Content Marketing

In the context of SEO, Content Marketing stands for the information itself which can take many forms, including text, images, audio recordings, videos as well as more sophisticated forms such as raw data or data-visualisation dashboards, including interactive elements. The Content Marketing Institute defines Content Marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action”.

The Importance of Content Marketing

1. Create Awareness

Content Marketing helps attract potential customers by creating awareness early in the decision-making cycle. This presence in customers’ minds early on increases the chances of them going through the other stages as smoothly as possible, including engaging with the brand and converting as customers.

2. Engage your Audience and Build Credibility

Engaging your audience stands for building relationships with useful content that helps customers better understand their own requirements of a service, or make a decision on, for instance, alternative brands they can choose. In time this can lead to greater credibility from customers at a later point in the decision-making cycle.

3. Generate Conversions

The two previous phases give Content Marketing the power to convert customers. Once it gets to the conversion phase head-on, the place that the product occupies in the customer’s mind is all that is given credit when deciding between alternative brands. This is why it is so important to do Content Marketing just right in the prior two phases.

4. Build Loyalty

The ultimate goal of content marketing is more than just winning the sale, it is keeping the customer informed and engaged, which contributes to building loyalty. It is equally important for content marketing to communicate to customers the value beyond the product that the brand provides.

5. Leveraging Compounding Returns

Finally, content marketing is about leveraging compounding returns which means that compared to other modes of advertising, content marketing can bring sustainable traffic that does not require constant investments. It is about building a sustainable source of communication with your customers that pays back in the long run.

Content Marketing Challenges

1. Comparison to Paid Search

In contrast to the case of paid search which caters to customers that are ready to make a purchase decision, content marketing is present at all stages of the decision-making cycle, from awareness and engagement to conversion. This presence at all stages of the decision-making cycle affords a certain competitive positioning with a strong awareness and some space for credibility, once the customer gets to the conversion stage.

This is not to say that paid search is ineffective, but rather that both, organic and paid search should work hand in hand to sway the decision in favour of your brand, once the customer reaches the conversion stage.

2. Optimising for Long-Term Results

In the context of sales, content marketing can indeed take longer to show results. However, the strength of content marketing lies in its breadth and depth as opposed to immediacy. Content Marketing takes longer to bring to an operational state, but once established it provides a constant source of conversions. Once you have an established audience, that relies on your content marketing efforts, it starts to drive results comparatively faster than otherwise starting from scratch. 

3. Content Marketing Return on Investment

Another challenge around Content Marketing is that the Return on Investment (ROI) is difficult to measure, but it’s only so because Content Marketing offers so much more than just the initial conversions that come with it. 

The AIDA Model

To measure the Content Marketing ROI one must consider all stages of the marketing funnel and namely, the Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA).

Content Marketing Key Success Factors

1. Content Readability

There’s a fair amount of discussion on the importance of readability of content for SEO, which is a topic of its own. Readability is indeed affecting users’ ability to understand the page content, but on its own, it’s too broad a concept to apply in a way that is meaningful in onpage optimisation.

To put it simply, in an SEO context readability can be limited to the alternative uses of language depending on the wider context of the user journey, be it within the page content, the website or the wider organic search neighbourhoods the page is shown under. Depending first and foremost on the user journeys, some alternatives for the use of language are formal vs informal, conversational vs transactional and generic vs specialist.

Ultimately, readability stands for the ability to align the content to the language used by the customers, which starts with the search queries. Some of the questions you should ask are whether your customers are searching using formal terms or are they phrasing the search queries informally; do they adopt a more conversational tone or are they following a rigid transactional query structure? Depending on these questions you can decide on the language that is most appropriate in your writing.

2. Brand Tone of Voice

Some brands have a fairly established tone of voice, others – not so much, whatever the case – continuous research and optimisation of the use of language on a granular level can go a long way in increasing organic search traffic and improving the conversion rates in a manner that is sustainable and affords customers a view of the brand that reaches beyond the bluntness of a business transaction.

A good place to start the research on the topic of language use is to try to get a holistic understanding of all the search queries the website aims to target. This way, especially in the case of follower or niche brands, this process transforms the mindless practice of so-called content building into a mindful one of entering a conversation, one which can be continuously and constructively shaped and realigned according to new standards and developments in the market to achieve a desired form of resolution for the wider brand.

