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SEO Checklist: A Handy Guide for Any SEO Campaign Part 2

Off-Page SEO

In Part One of our SEO checklist, we focused on on-site aspects of SEO, like preparing it for crawling. We dealt with various aspects of website optimization that would be considered good practices by search engines, and therefore, improve the website’s ranking. If you haven’t read the first one yet, you can find it here.

In this part of our SEO checklist, we are going to focus on the aspects of optimization that need to be done off-site, hence the name Off-Site SEO. Basically, the goal of this aspect of SEO is to improve the image of the website in the eyes of search engines, therefore improving its status and, through that, its rankings.

According to Search Engine Rankings Factors conducted by SEMRush, off-site SEO factors account for around 50% of all ranking factors search engines take into account. Furthermore, off-site factors are far more dynamic and proactive when impacting your rankings – it’s something you can consistently work on to improve and do so in continuity.

The parameters to focus on:

  • popularity
  • relevance
  • trust
  • authority

Now, we could focus on each of these parameters individually but that would be impractical since each and every off-page SEO technique will always impact more than one of these – if done properly, of course.

We’re going to split these off-site factors into two parts, links and social signals, but it should be obvious that these two aspects of off-page SEO are inseparable. How, you ask? Well, we’re going to give an example so that we can make the situation 100% clear.

When you create a quality link coming from, let’s say, an authority blog from your niche, you are actually getting more than just relevant link juice. Part of the traffic that lands on that page has a chance to, through the backlink you got, land on your website.

Furthermore, the article you published will most probably be shared by the blog in question on their social media pages. Some natural shares may occur as well. This means that you didn’t create just a static link but a PR “signal” that will have some kind of reverberation in the online environment.

The example above perfectly explains why SEO isn’t a precise discipline. A lot of things depend on other people. In some situations, the “viral potential” of your content may get you amazing results with practically no extra effort, while in others, the result ends up being minuscule despite your efforts.

Before we dive into how to actually work on your off-site SEO, we need to stress the importance of preparing your website for this kind of effort. Investing time and money into off-site aspects of SEO while your domain is a mess is basically like putting lipstick on a pig. The pig is still going to stink.

Now let’s dive into the link building aspect of SEO.

Links

When we talk about off-page SEO, we have to mention backlinks. They are still very powerful and impactful, but a lot of marketing “experts” used them in a spammy fashion, and Google doesn’t like spam. So, what is the white hat approach to this?

Well, there are a couple of things you can do we will start with the most common one.

a) Guest blogging – First thing’s first! If you wish to ensure that you don’t get punished for getting links, you should absolutely avoid paying for them. Guest blogging can be approached from a few angles.

You can approach websites that accept guest posts and get a link to your website from the bio or even from the content if you have a way to link to it naturally. The most common way to get a link from the article itself is to create relevant, well-researched, and well-written content on your domain so you can link it as further reading.

This takes some forethought and planning. To create this type of content for your blog, you need to have at least a general idea of where the content will be linked and the subject matter you are going to be dealing with in your guest posting campaign.

b) Link roundups – Being that content creation is a constant in the online environment, not all content will be 100% original in terms of subject matter. A lot of publications diversify their content by adding weekly or monthly roundups of the best content from their respective niche. If you want to be included in these kinds of roundups here is what you need to do.

First, you need to find the people doing these roundups. You can do this in a few ways. Prospecting potential roundups can be done by using Twitter and Google search without having to invest in a specialized tool. Just focus on the keywords that you are interested in and search for people who do roundups on a regular basis. Build up a list and see what kind of roundups they do. After that, you should focus on creating content that will be a good fit for the roundups you want to be a part of.

Being in a roundup can be very beneficial for a number of reasons. First, you get a link from a relevant source. Second, they share the roundup on their social media profiles. Third, the people who are also in the roundup will share the piece because they were mentioned. So, get ready for traffic.

c) Broken links – Another way to get links back to your website is to do broken link building. The web is constantly in motion, links grow old and, after a while, they are removed. This happens for numerous reasons.

Sometimes, the content is removed, other times the entire domain gets shut down. Regardless, old links often turn into 404 messages and, by using some simple tools like Broken Link Builder and Check My Links to search relevant websites for broken links, you can create link building opportunities.

