing Tactics

So, now you’ve got an understanding of why content marketing is so important, how can you begin to implement it? Some key content marketing tactics include:

Understand your audience and what they’re looking for – The very first thing you need to do when implementing a content marketing strategy is to understand your audience and the type of content they’re looking for. You need to know how they behave online and what content they consume.

Create responsive content – Make sure all of the content you create is responsive. Users should be able to access it just as well on a mobile device as a desktop. Think carefully about how things such as downloadable eBooks and videos will appear on mobile.

Create content worth linking to – Your content should be good enough that people actively want to share it and link to it. Think about what you can add to your content that will make it unique and stand out from the crowd.

Share your content – How will anybody know to link to your content if they don’t know it’s there? Always remember to share your content on your social media and other marketing channels. You can even send your content directly to the people and businesses who you think would find it beneficial.

Check out the competition – Take a look at what the top-ranking content is for your target keywords and see if you can create something even better.

How Can We Help with Your Content Marketing Strategy?

The team of experts at JOeve Marketing has extensive experience in helping brands of all shapes and sizes with their content marketing strategy. We work with organizational stakeholders to understand their niche product/service offering and their end-users, to ensure that content is tailored to attract their target audience.

A version of this article was first published on the DAN