Content marketing and search engine optimization are not mutually exclusive, and in fact the overlap can be significant. Many of our clients hire Grammar Chic to handle content writing, and separate SEO firms to handle the optimization; we work closely with these SEO pros to make sure the content we write is not only high-quality, but also ready for integration into a wider search engine marketing campaign.
Maybe your company has some irons in the fire both with regard to content marketing and SEO—and maybe you’re not sure how to make sure these two disciplines work together in tandem. The good news is that high-quality content tends to be a boon to SEO, and good SEO is usually transparent enough that it doesn’t tarnish the quality of written content.
How to Make Content and SEO Work Together
Still, it’s important to be strategic in how you integrate these two disciplines. Here are some tips to help you:
- Start with your goals. We’re always telling our content marketing clients that they need to know their destination before we can provide them with the road map—and that’s equally true of SEO. You need to know what you’re trying to accomplish, and what benchmarks you want to hit—whether it’s increasing traffic, getting links, or improving your online reputation. Set goals and make sure you have the same goals, or at least complimentary ones, for both content and SEO.
- Create buyer personas. There’s an old saying in SEO circles, that Google won’t love you until everyone else does. What this means is that the way to search engine success is to develop content that human readers find valuable. So, by developing buyer personas that help you tailor content to consumer preferences, you’re not just ensuring better content. You’re also ensuring more effective SEO.
- Do some keyword research. Use Google AdWords’ keyword research tools—or something comparable—to discover some useful search terms that relate to your business. Don’t overstuff your content with keywords, and in fact try to avoid a keyword density of much more than 1 or 2 percent—but do use those keywords to give some structure to your writing.
- Marry content writing with link building. Link building is very much an SEO activity, but it can also make your content more effective. Through link building, you may do some guest posting on authoritative industry blogs, which will only amplify your written content and expand your reach—a win-win.
- Conduct a content audit of your company website. You want to make sure your website is well-written and user friendly, but you can also look through it to appraise the SEO impact of your titles, headlines, and meta descriptions—all of which can make the site more palpable to search bots and Google algorithms.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 5 Ways to Sync Content Marketing With SEO
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