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Content marketing and SEO are both essential aspects of developing an online presence. Content marketing proves helpful in generating leads, improving brand awareness, building authority and credibility, and attracting customers, whereas SEO ensures whether the significant search engines have picked a business’ website. And while they’re not mutually exclusive — digital marketers can use both simultaneously because doing so provides an added advantage for online enterprises. However, let’s get into the details of how SEO and content marketing benefit your online businesses.
But before getting to the benefits, let’s understand the concept of SEO and content marketing first. This way, readers can understand the benefits better.
Table of Contents
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a technique that contains a series of steps to enhance the positioning of a website or web page in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for specific keywords. This way, users can easily find an online business or website by typing in the relevant keywords. We can group SEO into four parts;
1. On-Page SEO
On-site SEO includes the process of optimizing web pages and blog posts for content, keywords, and other on-page factors. The focus is on the site’s content, including its meta information (title tags, descriptions, headings), content structure, and keywords. Well for starters it’s important for your website to have plenty of quality content that might interest visitors and search engines are looking for. That means that you need good keywords throughout per page or post. You also want things like images, headings, and titles mentioning terms that interest people.
On-Page SEO is a very crucial part of your SEO optimization that helps to rank higher and gain more relevant traffic to your website from search engines. There are many tools for on-page SEO that can help you to improve your onsite SEO score.
2. Technical SEO
It’s not always easy to understand what your website will need in order to rank well in search engines, but when you’re willing to put in the time and effort, there are many solutions to offer. One of these solutions is technical SEO – a process that helps ensure that your website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines.
There are several technical SEO factors that you’ll need to improve for your website or blog in order to make your website accessible to search engine bots and increase your rankings.
3. Off-Page SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, involves all of the aspects involved in creating a website according to the search engines’ guidelines. These include on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is a subset of on-page SEO that refers to all of the activities outside of your site that impact a site’s placement in SERPs. These include things like link building, social media monitoring, blogging, and more.
4. Local SEO
Local SEO (search engine optimization) can make or break your business. After all, when people are searching for products in your area, they’re often just looking for a local business. So how do you rank well locally? Well, one of the main factors is the number of searches in your area – so while staying on top of your best customers will help, too, it doesn’t make up for lack of volume. Another way to optimize yourself is by being a part of the community and being active on social media. Share content with people who matter on Facebook and Twitter to grow awareness and drive traffic back to your site.
Local SEO is mainly effective for small businesses. This is because small businesses don’t have enough time and money to rank their SEO keywords across a country or globally. This is because of competition, less authority, and lack of ability to serve the clients across a country or globally. So I would like you should go with local SEO and sometime long-tail keywords to gain visibility locally and build trust. If you have a good presence then you can expand your business to other locations and target some more competitive keywords to gain traffic from across the country or globally.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a type of marketing in which the content creator creates, publishes, and distributes content for the target audience. Content marketing aims to attract, engage and retain an audience by creating relevant content in the form of blogs, podcasts, or YouTube videos.
There are many content marketing strategies followed by marketers. Similarly, there are many content marketing mistakes repeated by new marketers. To make sure you’re content marketing strategy is matching with recent trends in digital marketing you will need to keep yourself updated.
How SEO and Content Marketing Benefit Your Online Business?
Savvy entrepreneurs will have to find ways to promote their products or services. But where should they start? Different businesses have different goals. So, how can a digital marketer use SEO and content marketing to benefit his online business? Let’s find out through the following benefits.
Benefits of SEO for Online Businesses
Before moving on to the benefits of content creation for online businesses, let’s discuss the benefits of SEO.
1. SEO is for every business:
Although Google doesn’t share its stats, according to Internet Live Stats, people perform 8.5 billion searches on Google every day. Such a massive number of daily queries on Google indicates that people will search for any business on Google. So, a business’s niche doesn’t matter for its success; applying the proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques for business matters. Thus, SEO will work for any business irrespective of its niche. If you’re not aware of SEO then you can get the help of free resources on the internet and do it yourself. In the beginning, I would recommend hiring an SEO professional to manage your business SEO.
