We see many businesses complaining about content marketing being a waste of time for them. They’ve created good quality content, they’ve used SEO to market it but they’re still seeing their traffic flatlining.
The main issue is they’ve got things the wrong way round, they should be building their content around their SEO research.
The key to making content marketing work for you is to support your content with a well-researched SEO strategy. In this article, we’ll be talking you through how to create high-quality, cornerstone content that has a guaranteed audience before you’ve even hit the upload button. Here are four simple steps to help you drive organic traffic to your website using SEO and content marketing.
4 Steps to using SEO and Content Marketing to Gain Organic Traffic
Step 1 – Do your Keyword and SEO research
It is a common misconception that businesses should be building their SEO around their content. However, the most optimized approach to driving traffic to your website is to actually build your content around relevant keywords.
By drawing the titles for your content from primary keywords you will be ensuring that you are exposing your content to a much wider audience. Creating great content without SEO or building your SEO around your content is like keeping your priceless oil painting at the back of your garage, under a sheet. On the other hand, by building your content around keywords you’ll guarantee there’ll be an audience waiting for the content you’ve created.
Most people search with a problem in mind that they are looking to solve. Build this into your Content Marketing strategy. Your primary keywords will give you a good idea about what problems are most common for your target audience.
Step 2 – Long Tail Keywords are Your Best Friend
Any high-quality ranking sight will not only provide you with primary keywords but with secondary (or longtail) keywords too. Smart content marketing utilizes these too.
How do you do that? Well, a simple way to capitalize on the power of long tail keywords is to use them as a roadmap for your content. Using secondary keywords as subheadings in your content is a great way to draw traffic to your site, but to also provide your readers with satisfying and beneficial content that will keep them coming back for more.
Step 3 – Find Your Niche
When creating content you want to make sure you’re not rehashing what is already out there. This is key for a couple of reasons, firstly it is harder to benefit from SEO when there is older content with the same title or subject. Secondly, there are untapped topics that you could develop a greater market share in. There are a few exceptions to this, one we’ll cover later.
The first step to finding your niche is to be aware of what your competitors are doing, what they are doing badly, and what they aren’t doing at all. This way you can build your content marketing strategy around filling in these gaps in the market and backing your content up with SEO research so it finds the right audience.
Recreating resources and content that already exists can be an ineffective way to drive traffic to your site, however, there is one key exception. Above we mentioned being aware of what your competitors are not doing well. If you believe that you can provide more valuable content on a topic that your competitor has already covered then make your own and do it better.
If their content is weak, and you can back up your new and better content with SEO then this is a great chance to hijack already existing traffic and divert it to your site.
Step 4 – Make your content
Now is the time to bring the steps above together to create high-quality content with a pre-established audience. Use your primary keywords to inform your title. Build your content around your secondary keywords. Finally, fill a gap in the market, or replace something that already exists with an improved version.
You may have struggled with producing high-quality content but not experiencing much engagement with it. Don’t worry, there are a few small tweaks you can make to make your content shine. Or, if you’re the reader-and-research type, check out this content marketing guide.
The easier to digest your content is, the more engagement and traffic you will experience. Make your content more digestible by using shorter paragraphs, regular heading and subheadings, and avoiding large blocks of text.
Linking to your own relevant posts within your content is a great way to drive traffic across all areas of your website. Showing your readers how much you have to offer is a great way to drive returning traffic. This also goes a long way in building trust between you and your audience. You want to make yourself the go-to source for content in your market.
One of the biggest methods of generating traffic is to make sure your content is easy to share. To do this you should be including appealing pictures and infographics as part of the content. You should also install widgets that make sharing your content simple. Make sure your audience has the option to share your content on relevant social media (Linkedin if you’re a B2B business, or Facebook and Twitter if you are a B2C business). The easier you can make this the more likely they are to do so.
