The modern digital marketplace is competitive beyond comprehension. Your customers have a functionally unlimited supply of businesses, content, and products to choose from. Meeting this demand requires being both visible and persuasive. Comprehensive SEO is the key to appearing when your target audience searches, but content is what makes them click, engage, and ultimately, buy. When combined into one marketing campaign, it becomes an unbeatable one-two punch.
Here’s a deeper look into how the partnership between SEO and content works in your company’s favour:
Understanding Micro-Moments
Despite the value of logic and concrete facts in the buying process, emotions are pivotal in consumer decision making. Everything from the layout of your website to the words in your content strike a powerful underlying chord with your customer’s psyche. “Micro-moments” are moments in a consumer’s interaction with your brand in which you have the opportunity to deliver quick, actionable information. Great content is the key to building a relationship with the consumer that allows you to take advantage of this psychological phenomenon. Nearly half of all consumers want to read three to five pieces of content before interacting further with your company.
SEO + Content Marketing Increase Your Brand’s Visibility
Content is vital to engaging customers, forging valuable relationships, and making sales; but if you aren’t discoverable, then no customers be able to find your content. 51% of all traffic to websites is driven via organic search and inbound leads cost 61% less than traditional business ones.
How SEO Improves Your Content (and Sales)
Aside from positioning you at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), SEO has added value during the sales process. From the moment a customer lands on your page, content optimization efforts start increasing your ROI. A few key ways in which SEO and content are becoming one in the same are:
- Keyword Optimization: Your content should be written for people, but optimizing it for Google is key. Knowing which keywords to target, where they belong, and how to properly format content so it caters to both readers and search engines will propel your content to the top and help it convert more customers.
- Audience Targeting: SEO can help refine your content by identifying who is most likely to buy what you are selling. Knowing which issues your customers are facing, the most trending topics in your industry, and which kind of content is most likely to convert your readership increases your ROI dramatically.
- Measurement: Marketing efforts need to be consistently measured and refined in order to keep pace with the changing industry landscape, volatile search engine algorithms, and latest marketing trends.
The key takeaway here is that no aspect of your digital marketing efforts exists on an island. Each one, regardless of how important, exists as a cog in a complex machine. Creating unique, engaging, keyword-rich content is key to success in the online marketplace, but if you don’t increase your visibility with quality SEO efforts, then you won’t give your business the exposure it needs to find more customers. That’s why combining SEO with content creation is the best way to ensure maximum visibility and ROI.