3. Uniqueness of Content (Avoid Duplicate Content)

Like in the case of other onpage elements, good content reveals its most important aspects at the very beginning, keeping the rest for the end. As a general rule, search engines are struggling to decide which pages to show for what keywords. Thus a website which has duplicated content on its landing pages or shared with other websites is likely to experience difficulties ranking on the Web.

Thus over the years search engines have learned to spot websites that use plagiarism. Such websites are often punished with lower search results than the original source of information. Duplicate content remains an issue widely encountered on the Web, however, the point is not so much to avoid the use of other sources in your writing, as it is to write original content that stands out. The Web is still hungry for new original sources of information.

Similarly, duplicate content issues can take technical forms, i.e. it can be an issue rooted in the way the website is coded. When a website has two or more URLs showing the same pages, it is likely to be duplicate content. Thus ensuring regular checks can help alleviate these pages.

The issue of duplicate content also reflects on duplicate links leading to and from that content. Because of the duplicate nature of the content alone, the link equity also suffers. In simple terms, it is diluted among competing links for competing pages as opposed to consolidated into a strong linking structure.

Content Marketing Strategy

The Content Marketing Institute defines Content Marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action”.

A Content Marketing strategy thus stands for the process of creating and distributing content for the purpose of creating awareness and improving retention rates of customers. It can also serve to engage your audience and build credibility in your brand, for the purposes of generating conversions and ultimately leveraging compounding returns. Ahrefs sets apart 9 simple steps one must consider when planning a Content Marketing Strategy:

1. Setting SMART goals
2. Understanding your audience
3. Choosing a content type
4. Finding the right search queries
5. Prioritising the most promising topics
6. Creating a content calendar
7. Promoting your content
8. Monitoring the results
9. Keeping the content evergreen

1. Setting SMART goals

Setting SMART objectives means following a framework that has a set of rules which aim to ensure the objectives are clear and reachable, in simple terms. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. This criteria are commonly attributed to Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives concept, but expanded further by some authors to SMARTER, also incorporating Evaluated and Reviewed.

2. Understanding Your Audience

Understanding your audience means attracting visitors to your website that might actually convert into customers. So if you’re interested in targeting a particular audience what your search must begin with is understanding the topics your audience is interested in. This is often achieved through designing the so-called Buyer Personas.

A Buyer Persona is a limited group of customers defined by a set of preferences and characteristics. It could include such demographical aspects as age, location, occupation, but depending on the industry can get very technical very quickly, including such aspects as user needs, personal and professional challenges, career goals, and emotional appeal.

If you prefer a more academic definition, here’s one coming from Tony Zambito, that defines Buyer Personas as “research-based archetypal (modelled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behaviour, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions”. Particularly relevant to the digital context, this frameworks also include “where buyers buy as well as when they decide to buy”.

3. Choosing a Content Type

Even though a fair amount of content marketing experts prefer to focus on a handful of content types, considering the other ones a waste of time, exploring which one is the right one for you well ahead can prove a valuable investment down the road.

A good point to start in choosing the right content type is your audience, namely ask yourself what type of content your audience consumes the most. Secondly, it is equally important to consider where your skillset lies. Are you a natural on camera or do you have a way with the written word?

Here’s a comprehensive list of different content types:

1. Blogs
2. Emails
3. eBooks
4. Podcasts
5. Whitepapers
6. Videos
7. Infographics
8. Webinars
9. Case studies
10. Presentations
11. Testimonials
12. Quizzes

4. Finding the Right Search Queries

So, if you’re goals sound something like “attracting targeted traffic from Organic Google Search”, for a specific audience like “Digital Marketing Professionals” using “Evergreen Content in the form of digestible Articles and Emails”, then finding the right search queries can prove significantly easier than you might expect.

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

In order to achieve this you will need to employ the good old Keyword Research using a tool like Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer. To begin, you will need to brainstorm a few relevant so-called ‘seed’ keywords. Seed keywords are the keywords you use to begin the discovery of new relevant keywords to target. “Content Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy” could serve as two strong examples of seed keywords for this article.

You will have to paste these keywords in Keywords Explorer and select your preferred Search Engine depending on your requirements. You can then browse for keyword ideas based on matching terms, related terms or search suggestions.

