Digital marketing is all the rage nowadays and it’s no surprise either since everything is happening online. Shopping, education, and entertainment, all of these things have found a place on the internet.
Businesses can reach out to more people than they ever could. This has created a lot of competition as well, after all, it’s not just one business going online.
With so many online ventures, it becomes difficult to actually attract sufficient traffic to your site.
This is where SEO and content marketing come into play. Using both of these in your marketing strategy, you can make your online business have more exposure and ultimately get more people to come to you.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It can be described as all the processes involved in making a website rank high on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
It has two main components that are:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
We will look at the details later. For now, it would suffice to know that by doing SEO, you tell the search engine that your site is related to a particular topic and should be shown in the results when that topic is searched.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is a digital marketing strategy in which companies target the people who are still in the research phase of the buying cycle.
They make some useful content like blog posts or articles that are geared toward their target audience. The purpose of making and publishing content is to generate people’s interest in the brand and increase brand exposure.
The interested parties will eventually become loyal customers.
How SEO and Content Marketing Can Boost Your Online Business
Before we go further it must be noted that SEO and content marketing are co-dependent on each other. One cannot have success without the other.
A site with great SEO but not enough quality content will fail, while great content hosted on a site won’t see the light of the day without great SEO.
SEO makes your site rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). A website that shows up first has a higher chance of getting more traffic than a website that shows up lower. That’s why ranking high is so important for digital marketing.
Then without further ado here are some reasons how SEO and content marketing can be used to boost your business.
Keywords and Content
As we have discussed, SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. SEO allows search engines to ‘see’ a website and determine what it is for.
Keywords are one of the important factors that search engines use to ‘see’ a site. Your website ranks for certain keywords. Content on your site is what uses these keywords. That signals to the search engine that this website is relevant to a particular search.
Hence you need to write some quality content for your site. Using that, you can optimize your site for those keywords and make it rank higher on the SERPs.
It should be noted that black hat SEO techniques like “Keyword stuffing” should be avoided. They are detectable by search engines and they penalize sites by lowering their ranking.
True-Value Content
You have optimized your site for a keyword, that’s well and good. But you need to have written some really high-value content.
People read blog posts because they have something they wish to solve. If your post cannot answer their question then that is ultimately bad for SEO.
Visitors turn away from a site that cannot provide what they need. Usually, this happens quite fast. When a visitor goes to a website and leaves soon after without spending much time or visiting other pages, then that is called a “Bounce”.
If the bounce rate is high, that is an indication to the search engines that this site does not have what users need, so its rank will be decreased.
You can use content optimization tools to increase the quality of your write-up and make it interesting to read. Writers frequently use tools such as duplication detectors to detect plagiarism and paraphraser tools to keep their content free from repetition.
Use these tools effectively to write true value content. By writing high-quality content that actually solves a problem related to your niche, you can reduce the bounce rate.
Visitors who do not bounce have a way higher chance of getting through to the bottom of the sales funnel and buying something.
1. User Experience and SEO
Your website needs to have a great user experience. Visitors do not like to wait or be confused. So, you have to design and optimize your site so that doesn’t happen.
Loading times
Make sure that the website has the least possible loading times. According to a study by Smartbear.com, on average people will wait no more than 2 seconds for a website to load before leaving. Approximately 40% will leave after 3 seconds.
To optimize your site for the least loading times, you can first check any images on your site and optimize them first. Do not use any large images that take too long to load.
You can reduce the number of plugins you use and you can cut down on the number of files that your website needs to load. Using website caching, you can decrease the subsequent loading times for a site.
There are several free and paid tools available that can help you optimize your site for loading, so use them to get an edge.
The increase in traffic will signal to search engines that this website has what visitors need and it will raise your ranking.
Design and Sitemap
Making your website easy to navigate will prevent your visitors from being confused. Confused visitors usually leave quickly and contribute to a high bounce rate.
You can add some text and images on your homepage that can suggest to visitors what to read, and what the website is about. They can be used to link some articles on your site that visitors may find helpful.
Additionally, a good sitemap is very useful in preventing confusion. It helps both human visitors and search engine crawlers.
Humans use it to easily navigate a site and reach where they need to go. Crawlers use sitemaps to properly index a website. A properly indexed site has a higher chance of ranking near the top.
Conclusion
Using SEO and content in tandem with each other will boost your website’s visibility. That will ultimately bring about more traffic to your site.
When a website has more traffic, you can use your content to drive that traffic down the sales funnel.
Good content establishes you as a trusted authority on your subject and generates brand loyalty among regular readers. New readers on the other hand will remember your content and when they need your services/products, then they will come to you first.
This is how SEO and Content Marketing will boost your online business.
