How do SEO and content come together for an effective marketing strategy?
According to Spilker, the “golden rule” of content marketing is knowing the purpose of your content and establishing goals based on that purpose. Whether you’re looking to improve site traffic, raise awareness or highlight a service offering – knowing the why behind a piece of content and who it is meant for is imperative to driving traffic.
Regardless of your content goals, applying specific strategies for different funnel level audiences is imperative to your content’s ability to ignite engagement.
“Your email newsletter audience is going to be a little bit more engaged, probably a little bit more knowledgeable… so what you send to them…should be different than your top-of-the-funnel or even middle-of-the-funnel [content],” says Spilker. Pushing content for the sake of keyword stuffing is a recipe for disaster, but catering your content to specific needs of your target audience will give you the right ingredients for an effective content marketing strategy.
To cater your content for specific audiences, you need data. Data may initially sound like numbers and spreadsheets that require a tedious attention to detail. However, it doesn’t always or even necessarily mean that. Even the slightest bit of SEO research on the type of content that is ranking in your market can allow you to better understand the keywords and language to implement into your content so that you, too, will eventually rank.
According to St8mnt, content is an easy way to recognize trends and gauge how the target audience feels and thinks. With content marketing, you can learn to connect and engage in ways your audience cares about. If you want a more in-depth look at ranking data, do a few search analyses and collect data on trending engagement, topics or communication and use this new knowledge to your advantage while building content. To track data involving keywords, SEO, competitors and everything in between, try Keywords Everywhere and MarketMuse. Both of these tools are Spilker-approved!