To Increase Leads and Sales, Use an SEO Content Marketing Strategy.

The center of SEO is good content.

You can implement all the advanced optimizations and even  ‘buy’ the highest-quality backlinks out there. But, if your content is low-quality, you won’t get far with your SEO.

On the other hand, SEO is also very important for content marketing. Ranking on the first page—or better, top 3 spot—of Google SERP remains one of the most reliable organic traffic sources for your content.

In short, content marketing and SEO are inseparable, and it’s best to plan the two together as an integrated strategy to get the best possible results in getting organic traffic, generating leads, and finally, converting these qualified leads into sales.

Step-by-Step Guide To SEO Content Marketing Strategy

Beginning with the first step, we’ll go through all of the necessary processes that I employ in my B2B SEO services to implement content marketing and optimise content for SEO.

Step 1: Define Content Marketing Objectives

It’s critical to outline the objectives—or goals—of your content marketing and SEO plan before moving on to the next step.

Your content marketing objectives should be in line with your marketing goals as well as your company’s overall goals. It’s critical to define these objectives so that we can create the correct strategic framework to achieve them.

The following are the primary principles to follow while creating SEO content marketing goals:

• Specific: easy to comprehend and put into practise.
• Realistic: achievable in a way. This is critical to maintaining your sense of accomplishment and your (and your team’s) morale. If necessary, break down large goals into smaller milestones.
• Measurable: You can use KPIs and key metrics to analyse content marketing performance in relation to these goals.

With that in mind, here are some common SEO content marketing objectives to consider for your own:

Establish your credibility and trustworthiness. One of the most common and obvious goals for SEO content marketing. Publishing useful content on a regular basis can help you establish yourself as an industry thought leader.

Attract new customers. This is also an important goal. New potential leads can be attracted via compelling and valuable content. This is mostly accomplished through creating material that is widely shared on social media and, if possible, goes viral.

Prospects and clients should be educated. Provide information about your product or service to potential leads and current consumers. It could also be about finding solutions to your audience’s problems (not directly discussing your product).

Persuade customers to buy your product. The information in this section is aimed to address sales objections, thus it may discuss why your product is worth the high price, or provide a case study on how your service can save money in the long term.

Make up a storey. Every piece of material should aspire to be a narrative medium.

Increase retention/loyalty: one of the most effective ways to increase retention is through content marketing. Maintaining existing clients is often less expensive than recruiting new ones, therefore this is an important goal to pursue.

This list is by no means complete, and you may have other goals in mind for your SEO content marketing approach. The crucial thing is to define at least one so that we may proceed.

Step 2: Keyword Research

The next step is to determine your target keywords based on your goal.

This is accomplished mostly by first identifying our ideal audience. The goal is to uncover keywords that our target audience is looking for, which will be impossible if we don’t know who they are, what they do, what their wants are, and what their pain points are.

This can be accomplished through market research and the creation of a buyer persona.

The most important thing to remember here is to pick keywords based on your audience’s search intents, as stated in the previous stage, and in accordance with your SEO content marketing purpose.

If you want to attract new prospects, for example, you should look for keywords that are associated to informational intent. You may use a variety of keyword research tools to assist you in this process, ranging from the free Google Keyword Planner to reasonably priced options like KWFinder to premium options like Ahrefs or SEMRush.

There are three main principles in implementing keyword research:

According to their search purpose, the term must be relevant to your target. This is primarily determined by the number of searches performed.

According to your goal, the term must be valuable for your business. Not every keyword or key phrase with a large enough search volume will be relevant to your goals.

According to your available resources and timeline, the competition for the keyword(s) must be manageable. To measure this, some keyword research tools may utilise metrics like keyword difficulty (KD) or comparable ones.

Make a list of prospective keywords based on their importance, as well as relevant indicators such as search traffic. This list will be used in the next phase.

Step 3: Topic Research and Planning

The next stage is to figure out how to turn the target keywords into subjects, and then actual material.

Doing a fast Google (or your target search engine) search for your goal keywords and looking at the top-performing material is the best and most accessible way to achieve this:

Take note of any rich/featured snippets that are available for the query. We’ll also try to retrieve this highlighted snippet (see Step 5: Content Marketing Best Practices for more about this)

At the very least, look at the top three content rankings. Analyze all of the text on the first page if at all possible.

There are two basic ways you can take in this situation:

Make something that is superior to the top-ranking material.

Take a different approach and develop material that is truly distinctive.

In most circumstances, developing unique/different content is easier because you’ll need to be much better to get noticed if you want to create a “same but better” content.

You can use a variety of tools to assist you come up with topic ideas. For example, BuzzSumo is a popular choice. Various keyword research tools (most notably SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool) can also be useful in this regard.

Although you can be as creative as you like, make sure the topic is relevant to the keyword’s search intent. For instance, if the search intent for a given phrase is mostly informational (the audience is looking for answers/information), your topic should be informative or instructional rather than transactional.