5. Prioritising Search Topics

Prioritising the most promising topics can be achieved by employing a scale beginning with the product being an irreplaceable solution for the problem and ending with the product being completely irrelevant in solving the problem. Most topics would fit somewhere in the middle, and the key here is ensuring you don’t target queries that are too close to the latter.

Even when you’ve put all your topics on this scale, there are further processes that afford to tackle the prioritisation of Search Topics including such practices as Keyword Mapping. Keyword Mapping fuels the practice of both Content Marketing (for new content) and Onpage Optimisation (for existing content).

In other words, Keyword Mapping involves attributing keywords to web pages based on their propensity to positively influence organic rankings. Thus, in a few words, Keyword Mapping stands for the practice of specifying which of the new or existing web pages should rank for what keywords.

6. Creating a Content Calendar

Publishing content consistently comes with finding the balance between your content quality and the speed of production. So, if your goal is publishing as often as possible without dropping your quality standards, what you need is a content calendar. While you should allow for similar periods in between posts, it’s really up to you how long those in-between periods will be – it all depends on how long you estimate it will take you to bring a piece of content to production.

A content calendar also often referred to as an editorial calendar is a schedule used by content and marketing practitioners to organise and manage content production. On a wider level, a content calendar gives a top-level overview of everything that will be published over a specific timeframe.

In other words, content calendars are mere schedules showing what is planned to be published, when and by whom. On an individual piece level, it can also allow space for mentioning how far in their writing the writers are and when the content is ready for reviews and revisions by which parties, along with references to content formats and channels.

7. Promoting the Content

One of the best ways of promoting your content is sharing it with your email subscribers. The main reason for this is the integration between the idea of evergreen content which means that it remains relevant over time with the idea of freshly made available. In other words, the best way of promoting your content is by exposing your most engaged customers to it, through a channel that in itself is a testament to the content’s freshness.

In the context of SEO, there’s also a secondary target. Known as “content amplifiers”, these are the journalists and influencers who can share and amplify your content to their followers. Not only does this directly provides you exposure to a new audience, but also contributes towards the content being featured in organic search and on social media. In SEO, this is known as “outreach”. The key to doing this well is having a compelling reason so that journalists and influencers will care about it and this normally falls under one of these two:

1. You have mentioned them or their work in a relevant setting
2. You have something worthwhile the influencer didn’t know about, but could be genuinely interested in

8. Monitoring the Results

When it comes to monitoring the results in a digital setting, the first things that come to mind are Keyword Research and Web-Analytics. When it comes to understanding traffic in terms of keywords, both Google Search Console Ahrefs’s Rank Tracker are great tools for a number of reasons.

Google Search Console

Firstly, organic search estimates asides, Google Search Console is the single source of truth for what keywords your website is already ranking for, in what positions as well as the number of individual clicks to every search query and landing page.

Secondly, Google Search Console also provides insights into more technical aspects of websites including coverage reports, sitemaps, page experience, core web vitals and mobile usability.

Google Search Console, however, is quite limited in terms of understanding keywords outside the website setting. For a broader view of the overall market SEO Managers tend to rely on other SEO tools.

Ahrefs Rank Tracker

Among these other tools are also the Ahrefs SEO tools with Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker being a great tool, particularly for tracking the overall performance of your organic search on a per keyword basis, in comparison to your 10 nearest competitors.

It provides insights on such aspects as Search Visibility, Average Ranking Positions, Estimated Organic Traffic, presence in SERP Features, and individual Ranking Positions.

Despite the usefulness of these Keyword Research practices and these Keyword Research tools in particular, they have certain limitations in that they don’t show the full picture of how users behave once they arrive at the website.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is split into a range of reports spanning Realtime coverage, an overview of website Audience, the website’s Acquisition channels, an overview of onsite Behaviour as well as Conversions.

9. Keeping the Content Evergreen

As you move forward with your new content, as previously mentioned it is always a good idea to track its performance as much through Google Analytics and Google Search Console as through Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. However, it might also be reasonable to come back to it over time to update it in order for it to maintain and advance its rankings in search results and make it evergreen.

Depending on how well any piece of content is doing and whether it is climbing or falling down in the organic rankings, one can make judgements on whether the content just needs updating a bit of information to keep it fresh or rewriting the post entirely. It is generally a good idea to wait about six months to give a blog post time to rank before deciding to rewrite it.