Content Marketing and SEO are often considered synonymous, but they are not. While it can be difficult to differentiate between the two in some cases, the truth is that they are two different marketing methods.
However, they fuel each other. And when combined strategically, they can maximize your results, including increased traffic and conversions.
This article will guide you through when to combine the two and the exact framework you need to follow to get the desired results. Let’s start by understanding Content Marketing and SEO first.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract, convert, and retain customers so you can increase revenue and ultimately grow your business.
Here’s an example: At Ahrefs, we create content that teaches users how to solve different problems and increase their website traffic using our tools. That’s Content Marketing.
What is SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of optimizing a website to increase the quantity and quality of its traffic from search engine results. It involves keyword research, content creation, technical auditing, and link building.
Since searching for information in search engines is one of the top ways users discover web content, SEO is important if you want to increase your website traffic organically.
When should you combine Content Marketing and SEO?
SEO as a distribution channel for Content Marketing is a no-brainer if your audience is looking for solutions to the problems your business helps solve.
For example, a lot of our potential customers are searching for terms like “keyword research,” “link building tips,” and “seo basics” on Google. So we create relevant product-based content that targets these keywords and optimize them to rank on Google to attract and convert these users.
For example, this blog you are reading is a great example of this. As you read, you will also understand how we use this article to market our products.
How to get started
Now that you have a clear understanding of when to combine SEO and Content Marketing, let’s take a look at the exact step-by-step framework you need to follow.
We’ll cover finding the right topic ideas, tips for creating SEO-optimized informational content, and more.
Let’s dive in.
1. Find the right keywords
A common mistake marketers make is creating content around keywords that lack informational intent or even worse, creating content without doing any keyword research first.
Before you create anything, you need to find informational keywords that your audience is searching for that represent problems your business can help solve. These are keywords that can drive profitable customer action.
You can find informational keywords using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Here’s how:
- Enter your seed keyword
- Go to the appropriate Terms report
- Add keyword modifiers like what, who, instructions, how , and tips to the “Include” filter and select “Any word”
You will now see a list of keyword ideas with informational intent that you can create content around.
2. Analyze and match search intent
Writing a helpful article or guide targeting a specific keyword is not enough to rank. You need to analyze search intent and match it. While often overlooked, this is crucial to SEO.
For example, when people search for “bounce rate,” they want to understand what bounce rate is and how to measure it.
However, when searching for something like “reduce bounce rate,” the user already knows what bounce rate is and is looking for advanced tips to reduce bounce rate.
Therefore, the content format and angle need to be different in each case.
One effective way to match search intent is to analyze search results for what we call the three Cs of search intent:
- Content Type
- Content format
- Content Corner
Content Type
Content type refers to the overall type of business analytics list of cell phone numbers in america content in search results. You’ll often see blog posts or videos when it comes to informational keywords.
For example, when we search for “email marketing,” the results are blog posts:
On the other hand, searching for “how to arrange prices” mostly brings up video results:
Content format
Content format refers to the overall format of the top search results. It typically looks like this:
- Schedule
- Instruct
- Compare
- Review
For example, tutorials are the dominant format for “creating content.”
Content Corner
Content angle refers to the unique selling point of the content. Since it depends largely on the topic, it is difficult to “categorize” it into a few categories like we did for type and format.
To understand the content angle, you should analyze the top results.
For example, the key concept for a “content strategy plan” focuses on development steps.
3. Prioritize by “business potential”
To attract the right audience and increase engagement, you need to focus on keywords that have “business potential.” In other words, keywords that represent problems that your product or service helps solve.
For example, we recently wrote a guide on “how to cannibalize keywords” because the topic has both traffic and business potential for us. The keyword gets 600 monthly searches, according to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, and keyword cannibalization is a problem our tool helps solve.
So when we saw that searchers were looking for guides that explained how to solve keyword cannibalization, it was clear that this was a high “business potential” topic for us.
Here’s the scale we use to score topics at Ahrefs:
4. Create valuable product-led content
Now that you’ve identified a great content idea, the next step is to start making it happen. A great piece of content is relevant, original, product driven, and resonates with your target audience.
For those who don’t know, product-led content strategically talks about a product and uses it to make an argument, solve a problem, or help the reader achieve a goal.
In our opinion, three essential elements make a great piece of content.
Competence
Whether you’re creating content in-house or with the help of outside agencies, you need to make sure that the content is written by someone who is an expert in the field and understands your product well.
Without that, it will be impossible to sell your product or make convincing arguments in your writing.
Here are some helpful tips to add credibility to your articles:
- Collaborate with different people like product and technology teams within your organization to gain unique perspectives and accumulate knowledge
- Talk to influencers in your niche and get their insights by connecting with them via email and LinkedIn.
- Never hesitate to write down your own opinion, as you don’t necessarily have to agree with everyone.
Create in-depth content
Your content should focus on answering all the questions a reader might have when searching for a particular topic.
You can find important subtopics to cover using Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool in Site Explorer. Just paste in a few of the top-ranking pages for your target keyword and leave the bottom field blank. You’ll then see the keywords those pages are ranking for:
In the example above, we enter some of the top ranking pages for “mobile SEO”.
A quick look at the report shows that these posts cover the following subtopics:
- Mobile SEO Strategy
- Mobile SEO Best Practices
These are probably worth including in an article about mobile SEO.
Weave your products into the content
The most important part of any Content Marketing strategy is driving beneficial customer action. Writing in-depth guides or blogs that don’t talk about your product until the very end won’t drive the engagement or conversions you expect.
Therefore, you need to focus on writing product-led content.
In our articles, you will always find many cases where we talk about how our tool can help you solve a particular problem (as you have seen many times in this article).
The direct benefit of this is customer attraction and retention.
Remember, the idea is not to oversell the product, but to educate the user on possible ways to solve the problem (with or without your product).
5. Update content as your product evolves
To get maximum engagement and conversions bi lists from your content pieces, it’s important to update them as your product improvements and feature additions come in.
Depending on the severity of the change (whether it’s a product update or a complete product overhaul), you may need to:
- Updated step-by-step instructions on how to use the tool for a specific use case.
- Add new product screenshots.
- Add a new section explaining a new feature.
- Updated product tutorial videos.
While these changes may seem small at first, doing so consistently will help you extend the life of your best blog content and increase the results it gets over time.
For example, check out our beginner’s guide to link building , which was first published six years ago and has been regularly updated since then.
If you check the page’s organic traffic over time in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll notice a gradual increase in traffic since 2020:
In fact, blogging ranks #6 for the term “link building”.
However, this growth would not be possible if we did not update our content with the latest trends and mention how our new features can be leveraged for link building.
6. Build an owned audience through email opt-ins
Even if you rank #1 on Google and drive tons of organic traffic to your content, the reality is that most readers won’t sign up for your product or service right away. If they’re not ready to make a decision, no amount of pop-ups or banners will sway them.
But you can encourage them to sign up for your newsletter or weekly blog updates. At Ahrefs, we have a simple, non-intrusive form in our sidebar where our readers can enter their email address to receive our weekly updates.
This method allows you to build an owned audience through SEO-focused Content Marketing.
