Content marketing consists of all marketing activities that focus on creating and sharing information. It should be part of every SEO strategy, but it’s also crucial for branding. The idea of content marketing is that sharing valuable information is a great way to attract an audience and to build a brand. Blogging is one of the most well-known ways of content marketing. In this post, I’ll explain what content marketing is, why content marketing is important for SEO and how you should set up a content marketing strategy.
What is content marketing?
Sharing valuable information for free is the very essence of content marketing. Your audience will benefit from the information and will perceive you and your company as experts in a particular field. In the end, your expertise will be the reason why people will buy your products or services.
At Yoast, content marketing is one of the main things we do. We share our knowledge. We write about SEO on our blog and share this on Social Media and in our newsletter. And although it might feel contradictory, giving away our knowledge has a very positive effect on the sales of our eBooks and courses. Our audience perceive us as experts (probably through all the blog post we write) and are willing to pay money to get more of that knowledge. New to SEO? Learn the Basics of SEO in our Basic SEO course »
Why is content marketing important for SEO?
Writing content is a key aspect of Search Engine Optimization. Google reads your text, indexes the text and ranks it. If you do your content marketing correctly, you will write a lot of copy related to the terms your audience is searching for. Your website will pop up more and more often, as you write more blog posts. Overall, your rankings will go up, when you start doing content marketing. And, all of these new visitors are potential buyers. So, in addition to increasing the traffic, content marketing could increase your sales as well.
How do you set up a content marketing strategy?
Make sure to think about cornerstone content when you are setting up a new content marketing strategy. You should have about 4 or 5 articles that are invaluable to you, your company and your audience. These articles should be informative posts or pages. When you have written these articles (and of course, you can add stuff and change them over time!), you should write tons of other blog post about topics similar to these cornerstone articles. Make sure though, you write each of these new blogpost from another angle or about another subtopic. And don’t forget to link to your cornerstone articles from these blogposts.
Read more: ‘What type of content should a cornerstone article be?’ »