SEO and Content Marketing: What’s Your Strategy Missing?

George W. Bush is in office as U.S. president.

Lance Armstrong retires from cycling.

“Grey’s Anatomy” premiers on TV.

It’s 2005, the year I began my career as a writer, editor and content marketer. 

Maybe you think I’m dating myself by telling you this.

Or maybe I’m dating your website. Because if you’re like a lot of sites I see, your content marketing and SEO strategy are still stuck in the past. 

So, what does an effective SEO and content marketing strategy look like in 2024? Or maybe you’re wondering exactly what SEO and content marketing are, how they differ and where they can deliver real value for a business?

I’ll take you on a tour of those topics - and share some of the biggest mistakes I see websites making when it comes to their content marketing and SEO strategy.

But first, let’s take a look at what SEO and content marketing are, and how they work (or should work) together.

What is SEO?

Before we start, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page. Because even people who think they “know about SEO” seem to have a lot of misconceptions. 

SEO, or search engine optimization, refers to work done to make a web page or website available to appear in search engine results and to optimize its performance in those results. The goal here is to improve a website’s visibility and drive more business to it, typically in aid of other business goals like displaying ads, selling products or generating leads.

Do I even need SEO on my website? It's not an uncommon question, and the answer depends on your goals, but if you are getting or want any traffic from search engines at all, it's definitely a good idea.

Even though most of us use search engines like Google, I’ve found that many people really don’t understand what happens after they type those words into the search bar. Or that there’s an entire industry working behind the scenes to help companies appear in the top spots. 

For example, let’s say you are looking to buy an air purifier and you search “best air purifier.” Your search results might look something like this:

Out of the 196,000,000 available results out there, why do those three pages come up first? The answer - or at least part of the answer - is SEO.

And, as you can imagine, the higher up a website ranks, the more traffic it will get. In fact, research by Backlinko found that the No.1 organic search result gets an average click-through rate of 27.6%. It's also 10 times more likely to receive a click at all compared to a page in the No.10 spot. Whether a website is selling a product or a service, it has to be sold to someone. Now you can see why SEO is such an important part of online business!

SEO involves a lot of moving parts, so it isn’t something that can be summarized here. But it’s helpful to understand that it is executed via three key areas:

On-page SEO: This involves optimizing the parts of your webpages that, for the most part, people can see. It includes content quality, subheadings and keywords. It also includes some snippets of code known as meta data.

Off-page SEO: Think of this as the work that happens outside your website as a way to promote it. This might include backlinks and mentions from other sites, social media shares of your content, and even PR that helps drive traffic and attention to your website.

Technical SEO: This refers to the more technical parts of your website that can be optimized to ensure that it can be made available for display in Google search results (it can be indexed), and that it performs well for users. This can include the way your site is structured, how quickly it loads and performs for users, and how well it can be read and understood by search engine crawlers.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is, well, just what it sounds like. It refers to using content to market to people. There are lots of ways to market a product or service; content is just one of them. But it can be a really powerful one.

All types of marketing are geared toward what marketers call “conversion.” This means getting a person to take the action the business needs/wants them to take, such as buying a product or providing an email address that can be used for additional marketing and outreach to (hopefully) close a deal later. 

While other forms of marketing (such as banner ads or email marketing) tend to be more tuned toward direct promotion, content marketing is different: Good content marketing, the kind that works, provides real value to the reader, engages them by helping them solve a problem, and ultimately builds trust around the brand and its product or service. 

Let’s look at an example. Suppose that you are looking to run an employee satisfaction survey (something most companies do at some point!) If you run a search for “employee satisfaction survey” to find out more, the top organic result (at time of writing) is an article by SurveyMonkey.

The page is a 3,000+ word deep dive into what an employee satisfaction survey is, what it’s for and how to conduct one, including the types of questions to ask. 

Useful, right? In fact, if you really are looking to create a survey like this, you might spend several minutes reading through this page for ideas.

But there’s more: This page also includes helpful templates you can use to send out your satisfaction survey. Templates that are run through - you guessed it - SurveyMonkey. In order to access the templates, you need to create an account. And, if you end up wanting to leverage some of those templates’ best features, you can upgrade your free account to a paid one.

See how that works? Because SurveyMonkey succeeded in capturing your attention and helping you solve your problem, they may also succeed in securing your business.

