Shaun Kennedy 
In today’s digital age, brands need an online presence, which requires a well-rounded digital marketing strategy. Without one, your campaign might not run smoothly, leading to wasted ad spending, poor conversion rates, and an inability to reach your target demographic.
So, you must develop a solid and effective digital marketing strategy, which includes multiple components to ensure it runs effectively.
You'll find two essential components in an effective digital marketing strategy: SEO and content marketing. Although these two are entirely different pieces of the puzzle, they need to work effectively in tandem to create a successful, well-rounded strategy.
If that sounds foreign, you’re not alone. This article combines SEO and content marketing to create the perfect strategy for your business.
What Is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, better known by its acronym SEO, is a method for ensuring your content reaches your target audience. Without the right audience, your content will likely fall on uninterested ears, causing you to waste ad spend in areas where conversion rates are low.
So, by incorporating SEO, you can ensure your content appears in front of your target demographic. With a strategic SEO approach, your content will appear to the correct audience by carefully placing applicable keywords throughout your content.
Of course, SEO isn’t a one-and-done technique. It requires targeted research, technical tune-ups, and routine adjustments to accommodate your demographic’s search queries.
By itself, SEO isn’t as effective as it could be. However, once you combine SEO with a killer content marketing strategy, the results are well worth the work.
What Is Content Marketing?
The term ‘content marketing’ explains itself. It’s exactly what it sounds like: marketing with content. It’s the bread and butter of dozens of digital marketing campaigns. Many companies and brands produce helpful or enjoyable content for their target audience.
They use content marketing as a strategy to present their services to their target audiences, discussing the problem and how their services or goods are a solution. Content marketing can appear in varying forms, including blog posts, social media content, and videos.
As a brand, developing an ideal content marketing strategy to draw attention to your services or goods is essential. While content marketing alone can increase interaction on social media posts, blogs, and websites, the real kicker comes from adding SEO.
How To Unite SEO And Content Marketing
Although they’re separate aspects of a digital marketing strategy, content marketing and SEO should go hand-in-hand. Without the other, each element may cause your content to fall into the wrong hands (uninterested parties), causing you to waste precious ad spend on poor conversion rates.
So, by uniting the two, your brand can reap the benefits of each aspect. However, combining SEO and content marketing isn’t as simple as throwing a few miscellaneous keywords into your content. Instead, it requires meticulous care and research to ensure you reach your target demographic.
Here are a few tips for effectively utilizing SEO for your content marketing strategy:
Consider SEO While Designing Content
Since we’re bringing SEO and content marketing together in one strategy, it’s crucial to design and develop your content with search engines in mind. Before you start packing an obscene amount of keywords into your content, take note: it’s all about understanding how the search engine works.
Search engines comb through content to isolate what a page or blog covers, and once they pinpoint topics, they categorize the content accordingly. Consider dividing your content into specific issues, keeping viewpoints narrow. However, this doesn’t mean you should scrap certain portions of your content simply because it requires class.
Instead, create a dedicated topic area for that particular content, as the search engine can recognize and catalog it easier. For example, if you develop recipes for your website, you could divide each recipe based on its topic.
Keep cupcake recipes in one section, cookie recipes in another, and pie recipes in another. Or, if you cover a wide range of recipes, you could divide it into sections based on the type of recipe, like dinners, breakfasts, desserts, snacks, and lunches.
Weigh The Value Of Links
If you’ve been combing the internet for tips regarding SEO strategy, you might’ve encountered pieces explaining the detrimental effects of linkbacks from “bad neighborhoods.” While this can be true, it emphasizes the importance of using SEO to find neighborhoods that are best for your purposes (and help you steer clear of those you want to avoid).
This part of the process goes beyond link monitoring, as it’s an essential piece of the puzzle. You can rapidly steer your content into better neighborhoods by combining SEO and content marketing.
For instance, when your content begins popping up higher up in the search results (this is where most folks look for high-quality information sources), you’re going to see your backlink numbers rise. The search engine algorithm will eventually reward your efforts with applicable rankings once more reputable sites begin linking to you.
Stay On Top Of Content
As you develop your SEO and content marketing strategy, incorporate a regular schedule. While this applies to content marketing, we’re uniting the two, so SEO gets to hitch a ride.
Search engines pay attention to how frequently you add new content, so it’s essential to maintain a consistent posting schedule, especially if you’re just starting to produce content. When you post regularly, you tell the search engine you’re still actively posting and remain a relevant source.
On top of that, regular posts can add more potential content topics and keywords to incorporate into your search list, which can help increase traffic to your page. It helps improve your brand or company authority, especially when you have numerous well-developed content pieces spanning a range of pertinent topics and subtopics.
For SEO, adding applicable keywords helps ensure your content remains balanced and relevant to each site area. Sometimes, you might forget to spread the focus throughout each aspect of your site. While it’s okay to devote resources to your best-performing element, it’s crucial to incorporate other areas of your business that require attention.
Steer Clear Of Duplicate Content
Producing regular content is essential, but you must avoid creating duplicate content. While it might seem wise to incorporate various pieces of content that focus on the same keyword, it’s best to avoid this. Packing your site full of content focusing on the exact keywords can signal to search engines and crawlers that you’re artificially inflating keyword count.
This might not seem detrimental, but it can affect your website's rankings. Avoid devoting multiple pages to the same keyword. Suppose you want to incorporate content focusing on similar content; select different keywords to prioritize.
Select The Right Keywords
Keywords are essential in SEO, as they ensure your content ends up in front of interested parties. Given the importance of keywords, you must select keywords that match your content and demographic strategically.
In many cases, your content will have one focus keyword, which places heavy emphasis on choosing the right one to work. You can find the best keywords to use based on research on your demographic, competitors, and search volume. Once you develop a list of potential keywords, select the best-suited option and build your content around it.
Place Keywords Strategically
You can complete every necessary step for selecting the best-performing keywords, but without strategic placement, they might not perform as you hope. So, placing your keywords in suitable locations throughout your content is crucial.
Your chosen keywords should appear in specific parts throughout your content, such as the meta descriptions and title tags, and be scattered throughout the body of the content. However, be sure to naturally incorporate keywords, as forcing too many into the content can make it fall flat and seem difficult to read.
Final Thoughts on SEO and Content Marketing
In many effective digital marketing campaigns, you’ll see SEO and content marketing working hand-in-hand to ensure content reaches the correct audience. While you could stick with one over the other, SEO can bring content marketing to the next level (and vice versa).
Although effectively combining the two seamlessly requires careful work and meticulous research, you’ll have a better chance of placing your content in front of your target demographic. In addition, as you perfect your campaign, your analytics data will begin to change, displaying the results of your hard work.
So, while it may seem pointless to pour resources into combining the two, it could help you optimize ad spending, increase conversion rates, and ensure you reach your target individuals, which is well worth the work in the long run!