In general, what happens is that people first create content and consider optimizing it for SEO. However, the best practice is to start with the end result in mind. If you belong to content marketing or offer SEO services, it is suited to take a radically different approach – think of the promotion first so when it comes to creating content, you already have a strategy to work upon and hence craft the content to achieve that.
Here’s how you can do your content marketing from an SEO perspective:
Gather a concourse of talents
Get all marketing maestros on board – PR, SEO, content strategists, creative, and social media experts – to work on the content plan. Creating content for marketing is a team effort and yields awesome results when a variety of talents assemble to contribute. Ideally, you should have people who are specialists in different areas, instead of having jacks of all trades, masters of none.
Set a goal
With your fantastic team, you are ready to set a definitive objective. Firstly – understand your brand, purpose of marketing, the message you want to convey, your core values and the ways to communicate them.
Then, you have the job of understanding your potential customers and afterwards, your objective with the content marketing. Ask yourself – whether you need to track conversions, need improvement in customer support or sales? Once done, create clear content guidelines to plan what should you publish and what shouldn’t.
Do not create content just like that
There are millions of content posted on the internet in the form of videos, Facebook posts, Tweets and others. So, there’s so much noise and you have to make yourself rise among that crowd.
Better you learn from your past experiences – which areas need improvement, what has triggered mass interest, social engagement, etc.
Quality is what Google prefers – generate remarkable content, the battle is yours. Churn out the generic and the optimization won’t help you. Besides that, your content should be relevant and up-to-date.
Focus on data-driven content with exclusivity
While creating quality content, try to incorporate relevant data in a precise and accurate manner. Data to validate your points increases your credibility. Even better, if you give it a news angle and you’re credited as the source for that information.
Create content that answers users’ questions
Creating content that actually helps your users by answering their questions is a major win – in terms of content quality and SEO, both. Research and understand the pain-points of customers. If done successfully, you create evergreen content that gathers repeat readers. Quick, well-explained answers are termed the best.
Let customers be the king
Google loves the internet users and you can play around that. Involve your audience in what you do. For instance, ask them to submit their funny videos or creative posts under a campaign. In all your marketing initiatives, always remember that your moves will be to build an audience not just backlinks.
Don’t let any doubts cross your mind while creating content, like – what if people already know this, etc. Use different formats to present your content such as white papers, PDFs, infographics, small articles, etc. Then, choose relevant syndication partners to widen the reach of your publish. Of course, quality SEO services can help to promote your business.