Once you find relevant broken links, you should prompt the website with a heads-up about the link and a suggestion for a replacement – that replacement link should lead to your domain.

Of course, this technique also requires you to have relevant content on your domain so that you can actually offer it as a viable replacement. Links that are not optimal or barely fit the bill will have a smaller chance of being accepted as a replacement so be careful with this.

d) Brand mentions – If your brand has already made some progress when it comes to mentions in the online environment, you might want to look into that. In a lot of situations, mentions in the online environment go by unlinked.

Sometimes, it will be a direct brand mention, sometimes the mention will focus on one of your services or products. Regardless, a good idea to generate links is to approach the people who mentioned you in the first place and ask them, very politely, if they would be willing to add a link to that mention.

Your success rate here should be very high since there is absolutely no reason not to link to a brand once you’ve already mentioned it – it simply fits naturally and makes the content better.

e) Competitive analysis – This is probably one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it still works. If you are unsure about the direction you should take your link building campaign, you might want to take a peek into what the competition is doing. Being that you are in the same niche, there is a huge chance that you are doing a similar content strategy.

You can use tools like Moz’s Link Explorer to do this kind of analysis. You don’t have to copy your competitions’ work to the letter. It might be a bit wiser to avoid focusing on just one competitor altogether. Instead, pick and choose the ones that fit your goals best. You can analyze the steps they took to get those links and do something similar.

Social signals

While social signals are, in most cases, not a straightforward ranking factor which can boost your rankings directly, it can have quite an impact on your SEO campaign passivly.

Let’s see how.

As a business, you are trying to establish your brand as an authority in a certain field or as a good manufacturer of a certain kind of product.

If your brand name gets a lot of searches along with a particular product name and the users are not abandoning your website, then Google (or any other search engine) will assume that you are a good option for people searching for this product.

This may lead to them boosting your website’s rankings for queries that don’t include your brand name but just the keyword. This way, the brand can position itself as an authority in the niche and a trustworthy product provider.

We still haven’t talked about how you can get these social signals to help you position your brand better. Let’s do this now.

a) Influencer marketing

Influencers are people who have large followings and can impact buyer opinions in the online environment. They usually achieve this kind of influence through creating good content that provides value to people and through cultivating their social media following.

The good ones also strive to keep their reputation pristine and their reviews, advice, and opinions as unbiased as possible.

Due to the reasons cited above, brands tend to approach influencers with offers of collaboration hoping to improve their brand presence. The goal is to improve the brand’s reach, convert new leads, and even possibly gain some links in the process.

We would like to stress that, even here, like with any other stage of an SEO campaign, relevance is very important. You could always reach out to influencers that have the largest network of followers in what we like to call “the spray and pray” method.

Our suggestion is to attempt to reach out to influencers from your niche who can reach people that are actually interested in your subject matter.

Sure, you can pay a person with a following that counts millions of people to promote your brand, but if their post about your brand doesn’t do well, you’ve pretty much wasted your budget.

Here are the most popular types of influencers, so that you can get a general idea of where you should start.

Podcasts – These long-form online radio shows tend to attract a large audience. This is because they are not encumbered by time restrictions and can actually go in-depth when covering a particular subject.

YouTube – Vloggers have become extremely popular in the last decade, especially since they can monetize their efforts through built-in YouTube ads. Cisco predicts that video content will account for 82% of all consumer traffic.

Celebrities – These extraordinary individuals naturally gain the attention of vast crowds of people. They have immense followings and hiring them to promote your services or products will cost you an arm and a leg (in most cases), but it will pay off. They have a huge reach and they will promote you on social media.

Entrepreneurs – When it comes to B2B (Business to business) advertising, things are a bit trickier. The fact is that most executives and CEOs won’t be influenced by random advertisers, but they will check what other entrepreneurs suggest, especially if they operate in the same niche.

These are just some examples and you should do a lot more research before you decide in which direction you want to go.

c) Social media

Now, since you are going to be creating content as part of your SEO campaign, you should focus on creating a social media presence for your brand so that you have somewhere to share it. Keep in mind that these profiles will be off to an unimpressive start, but consistent work and cultivation of your following will give you an outlet for your content and a place where those who are loyal to your brand can keep up with the latest news.

