Content and SEO – Two Sides of the Same Marketing Coin

Content and SEO – Two Sides of the Same Marketing Coin:

A little while ago, Vertical Leap as a company made a strategic change in the way that we view search marketing, to put content at the centre of all our services. Thus was born the concept of content-driven search marketing. What this means, essentially, is that content is the motor that drives forward all other online marketing streams – to provide pages to direct paid searches onto, to provide substance for social interactions, and to provide relevant and authoritative pages upon which search engine optimisation efforts can be built.

Last time I wrote on this blog, I talked a bit about how evergreen content pages can act as a cornerstone on which to build a campaign to expand your market; this time, I want to write a little bit about how SEO and content marketing can be deployed together in order to increase the returns from each.

First, let’s look at content marketing in its most basic form – the ongoing creation of news and blog posts on a website. As you’ll see across our site, new feeds are one of the services that Vertical Leap offers our customers. Of our clients that have news, about two thirds also have organic search services. We find that we are able to get better results for the customers that have contracted us to deliver both.

Now, this probably comes as no surprise. After all, an SEO input into a content generation campaign allows better targeting of keywords, better optimisation of the pages that the content goes onto, and better leverage of the website itself to showcase the actual posts and stories in the best possible way. However, it goes further than that. We also see uplift in the natural search performance of a website.

But what is this effect that you can see on your website, and where does it come from?

• Google loves fresh content – a website is indexed more frequently, and putting a feed onto the home page of works wonders.
• Good content will get linked to more frequently, increasing the authority of a site as well as bringing traffic.
• Different pieces of content – news, blogs, white papers, videos – can be combined to create new pages that are useful and relevant to your audience, allowing you to increase the reach of your site without having to put up new pages all the time.
• Blogs and news feeds allow you to link to your core product pages from contextualised text anchors. This increases the focus on the pages that are desired to be returned by Google in response to search queries, as well as cementing their topic by judicious keyword use.
• By becoming a visible authority in a market, a brand name becomes better known, which can only help. A brand should always be one of the best performing search terms – people using it to come to a site have already heard of it and should already have the intention to buy, or fill in a contact form, or just to research the products and services available.

I think that sometimes content marketing can be regarded as an add on to SEO, or SEO as a useful extra to give your content marketing an extra lift, but the reality is that the two are just different sides of the same thing; the gap between them is really only an artificial one created by the different skill sets involved in implementing strategy. When it comes down to it, however, to get true value from both search engine optimisation and content marketing, the two should happen in concert with each other, informing the direction of each other and contributing to the ongoing increase in value of a website. The good news for our customers and potential customers is that Vertical Leap is able to bring both aspects of this to the table; if you’re interested, please contact us and find out more.