2. SEO brings the most targeted visitors:
SEO ensures that a business gets the most targeted visitors because it improves the ranking of a website in search engine searches. So, visitors will come to a website from search engines. Moreover, after applying the proper Google SEO techniques, the visitors who visit a website will be the most targeted ones.
Thus, SEO ensures that the people who need a particular product or service will reach the relevant websites. And there is nothing more successful for an online business than this. No doubt that other means of marketing, like email or social media marketing, can also bring customers to a website. But those customers won’t be as filtered as the ones who have come from SEO.
3. SEO is affordable:
SEO has different types of payment terms. But generally, people follow the fixed amount procedure. So, companies with low marketing budgets can also afford the SEO marketing technique.
Additionally, several freelancers and digital marketing agencies like VOCSO provide low-budget and result-oriented SEO services. So, new online business owners can also contact those freelancers and SEO companies to get SEO services for their websites.
4. SEO brings long-term benefits:
Optimizing a website with proper search engine techniques brings more benefits than other marketing means. For example, the business of a paid marketer will be beneficial for him as long as he performs paid marketing. So, with no investment, the benefits of paid marketing will vanish. The same is the case with AdWords and PPC, which are the paid marketing schemes of Google. But that’s not the case with SEO.
SEO provides long-term benefits to an online business until you don’t do SEO mistakes that lead to a Google penalty. For example, if a particular website gains a good ranking in search engines, it doesn’t mean that the achieved ranking will instantly fade away upon stopping the SEO efforts.
No doubt, SEO requires more hard work at the start. But once the website has gained a good ranking in search engines, the next task is maintaining the ranking.
5. SEO is a credibility booster for online businesses:
As mentioned earlier, SEO brings the most targeted customers. So, target customers have a greater chance of increasing the conversion rate of an online business than the customers who come from other advertising means. Thus, when the conversion rate of an online business grows, it will increase the credibility of that business.
6. SEO works alongside content marketing:
A successful SEO and content marketing campaign is an ideal thing that could happen to an online business. So, when SEO works alongside content marketing, this combo will generate more fruitful results for an online business than others.
7. Complementary benefits for online businesses through SEO:
Besides the rank improvement in search engines through SEO, SEO has some additional benefits for online businesses. For example,
- To apply the search engine optimization techniques successfully, experts will have to implement the on-page SEO factors on a website. So, the issues in the code, design, and structure of a website will keep on fixing, courtesy of SEO. In short, SEO keeps a website up-to-date.
- Besides on-page SEO, experts will also have to apply off-page SEO techniques, like building profiles of a company on social media, keeping the social media profiles up-to-date, and publishing the articles on other platforms. So, all these things are also a sort of marketing, which comes as an added benefit with SEO.
Benefits of Content Marketing for Online Businesses
Now, let’s discuss the (five) 5 reasons why content marketing brings value to your business.
1. Provides relevant information in the preferred formats:
Content marketing has a knack for communicating with its intended audience on relevant topics and in the forms in which they prefer to consume information. So, content marketing provides more customer benefits, which means a successful customer-business relationship.
Thus, a successful customer-business relationship is key to a successful online business.
You also shouldn’t forget to write content that ranks well in Google SERPs.
2. Shows instead of telling:
Whether customer service is answering critical questions about its company’s services or PR (Public Relations) is trying to explain a company’s place in a market, it is always better to show instead of telling. That’s where content marketing has the upper hand over other marketing strategies for online businesses.
Content marketing integrates valuable content into a department’s processes. Doing this allows the team to share their work and expertise to explain key concepts and values to their audience.
3. Focuses on the customer benefit sale:
Content marketing directly addresses the customers. So, if a digital marketer produces the best content, it will immediately engage the reader’s life. Doing so will urge the reader to make a conversion and help the business owner convert the readers into valuable customers.