There are really a lot of decisions to be made here, both related to the networks you plan on targetting and the approach to building your follower base.

d) Discussion boards, Q&A, Forums

While it may seem that every other form of online community has dwindled, aside from social media networks, this really couldn’t be farther from the truth. Forums are still very much alive, various question and answer websites like Quora as well, and other forms of discussion boards are still filled with people who are looking for a civil and troll-free online space for public discussions.

These places are perfect for improving brand awareness and building a reputation as experts in the niche. One of the few genuine ways to establish your brand’s presence online and turn your employees into brand ambassadors is to actually make an effort to answer questions outside your support inbox.

Now, you might want to ask: “What has this got to do with SEO?” Well, the thing is, search engine crawlers won’t only identify when your brand has been mentioned with a link leading back to your site, but linkless mentions count as well. Comment sections, forum threads, replies, and so on are a great way to boost your brand presence.

Furthermore, through this method, you can also increase traffic to your website. This is especially true if you have created a blog populated with in-depth posts that answer industry-related questions because you can actually link to these posts when you answer questions.

The way to do this efficiently though is not to just jam a link in the reply and carry on. You have to make an effort to give an answer to the question that is being asked but refer them to your post as a source for a more comprehensive answer.

The way to think about this is that you are not answering a privately asked question to just one person, you are answering a question for anyone who searches for it in the future.

SEO is a long-term investment, there is no questioning this, but it is also one of the ways to ensure passive traffic that matters. Keeping your rankings healthy for queries that are relevant to your niche is a great way to create leads. Consistent traffic also opens up the possibility to put up ads on your website and generate some passive income.

We do advise you to stay away from Black Hat SEO techniques, not because they won’t work (people wouldn’t even try them if the didn’t) but because if search engines find you doing these, then your website is going to get penalized, your hard-earned (and paid for) rankings are going to drop, and you might even get deindexed.

We hope that we were able to help you understand just how effective SEO can be as a way to improve your brand’s online presence. All the best from the Podroom Creative team!

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Things You Should Know Before You Start Producing Content

If you are a regular internet user, you deal with content on a daily basis. You read, watch, and listen to content on social media, various blogs, news portals, podcasts, and so on.

Even through this passive contact with content, we tend to learn a lot about it. For example, we tend to expect image-based content on Instagram, quick and useful information from infographics, snappy and entertaining content from Vloggers and so on.

Still, when you start working on your content strategy for the first time, you might feel overwhelmed with all the options at your disposal. It’s also difficult to determine the exact steps that need to be taken to create an effective content marketing strategy.

Before you can make any decisions related to content, you need to gather some important information which will help you find a good direction for your content strategy.

Target audience

The first thing you need to know is who you are trying to reach with the content you are going to create. Depending on which social groups you are trying to reach, you might change the language or style you use to reach them, the content format, the subject matter you are going to focus on, the length of the content, and so on.

One of the most popular ways to outline the target audience is to create personas. They are semi-fictional characters that stand as a representation of the ideal audience you intend to reach.

The more details you add to your persona, the better the chances of you finding a unique angle to spark their interest. You can also create more than one persona if you feel that your audience is dispersed and that one persona can’t possibly encompass all the relevant aspects without creating contradictory ideas about it.

Having more than one persona might mean that you have to modify your approach to content so that you can engage each particular group that is relevant to your work. Still, even if the scope of your campaign is broadened by this preliminary attempt to identify the target audience, it’s far better than trying to reach an audience with content that doesn’t cater to their interests.

Here’s a list of tools to help you discover your target audience:

  • Google Analytics (Audience & Acquisition)
  • Facebook Business Page Insights
  • Google’s Consumer Barometer
  • Good Old-fashioned Social Media Stalking

Competitive research

Another good way to get a better idea about who your audience is and how to reach them with your content is to take a look at the competition. You are not doing competitive research to identify your competition’s strategy and copy it exactly – we’re gathering information to help us build our own.

We’re actually looking at content to avoid making something that is too similar to the existing material, but we’ll address this point in more detail in one of the following subheadings.

We can spread this research task out into three distinct phases which are designed to gather information and reverse engineer the process of content creation that your competition took.

a) Content Inventory

The first step is to find the content that your competition is pushing out. There are a lot of tools out there that can help you with this but we’re going to go with BuzzSumo mainly because it can manage more than one thing relevant to our situation.

