Is Content Marketing the Future of SEO?

Appear­ing in rel­e­vant search results isn’t that easy today as it was, let’s say, after the turn of the cen­tu­ry or the fol­low­ing few years. Back then, site own­ers only had to cram their page con­tent with the tar­get key­words and build as many back­links as they could. Nowa­days, opti­miz­ing a site is much more intri­cate, and you have to be in it for the long haul.

Sim­ply put, SEO builds on rel­e­vance, qual­i­ty, and con­sis­ten­cy. There are many areas of opti­miza­tion that can address these fac­tors, but there’s one that man­ages to tick all these box­es, and that’s con­tent marketing.

A prop­er SEO con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy can go a long way in help­ing your busi­ness improve its place in SERPs and draw more atten­tion from users.

About Content Marketing

Before we can assess whether con­tent mar­ket­ing is the future of SEO, we must first under­stand what con­tent mar­ket­ing is.

In essence, con­tent mar­ket­ing is the process of cre­at­ing, sched­ul­ing, and pub­lish­ing valu­able, high-qual­i­ty, rel­e­vant con­tent on your site that will evoke curios­i­ty from inter­est­ed peo­ple, dri­ving traf­fic to your web­site. Addi­tion­al­ly, con­tent mar­ket­ing can help improve brand aware­ness and can help boost sales as well.

When talk­ing strict­ly about SEO con­tent mar­ket­ing, the main goal should be to push rel­e­vant, infor­ma­tive, and engag­ing con­tent to your audi­ence. Rel­e­vant con­tent can tremen­dous­ly improve con­ver­sion, traf­fic, and brand aware­ness and leave the tar­get audi­ence want­i­ng more. 

Good con­tent should also offer val­ue for the con­sumer. Whether it’s just answer­ing a ques­tion, giv­ing inspi­ra­tion, or elab­o­rat­ing on a spe­cif­ic top­ic, good con­tent always has an aim, pur­pose, and val­ue for the reader.

Last­ly, the con­tent being pushed on your web­site needs to be con­sis­tent. Whether blog posts, down­load­able guides, ani­ma­tions, videos, graph­ics, eBooks, or oth­er for­mats,  they should reg­u­lar­ly give the read­ers their required “fix” of infor­ma­tion if you want to posi­tion your­self as a reli­able, author­i­ta­tive voice with­in your niche.

The Future of SEO and Content Marketing

As we’ve dis­cussed above, rel­e­vance and qual­i­ty in con­tent mar­ket­ing are cru­cial for a sol­id SEO strategy.

When assess­ing the win­ning com­bi­na­tion of SEO and con­tent mar­ket­ing, future suc­cess can be sim­ply high­light­ed with the fol­low­ing example.

By opti­miz­ing your site to dri­ve more traf­fic, vis­i­tors who vis­it your page are look­ing for some­thing rel­e­vant that will make them stay. This is where valu­able con­tent comes into play. If the con­tent makes them stay longer, the site’s bounce rate won’t increase. A low bounce rate will indi­cate to Google that the website’s con­tent is rel­e­vant and worth rank­ing high for the users’ search terms. 

The future of SEO and con­tent mar­ket­ing will revolve around cre­at­ing high-qual­i­ty con­tent that major search engines can eas­i­ly rank and judge for spe­cif­ic search terms. Fur­ther­more, a good con­tent strat­e­gy can help site own­ers a great deal with improv­ing their back­link strategy. 

For exam­ple, well-writ­ten, engag­ing blogs are bound to get more shares both from users and oth­er web­sites. And a strong back­link pro­file is also cru­cial for land­ing on the first page of Google. 

The Future of SEO From Google’s Perspective

Those mar­keters and busi­ness own­ers who fol­low the lat­est SEO trends know that Google absolute­ly adores rel­e­vant and high-qual­i­ty content. 

Now, con­tent qual­i­ty and rel­e­vance are key rank­ing fac­tors for Google. How­ev­er, it wasn’t always the case.

Back when the search engine first start­ed rank­ing sites, it was all about key­word and back­link quan­ti­ty. Basi­cal­ly, as long as there were a cou­ple of back­links point­ing to a web page and the con­tent on it was crammed with the tar­get­ed keyword(s), the site would man­age to rank high, even though the con­tent itself was poor. The con­tent mar­ket­ing future (and cur­rent trends, of course) focus­es more on rel­e­vance and quality.

This means that Google will only rank a web­site if search intent and the website’s con­tent match, mean­ing that the user will find exact­ly what they’re look­ing for in the results. The future of SEO points to the dom­i­nance of con­tent mar­ket­ing when we observe some of Google’s pre­vi­ous major updates as well.

For instance, the 2019 Bert update was imple­ment­ed to weed out sub-par con­tent and to bet­ter under­stand the use of nat­ur­al lan­guage to improve search results. 

This major update brought a divid­ing moment in the dig­i­tal realm, fore­shad­ow­ing the con­tent mar­ket­ing future and the future of SEO. It clear­ly indi­cat­ed the tran­si­tion from key­word-stuff­ing, spam­my links, and oth­er black hat tac­tics and focus­ing on deliv­er­ing qual­i­ty to users.

Tactics for SEO Content Marketing

So, if con­tent mar­ket­ing is the future of SEO, how can busi­ness­es get the most out of their pages and their content?

Here are a cou­ple of tac­tics that can help site own­ers improve their SEO metrics.

• Bet­ter under­stand­ing tar­get audi­ences – Invest­ing some time in get­ting to know your audi­ence, their inter­ests, and their behav­ior can go a long way in fine-tun­ing your con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy to fea­ture tru­ly valu­able con­tent that your users will be more than hap­py to engage with.
• Linkwor­thy con­tent – A strong back­link pro­file starts with con­tent wor­thy of link­ing. Focus on com­ing up with a unique angle that will make your con­tent stand out and link-wor­thy. Strive to cre­ate some­thing that peo­ple will active­ly link to and share.
• Share the con­tent your­self –  Your mar­ket­ing chan­nels, social media pages are excel­lent places where you can share your con­tent. By get­ting the word out, peo­ple will poten­tial­ly click on your con­tent and might even link to it. Bet­ter yet, you can send it direct­ly to those who you think can ben­e­fit from it.
• Check out oth­ers – Take a look at what the top-rank­ing com­peti­tors are doing con­tent-wise. Work off of that and aim to cre­ate some­thing superior.
• Go Omni device – Respon­sive con­tent also ranks high with Google. As such, make sure to cre­ate con­tent that users are eas­i­ly able to access through every device. Videos and eBooks may appear dif­fer­ent­ly on mobile devices, so be care­ful about those.

We Understand the Complexities of Content Marketing and SEO

As award-win­ning SEO mar­ket­ing experts, we fol­low the lat­est trends, tech, and top­ics in the world of SEO and dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. We know how to tai­lor the dif­fer­ent SEO and con­tent strate­gies to meet the needs of our clients and their audi­ences. By out­sourc­ing SEO and con­tent mar­ket­ing to us, old and new clients can focus on oth­er aspects of their busi­ness while we make sure that their dig­i­tal ecosys­tem gen­er­ates traf­fic, leads, and ulti­mate­ly, sales.