4. Producing relevant content connects in the right place at the right time:
Engaging content is the only way to convert a reader into a customer. However, figuring out the target audience is the only way to create exciting content. So, to achieve the sole purpose of content marketing, experts recommend creating content according to the buyers’ persona. This way, customers will appreciate if the content creator has produced content according to their interests.
5. Drives more traffic to an online business:
As mentioned earlier, SEO makes it easier for the target customers to find a company online. So, to drive more traffic to an online business, a content creator should optimize his content with relevant keywords. Doing so will fulfill the purpose of SEO in content marketing, which makes it easier for the target customers to find a website or business online.
6. Establishes the brand authority and brand awareness:
Quality content will help online businesses develop their brand awareness and authority. But if a writer doesn’t know how to create quality content, he can take the help of a paraphrasing tool. Paraphrasing tools detect the worn parts of the content and enhance them with fancy wording.
Doing so will differentiate a particular online business from its competitors. Moreover, an online business with brand authority and awareness automatically gains readers’ trust.
7. Provides long-term compounding ROI:
As mentioned earlier, SEO is a beneficial long-term investment. The same is the case with content marketing. So, a modest investment in content marketing today can yield greater returns over time than the day a content creator has produced content.
8. Describes the topic in enough detail:
A blog post, podcast, or video provides the audience with more context than a commercial, ad, or press release ever could. So, content marketing offers an opportunity to describe a topic in more detail than other means of marketing, which means it will have a more significant impact on online businesses than other marketing means.
9. Cost-effective investment:
Content marketing is a cost-effective investment compared to other forms of advertising. For example, producing a series of blog posts based on frequently asked customer service questions is a more affordable approach than paying to survey the target audience for topic ideas.
Thus, content marketing is more eco-friendly for a growing online business than other means of advertising.
10. Improves the impact of existing business processes:
An online business consists of several processes. So, suppose a business owner wants to save costs in the long run. In that case, he can take the help of content marketing to create content for the sales team to share with their current customers. Doing this will improve the existing business processes.
Similarly, instead of the sales team needing to create new content to serve each client’s needs, content creators can create new content templates to address the most common issues through content marketing. So, content marketing improves existing business processes’ impact without extra cost.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
1. How can SEO benefit your business?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) technique increases the positioning of an online business in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). This technique helps businesses by allowing the users to find an online business easily, making it easier to increase the conversion rate of online companies.
2. How does SEO help digital marketing?
Traditionally, marketers followed the outbound marketing technique where marketers personally reached the customers. However, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) makes it easier for the audience to find the information they want. So, the SEO technique is an inbound marketing strategy.
3. What are the benefits of content marketing in digital marketing?
Although content marketing has several benefits in digital marketing, let’s discuss the most common ones.
- Unlike the outbound marketing strategy, the content marketing technique drives more sales and increases the conversion rates of online businesses.
- Being a modern technique, it is less annoying than traditional marketing means.
- As discussed in the above guide, content marketing increases the brand awareness of a business.
- Similarly, content marketing increases the credibility of a brand. Thus, people trust a website, blog, or YouTube channel having quality content more than other content-sharing sources.
- Search engines are about quality content. So, if a content creator focuses on producing quality content, this will benefit his blog, website, or online business.
- Content marketing puts sales in auto-pilot mode.
- If a website has a product page, content marketing will drive more visibility to the web page.
- Unlike traditional marketing, content marketing makes the life of the customer service and sales team easier.
4. Why is SEO important for an online business?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an essential technique for an online business’s success because it helps drive more organic traffic. More organic traffic means people can find an online business naturally.
Bottom Line – the Conclusion:
Content Marketing and SEO can be rewarding for an online business. These two forms of marketing have been around for years and have continued to grow in popularity, even though countless other forms of marketing are available for businesses today.
Some still consider content marketing an old-fashioned term, but it has plenty of benefits that can help build your brand name and increase sales. Similarly, a digital marketer who wants to build high-ranking websites would have to use SEO to succeed in his online business.