With BuzzSumo you can find out which of your competitions’ content performs the best, who is linking to them, and see who most commonly shares their content. You can also use websites like SEMRush, Moz, Majestic, SpyFu, and others to dig up all the backlinks that lead to their website.

b) Categorization

The second step in this is to quantify and categorize the content you dug up. There are really a lot of ways to do this and it will mostly depend on what information you’re after. Some things to consider should be content type, publications, quantity, quality, etc.

Still, try not to overdo it, as adding more categories and not actually needing them is basically increasing your workload and decreasing the clarity of the list you are getting.

c) Content Analysis

The final step is to actually go through the content and attempt to identify the things that make it good. Sure, this can take some time, especially considering that your top competitors are going to be very good at content marketing and you’ll have a lot of things to take a look at.
Devise some kind of system of tagging content when you see things that you like so you can go through it again and find what you need very fast. If there is too much for you to go through, then you should focus on the most popular pieces, as you’ll have the highest probability to learn useful things from it.

Problem solving

When we’re talking about business content, we are always attempting to make that content interesting and engaging for our audience. Unlike traditional online content that is mostly there to entertain – think funny videos, snappy vlog posts, entertainment blogs like Cracked and so on, business content can’t really be all about humor. Why? Well, it really doesn’t match the brand image of most businesses out there.

Furthermore, this isn’t what their audience wants to hear from them. Nobody cares about a law company that’s constantly cracking jokes on their social media channels, but they would care about a company that gives out free and useful legal advice through their blog – for example.

Content, if we want it to be good, needs to provide some value to the audience that is supposed to consume it. This is probably one of the most difficult things to figure out, but it usually has to do with familiarizing yourself with your niche. Depending on what product or service you are trying to sell, there are really a lot of directions you can take this.

For example, a company that offers B2B software might focus on creating content that shows off how the software is intended to solve business issues and why it’s worth the investment. A company that sells clothes might be focused on the latest fashion trends, dress combinations that include their pieces, and a more image-centric content strategy.

A digital marketing company might want to educate their clients and help them get a better understanding of the online environment so as to help them make better decisions and find their voice – like we are doing right here.

Unique edge

Of course, your content isn’t going to do you much good if the web is already filled with content that deals with similar subject matter, in a similar manner.

There are quite a few limiting factors when it comes to this. Chances are you are not the first in your niche to reach for content marketing to improve your online presence. This means that the basic, most obvious content ideas have long been covered, published, ranked and, in some cases, even grown old.

Furthermore, the SEO aspect of content marketing tends to get in the way. All the rules about creating easily crawled content, about creating well-made SEO titles and so on, may have a limiting effect on how you construct your content in the first place.

Well, while SEO may be causing issues here, it can also help you out. Most content will have a keyword (or a few keywords) at its core. Before you start working on your piece, you might want to take a look at the content that is ranking for this particular keyword.

This way, you are going to get an idea of what’s already been done, what pieces are ranking better and what you can do to add to the subject discussion.

Define your goal

Finally, you want to create content that helps you achieve a goal. Are you after SEO and better rankings? Maybe you want more leads? Improved conversion? Maybe it’s improved brand awareness? Whatever your goal is, you need to be careful not to lose track of it throughout your content creation process.

There are a lot of things to consider when creating content and if the goal you want to achieve gets lost along the way, ultimately, it will do you no good.

Establishing a good content strategy isn’t something that can be done in a day’s worth of work. You’ll first have to ensure that you have enough information to go on. Don’t let your content be based entirely on vague ideas of how content should work.

Content marketing campaigns are long and expensive investments, which means that if you get things wrong in the planning phase, your entire investment is compromised. If you are not sure how to do it on your own, consult a professional, just don’t run into it blindfolded.

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SEO Checklist: A Handy Guide for Any SEO Campaign – Part 1

When we’re talking about getting natural exposure online we are primarily talking about getting good rankings. The only way to get traffic that isn’t gained through Ads, be they AdWords or social media ads, is to ensure that your content ranks well for queries related to your field of expertise.