In other circumstances, such as when targeting long-tail keywords, the topic may be self-evident (and limited)

Be as inventive as possible, but remember to keep the content’s goals in mind.

Step 4: Planning Your Content/Editorial Calendar

Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term endeavour. Although there are occasional exceptions, we can’t expect to develop a single piece of content, optimise it, and rank it overnight, but we can expect to stay consistent—both in number and quality—for at least 6 to 12 months.

This is why, in order to keep track of your content marketing plan, you should construct a content calendar—or editorial calendar. A year’s worth of content calendar is ideal, but you can start with a 6-month calendar at the very least.

The following items (not an exhaustive list) should be included in the content calendar:

• The target keyword
• The topic idea and/or working title
• Meta tags, meta description, tags and categories to be used
• CTA (call-to-action) plan
• Who’s in charge of the content (if you have more than one content writers)
• Type of content (blog post, video, podcast, etc.)
• When to publish the content
• Where to publish the content (publication channel)
• How to promote the content
• Where do you plan to get backlinks from
• Status (Started, working, published, etc.)

In your content calendar, the more specifics you give, the better. The aim is to develop subjects with an SEO specialist and a consultant ahead of time, taking into account all of the key factors so that the implementation goes well.

Step 5: Content Marketing Best Practices

It’s time to put the plan into action and start creating content.

Although the process may differ (substantially) between individuals and organisations, we have included a list of critical recommended practises to consider:

Except for unique information developed for transactional intent, most content should be non-promotional (i.e. product tutorial, introducing a new product, etc.)

Your article should have a clear structure—introduction, problems/challenges, solutions, and conclusion. You can also use other frameworks, which may influence the tone (or voice) of your text.

The recommended length for textual material is 1,000 to 2,000 words, but quality and engagement must be maintained. Divide the material into subheadings, with at least one subheading per 300 words and each paragraph containing no more than 150 words. With a lot of white space, you can maintain readability.

Make careful you utilise broad, well-understood terminology and concepts rather than specialised ones. For example, instead of “MQL/SQL,” use “qualified leads.” Explain or offer outbound links to justify the definitions of any special or unique terms you used.

In general, if you make a claim or discuss data, include outbound links. This is critical for establishing the credibility of your material.

Create an internal linking framework that connects your content elements. Among other things, a solid internal linking structure can aid crawling and indexing.

Use schema.org to add structured data markup to your content. This will make your page eligible for featured/rich snippets, as well as increase the page’s overall indexability.

Creating backlinks, also known as inbound links, is one of the most crucial things to concentrate on. In the next phase, we’ll delve a little further into it.

The goal is to maintain consistency, both in terms of quality and quantity. That is, maintain the quality and relevancy of your content by regularly producing it—and generating backlinks, as well as internal and outbound linkages (as well as the quality of your backlinks).

Step 6: Content Promotion and Backlinks Building

Because we indicated that your content promotion strategy should be included in your content calendar, how you promote your content is just as important as how you generate it.

We may advertise our material through a variety of venues; here are a few of the most important:

• Social media: fairly obvious, since social media is where the audience is. It can be divided into organic, paid, and influencer promotion.
• Email marketing: still one of the most effective channels with the highest ROI.
• Blog commenting: also including forum commenting, an old-school blogging tactic that can still be effective when done right.
• Paid promotions: from various types of ads to content delivery networks (CDNs) and other channels.

The most important aspect to remember is that content promotion serves two purposes: it generates organic traffic to your content and it builds backlinks. Aim for backlinks from relevant and high-quality sources whenever you promote your content.

It’s also worth noting that the quality of your backlinks is more significant than the quantity these days. In fact, if you gain too many low-quality backlinks in a month’s time, Google and the other search engines will penalise you.

Getting 2-4 high-quality backlinks every month is adequate in most cases.

Step 7: Evaluation, Re-optimization, Content Leveraging

Content marketing and SEO, as previously said, are long-term strategies.

If we continuously implement all of the above improvements, it will take a page 2-6 months to climb (slowly) from page 5 to page 1, and then another 6 months at least to reach to the top 3 or #1 slot.

As a result, it’s critical to keep track of our development throughout these months, and here are some key areas to consider:

• SERP ranking
• Improvements in organic traffic
• Reach and impressions
• Bounce rate and dwell time—how much of your content are they consuming—, other on-site engagement metrics
• Conversion rate, if the content involves CTA
• Technical factors like page load speed and mobile responsiveness
• Backlinks profile

In a nutshell, review your content using all of the aforementioned stages, track its development using various KPIs and metrics, and re-optimize it as needed. Depending on the situation, we can alter the information or even change our strategy entirely.

End Words

Textual material, such as blog articles, has an average conversion rate of roughly 0.5 percent to 1 percent, which is greater than the 0.46 percent CTR of display advertising. As a result, an SEO content marketing campaign can be an extremely cost-effective way to produce highly targeted traffic, establish an online presence and credibility, expand your remarketing list, and, most crucially, generate leads.