Content marketing has become an increasingly integral part of how SEO works today and businesses of all sizes cannot afford to ignore the bigger picture of content marketing if they want an effective online presence.
Content is king and there is a need for unique, quality content that keeps the reader interested, while also being rich in keywords relating to your business. Simply put, regular content (such as press releases or blog posts) serve as a ‘freshness’ indicator to Google when they consider how to rank your website. Truthfully, you’ve got to have a blog if you want your website to rank highly in a saturated industry – it’s incredibly important. Content marketing is also extremely useful for link-building and allows you to create content in all the different ways consumers talk about and search for your products and services online. In this way, optimising the blog to support the anchored content of your website will increase the likelihood of you ranking for customer search terms online.
Let me give you an example. If two websites are competing for the same services – what is it that differentiates them exactly? Well for starters, if one site has a blog then it’s telling Google ‘hey over here, here, here!’ whereas the one without a blog is silent. Therefore, the one with the blog producing fresh content every month is perceived to be more relevant by Google and will rank higher.
Yes, you should be optimising your content for Google if you want it to find your content – but it’s not just about keywords, inbound links or SEO as a single concept anymore. When looking to improve the online presence of a business, don’t fall into the trap of false dichotomies. It’s not SEO OR content marketing, it’s not SEO OR social media – it’s both, SEO AND content marketing. Keywords, link-building, meta tags and unique content are all going to be good for both your website visitors to read and for Google’s ranking purposes.
Best practice for blogging is to have it set up on your own website and use WordPress. WordPress is by far the best platform thanks to the Yoast SEO plugin.
By Alex Obertelli