We do realize that this is quite a broad statement and that there is a whole lot of work involved in actually getting there. However, unlike other forms of advertising, the results of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are a bit more permanent.

We’ve created this SEO checklist to help you keep track of all the different factors involved in getting good rankings. Things can get quite hectic when managing an SEO campaign and any slip-ups may diminish the overall impact of your campaign. This is why it‘s a good idea to keep a checklist to help you remain on top of things.

Essential Tools for SEO

There is a ton of tools out there that can help you manage various aspects of your SEO campaign but we’re here to talk about the essentials. These tools are most broadly used and proven to be very reliable.

This is the basic tool for your SEO efforts. It comes directly from Google and offers the following features:

Keywords and Traffic – You can check to see how much traffic your individual keywords bring to your website.

Website Error Checker – Through this tool you can check the website for errors and having an error-free website is one of the more crucial aspects of SEO.

Sitemap Submission – If you want to ensure that your website gets ranked, you need to do all you can to help Google’s website crawlers find all the pages without any problems.

These are by no means the only features of the Google Search Console but they are the most prominent ones.

Another essential tool that comes from Google and focuses on giving you a better insight into your website’s performance. Google Analytics should be set up as soon as your website is up so you can get the most relevant data possible from the get-go. It can also be connected to your Google Search Console to improve the information you get within Google Analytics.

Some of the things that Google Analytics helps you track are website bounce rate, traffic numbers, the traffic you are getting from Google, pages which generate the most traffic, information about other sites and search engines that get you traffic – among other things.

  • Yoast SEO

For a long time, WordPress has been the dominant CMS (Content Management System) on the market and there are few signs that this is going to change. Yoast SEO is a plug-in for WordPress that helps you manage daily SEO tasks with ease and also helps with sitemaps and robot.txt.

Keyword Research

In the past, keywords have been the primary way to ensure a good ranking. This was due to the fact that back then you could abuse keywords in various ways to ensure your ranking. Naturally, when Google noticed this abuse, they cracked down hard on the abusers but keywords are still VERY relevant.

The rules are a bit different now and search engine algorithms are much more sophisticated when it comes to finding out what your website is about – if you use your keywords properly.

Still, the tricky thing is to find out what the best keywords are for your particular situation. There are a few techniques you can use to discover your keywords.

  • Google Suggestions

The easiest way to gain access to long-tail keywords that people are searching for is through Google suggestions. You simply open Google search and type in a basic keyword you would like to rank for and the search bar will show the most relevant long-tail searches people go for.

This tool is great if you want to give a bit more substance to your keyword choices. It offers a lot of details related to individual keywords like difficulty (of ranking), search volume (how often people search for it), CPC (Cost per click) and so on. This tool is here to help you find the most optimal keywords to focus on in terms of competition and traffic they bring once you rank.

This is another one of Google’s official tools but this one is primarily focused on finding keywords for use in AdWords campaigns. Still, the keyword data is very precise, being that Google stands behind it and it can be a great additional asset for your keyword research process.

There are a lot of other techniques you can use to find keywords. Doing competition analysis is one of them, searching for keywords on Reddit and Quora is another. Still, you need to make sure that there is some data baking up your choices, so make sure you use one of the above-mentioned tools to check their quality before you commit to any of them.

On-Page SEO

Before you go out and attempt to build up your website’s reputation, you’ll have to take care of the on-page optimization first.

While the on-page optimization isn’t terribly difficult, there are really a lot of things to think about and get in order. It’s also important that these best practices be applied to any future pages and content you might add to your website.

a) URLs

Google will use your URL to attempt and extract more information about the page it’s crawling through. This is why it’s a good idea to put your primary keyword into your page URL.

Another important thing to keep in mind when it comes to URLs is that those with fewer characters inside the URL seem to rank better than those with more. A recent study conducted by Backlinko, which included 1 million search results seems to indicate that less is more when it comes to URL length as a ranking factor.

b) Tags

In the past, tags used to be the bread and butter of keyword optimization and, well, keyword stuffing. This “golden age” as some would refer to it, is gone, and these days tags have a more modest role in SEO while some have become completely obsolete.

Still, this doesn’t mean that there are not important. Tags are a broad subject and we could devote a whole article to them, which we probably will at some point, but for now here is a short overview of the most important tags.

