Content Marketing and SEO

SEO has changed so much over the last few years and the old content marketing techniques just don't cut it anymore. You HAVE to have the highest quality website and content now to earn and continue to climb in page rank. In order to do this correctly you must invest your own time and dedication into the SEO for your business.

Here is some insight on why content marketing could be considered the new SEO:

Content marketing is the cheapest and most effective way to do SEO these days. Not only does writing high quality content produces links at a quicker pace than building them manually, but it’s also cheaper. Plus, your content will naturally get shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest.

My content marketing experience

I’ve always built my organic search traffic through content marketing. “Why?” you may ask. It’s cheaper, and it provides faster results. We were able to launch KISSmetrics and get over 100,000 monthly organic visitors in less than a year just through blogging and creating infographics. We didn’t build one link manually… we just spent our time and money on content marketing. I did the same with Quick Sprout. Google drives around 90,000 visitors a month to the blog, and I didn’t have to manually build one link. I just wrote a lot of high quality content… 311 blog posts to be exact.

The big difference between content marketing and paid SEO

There is one huge difference between paying to do all of the things above and spending the money on content marketing. Can you guess what it is? Nope, it isn’t the price difference of $1,047,705.80. Guess again… Content marketing doesn’t get affected by algorithm updates, while paid SEO does. Search engines can tell when you provide value, and in the long run, that’s the kind of stuff they want to make sure stays high in the rankings. So, instead of investing in short term solutions that may increase your overall rankings and traffic, invest in the long term solution of content marketing.

Conclusion

Now that you know content marketing is the new SEO, spending money on it doesn’t guarantee results. Over the last few years, I’ve tested a lot of different types of content and found that certain types produce better results than others.

Detailed content – short blog posts tend to get fewer links than detailed, thorough content. Don’t try to replicate what Huffington post does by producing hundreds of new pieces of content each day… focus on quality.

Digestible infographics – if you can make complex data easy to understand in a visual format, you can get millions of visitors to your website.

Social profiles – a key requirement to a successful content marketing strategy is owning powerful social profiles. Make sure you build up your Twitter and Facebook profiles. You’ll need them to spread your content.

Collect emails – make sure you have email opt-in forms in your sidebar and leverage pop-ups to collect even more emails. If you have a solid email list, you can always email it every time you publish a new blog post or content piece. This is an easy way to kick start the virality process.

Be consistent – if you can’t publish content on a regular basis, no matter how good your content is, it will be tough to get a good ROI out of your content marketing. Make sure you publish content on a regular basis.

Headlines matter – no matter how good your content is, if you can’t write attractive headlines, no one will read your content. Learn how to write good headlines.