That’s content marketing. It involves using content to build authority and trust. In the above example, that content is delivered in a web post, but content marketing can also happen over social media, via email, through media like images and infographics, and other ways as well. 

But the example above is most relevant here because it leverages more than just high-quality, useful content. After all, the only reason we found this article at all is because it appeared at the top of the page on a Google search.

And that means it’s also making use of SEO.

SEO: The Secret Sauce in Content Marketing

A lot of people outside the SEO and content marketing communities don’t fully understand how these two things differ, but that’s partly because when content marketing is done well online, SEO is baked into that content. 

Why is SEO important for content strategy?

Because in order for any content to be read, it needs to be found. SEO is the more technical work that helps ensure that content actually appears in relevant searches. It's the secret sauce that allows great content to be discovered, read and even shared. And that is what gives that content the opportunity to convert a reader to a repeat visitor or customer for your brand.

If you think of SEO as that layer we add to content, it includes:

• Optimizing pages for relevant keywords

• Ensuring the content is interlinked with other relevant content on the site

• Adding visual elements and alt tags to create a richer online resource

• Writing engaging titles that are more likely to be clicked from the search results page

• Improving page speed and mobile responsiveness

• Ensuring that the site is well maintained and performing well for both users and search engines

• Ensuring that the page and others can be crawled and indexed by search engine bots

If too many of these details are missed, content may not rank well enough to find an audience. In other words, a successful online content marketing strategy often requires SEO.

Key Elements of a Good SEO and Content Marketing Strategy

OK, so we’ve covered what SEO is, what content marketing is and why/how they work together so well. But what does that actually look like in practice? What should be included in a content strategy? Here’s my process.

Determine the Target Audience

This is the first and very most important step in content marketing and SEO. Who do you want to read this?

Narrowing this down often isn’t as hard as it sounds. Most businesses know quite a bit about their ideal customer. They have purchase data, common questions, surveys and all kinds of other things that can help them to understand who their customers are and why they are buying.

Once you understand who the ideal customer is and how a business’s products or services solve a problem for them, then it’s time to move on to the next stage of the strategy: keyword research.

Conduct Keyword Research

Let’s reach back to that article about employee satisfaction surveys from SurveyMonkey. Why did SurveyMonkey even post that article? Two reasons:

1. A person’s need or desire to send an employee satisfaction survey is a problem that SurveyMonkey’s product can solve. SurveyMonkey is a great tool for sending out all kinds of surveys.

2. According to SEMRush, more than 590 people are searching for “employee satisfaction survey” every month. To SurveyMonkey’s marketing team, that means 590 people SurveyMonkey could attempt to reach and convert to paying customers.

Now, 590 people may not sound like a lot, but SurveyMonkey ranks for thousands of keywords like this. And you can bet that their SEO and marketing team combed through every potential customer pain point to match them to keywords people were typing into Google.

That’s good keyword research in action. Find your customers’ pain points and which keywords they are using to help solve them. Then create content that aims to help those customers solve the problems they're searching about.

Create High-Quality Content

This part sounds easy but it’s actually hard. Like, really hard. 

It’s also where a lot of the magic happens. Because in the content marketing and SEO game, excellent content not only ranks better, it also converts better. 

So, what does high-quality content look like in this context?

• It matches the search intent of the people searching for the keyword it’s targeting

• It provides valuable, useful information to those people

• It goes beyond basic info you could find anywhere to provide real value and insight

• In engenders reader trust in the organization

• It’s well written and well organized

• It’s free of typos and grammatical errors

• It nudges the audience toward the desired action (a purchase, a signup, etc.)

Optimize On-Page SEO

Next up, on-page SEO. This involves checking and optimizing a number of elements to give them the best chance to be read, properly interpreted and ranked by search engines. This includes optimizing:

• Title Tags

• Meta descriptions

• Headers

• URLs

• Internal links

• External links (ideally to high-quality sources and resources)

• Images and alt text

• Adding schema markup

I always run a crawl of the site to ensure I’m linking content to other related resources on that site. This, too, helps Google better understand the page and its relationship to other pages on your site. It also helps readers by providing additional useful resources!

Backlink Building

Links from other websites pointing to your site are a way to build its authority. In fact, backlinks are still one of Google’s strongest ranking factors, and one of the core pillars of its ranking strategy.