-Title Tags

These tags typically appear as clickable titles in SERPs as well as social media. They used to be very important for ranking (keyword stuffing and similar black hat approaches) but these days their role is to attract attention and improve the click rate, so craft them with care.

They should be unique and explain the content of the text well. The length of the title should be somewhere between 50 and 60 characters so that they display properly.

-Meta Description

The meta description takes up the biggest part of the snippet and is probably the biggest factor in your click-through rate and bounce rate. The character count stands between 150 and 160 characters.

The meta description is a piece of text that should describe what the reader can find in the article and assure them that they will find what they need within it. It’s a good idea to include a call to action and relevant keywords, just make sure that you do it in a way that isn’t spammy.

-Image Alt Tags

One of the things Google and other search engines are not particularly good at is deciphering what the contents of an image are. The purpose of an image alt tag is to help search engine crawlers get this information.

Also, this text displays when the image, for whatever reason, fails to load up. This allows the users to get a sense of what the image is and how it fits into the context of the article even when it isn’t displayed.

These are the basic tags you need to worry about but this is a much deeper subject, as tags are used for different purposes and specific situations.

c) Keyword Placement

A lot of people start thinking about keywords by focusing on keyword density (percentage of the text occupied by the focus keyword) which is an obsolete approach and makes the text look artificial to both crawlers and users. Here are the three basic things you should keep in mind.

-Keyword at the Start of the Title

The most important thing is to add your keyword to the title tag as close to its beginning as possible. The reason for this is the fact that search engines tend to view it as more important when it’s closer to the beginning of the title.

-Keywords in the First 100 Words of the Text

A big mistake people make is to start the article off with an elaborate intro which has little to do with the subject matter of the content. Due to this, their keyword tends to come up much later in the content.

Make sure you start your article with an intro that deals directly with the rest of its content and also that you insert your keyword naturally within this intro so the search engines can get a better idea about its subject matter.

-LSI Keywords

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a mathematical way to identify relationships within a text and is a technique used in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The LSI keywords, also known as semantic keywords, are keywords that are closely related to your primary subject matter (primary keyword).

They serve the purpose of confirming to the crawlers that the content handles the subject matter well. Furthermore, they are used to better identify related queries that are not formed in the same manner but are asking for the same thing. You can use semantic keywords by using one or a few of the tools from the keyword section of this article.

d) Content

One of the most important aspects of SEO is content. Everything we do related to SEO is ultimately tied to content. Our keyword research serves as a basis for our content. The content we create is material for search engine crawlers, a source of traffic, it’s the reason we get inbound links, it’s the reason people stick around our website.

Still, all this is true only if we do it properly. Even though the content is one of the most important aspects of SEO, creating content to satisfy search engine parameters is not a good idea. Content should be created with the goal of engaging your target audience.

Content creation is probably the most difficult aspect of SEO to grasp. Since we’ve been talking about technical aspects of SEO and suddenly we’ve switched to something that has more to do with creativity, entertainment, education, engagement – to many who haven’t dealt with SEO in the past, this might seem like we took a left turn somewhere along the way.

If we take a look at an average business website, disregarding its content (videos, infographics, blog posts, PR posts, news, etc.) we get a very stale online presence which contains only the rudimentary information about the company.

This is why we create content, to keep people coming back to our website and while many businesses don’t recognize it, finding a voice for their company that people will enjoy is crucial to the success of their online presence.

Content is a very complex issue and if developed properly it can even lead to becoming a separate source of income for a company. High traffic websites needn’t really sell anything and/or convert traffic to actual leads but this is a different subject.

You can expect the second part of this article to be within a couple of weeks – We’ll link it here when it’s live so stay tuned.

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Why is Content Marketing Important?

In the online world there are countless ways a business can market itself, as marketers were quick to come up with new techniques and methods for digital marketing over the years. Although having a lot of options is generally a good thing, a problem arises for many inexperienced businesses and marketers – which option to choose?

The fact that people were able to achieve good results with different methods has created many disputes about which one is the best, but in reality there is no such thing. Depending on the type of business, its niche, resources, market and business model, different marketing techniques might be more or less suited.

However, one marketing method is always important and any type of business can benefit from it – content marketing. Despite being one of the oldest digital marketing methods, it’s still very cost effective and this is why 90% of companies use it.