There is a long list of ways to build links to a page, and most sites will only jump through the hoops for their “money pages,” but this is always an important step to consider.

Having really high-quality, unique content can get the ball rolling on its own; the best content is the kind people just want to link to and share. I also use tactics like guest posting, creating special types of content and graphics, creating events or surveys, becoming a source for journalists, leveraging social media, and more.

Content Repurposing and Distribution

But … we’re not done yet! The best content strategies leverage the content they create and then leverage it some more. After all, really good content costs money, and I  want to make sure it gets the most mileage possible. 

What does repurposing look like? If you’re talking about a post on your website, chances are you have other methods of content distribution, like email, social media or videos. Repurposing written content might mean:

• Restructuring it as an Instagram or Facebook Carousel, or a slideshow on LinkedIn

• Breaking out key points or questions into a YouTube video

• Condensing key points into an email

The content isn’t exactly the same as the original post, but you aren’t starting from scratch either, which means it’s an efficient and effective way to spread that same message through other channels.

Content Updating

Last but not least, any content strategy I create also has content maintenance in mind. This is so, so important for a few reasons. 

First, an organization’s content standards, voice and goals can shift over time. That, in itself, warrants an update. 

But even relatively evergreen content can get stale. Source links can turn to 404s, information can change and even the search intent for the keyword itself can shift over time. 

Plus, SEO is competitive, which means that other businesses competing for the same keywords are likely to be updating and improving their pages over time. You need to be doing the same. 

Every piece of content that’s created needs to fit into the bigger plan for the site itself, which should include how to ensure that content stays up-to-date and in line with SEO best practices. 

Every piece of content produced should be weighed carefully as both a current asset and a future liability that will need ongoing maintenance and care.

What is your SEO and content marketing strategy missing?

If you’re thinking you’ve got this (and maybe you do!), there are still a lot more moving parts in a really solid content marketing and SEO strategy. Here are a few things I often see getting overlooked.

Topical Authority

We took a look at keyword research, but top-ranked content is usually the tip of the iceberg; what’s underneath it all the supporting related content. 

When topic clustering is done well, it helps that content at the top - the stuff that’s aiming at those more competitive topic areas and keywords - rank. I have built out content on a number of sites using this just strategy. It still works. 

For example, in SurveyMonkey’s case, they have topical authority around surveys. They’ve solidified this by building out a huge network of content around all aspects of surveys, including creating them, interpreting them, survey types and more. 

What this means is that when it comes to queries related to surveys, they are likely to land on or near the top every time they create new content. Why? Because Google already sees them as an expert that creates quality content on this topic.

Site Architecture

I still see so many sites that have a /blog or /resources page and then a bunch of posts about things related to their business. This strategy is missing a lot of things, but the most obvious one is organization and architecture. 

Think about a person landing on a page like that. They can see, maybe, a post or two at the top of the page, and not much more. And what if that isn’t what they want to read about? What is going to compel them to continue to scroll and click through more pages of unrelated blog posts?

Plus, who visits a website wanting to read the “blog?” People visit sites for specific kinds of information, and this site structure does virtually nothing to help them find it. If they land on a post from a search, they will be just as disoriented. There may be more resources to help them, but they won't know that.

Here’s the thing: If a person sees the page this way, so does Google. What is this site trying to be an authority in? What are all these posts about? How are they related to each other? 

Part of content strategy involves thinking this through from beginning to end. What topic areas do you want your business to become an authority in? What other topics fall beneath that? This is how you can start pulling together a better, more useful site architecture to help move people and crawlers through your site and help both better understand what you are about.

Truly Unique Content

You’ve been on the internet, so you know: so much of the content out there is just … meh. It’s OK. But you won’t remember it or who wrote it once you close your browser.

Your content shouldn’t be like that. 

It doesn’t have to be like that. 

In fact, if the person or team behind your content does their due diligence to learn about your business and your audience and their unique problems, it probably won’t be like that.

Based on how a lot of companies appear to produce content, that’s a big if.

A good SEO/content marketer will not only be looking to pull out all the stops to ensure that your content really connects with its intended audience; they will also be monitoring and tweaking its performance to ensure that’s really happening.

Go Forth With Content Marketing and SEO

Whew! So now that you understand more about SEO and content marketing, how’s your site performing? Are you looking for the secret sauce that’ll help you perform better in search, connect with that audience and increase conversions? If yes, I can help.