Today we will discuss the reasons why content is still king and why every business needs to utilize it.

Content Boosts Your SEO

Content marketing is not an isolated set of techniques and methodologies that don’t have any effect on other important aspects of marketing. On the contrary, it is directly connected to search engine optimization. Given the fact that the essence of SEO optimization is code and text, content and especially articles have a great impact on how a certain website will be ranked.

If you want to constantly improve the organic visibility of your website, you will have to publish optimized content on it. Creating new content is one of the best and most commonly used SEO techniques and content marketing goes hand in hand with these practices.

Each page or blog content is an opportunity for improving SEO efforts. Apart from the fact that your content needs to offer valuable information and be relevant depending on its purpose, you also need to follow up on certain SEO practices and when Google indexes it, your site will rank higher.

Content Helps Solidify Your Brand

Branding has never been more important than today. Given the fact that there are more businesses than ever and that it’s never been easier to start something from scratch, the competition has become very fierce. A lot of markets are oversaturated, which means that the only way to grow your business is to fight with your competition.

In this kind of business landscape, building a strong brand identity is essential. A business will never be able to compete if it sinks in with the crowd. Your brand needs to be unique and recognizable and only then will customers get interested in what you have to offer. This is where content comes into play.

By creating and publishing good content, a business has the opportunity to express its values, tell a story about the brand, talk about policies, goals, and create a voice of its own.  With consistent content, you will be able to leave a good impression on your target audience, show them who you are and what your brand has to offer them.

Content Marketing Is the Catalyst of All Your Marketing Efforts

Quality content is a must for nearly all marketing efforts. Regardless of whether you want to reach people through email, your website or social media to engage people and get them to think and talk about your business, you need content. The alternative is to borrow someone else’s content and this doesn’t make a business memorable and interesting.

Here are some of the ways in which great content affects different online marketing efforts:

  • Email marketing:  need to contain content that will make them engaging and offer value to potential leads; if you use the type of content that people have already seen a thousand times, they might think that you are trying to scam them.
  • Social Media: Another highly important marketing channel is social media, where you need your own quality content to share on a regular basis. A business that has no unique content of its own to share share on social media can be perceived as inactive or slow.
  • SEO: If you are looking to attract more people to your website and boost SEO efforts, regular blog publishing can help you achieve this.

As you can see, original, high quality and well-written content is a flexible marketing material that can be distributed through multiple channels. Additionally, it can help promote your brand, your message, values, thoughts and goals.

Good Content Allows You to Create Ads

All businesses, no matter how big or small need paid ads at some point, and most of them utilize these kinds of marketing method. Some of the paid marketing methods are:

  • Social media ads
  • Pay per click campaigns
  • Website ads
  • Video ads
  • Email marketing

The fact that you create original content on a regular basis doesn’t guarantee that people will see your content. The Internet is a big place where there are a lot of similar businesses competing for their place. This is why organizations use paid advertising methods.

Not only does having lots of good content allow them to create paid ads and have something to make them more engaging, but paid advertisement also allows companies to share their blog content and make sure it’s seen by their target audience.

A potential goal could be to create original and engaging content which is visually appealing. Because of this, people will click on your ad, read or watch it, go to your blog, subscribe to your mailing list or perform some other action. Still, it’s very important to create and optimize both your content and the ads for the right target audience in order for your paid campaign to be successful.

Content Marketing Is Important to Consumers

In today’s world business prospects want relevant information about products and services. This makes it more difficult to sell them something. Customers study products, their features, compare prices, and try to learn as much as possible about certain products before they even go out shopping.

This is why they need relevant, valuable content that can give them answers and help them make the right choices. However, customers today are better educated and they don’t want to get content that is actually just a sales pitch. In other words, people today don’t like being sold things in an obvious way and this is an instant red flag to them.

People like to read articles and watch videos that are informative and help them learn something. By giving them this kind of content and passively linking to your blog, store or contact page, you will encourage them to contact your business without spamming them. If they like your content, they will trust your opinion and knowledge.

These are just some of  the most important aspects of content in our book, and there are probably hundreds of other ways people have used content to put their business on the map. Simply put, content will always be relevant and all businesses need some kind of content marketing strategy in place.