The foundations of a successful digital strategy are search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing. Google search engine result pages (SERPs) are only scrolled past by 75% of users. The consequences of incorporating SEO into your content marketing strategy will be favorable, and it is crucial for businesses to compete in this digital environment. However, the majority of online marketers distinguish between the two. This results in lost chances to drive traffic to your website.

“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,” is how content marketing is defined.

It’s a fantastic approach to offer important information to your target audience and produce significant results. By showcasing thought leadership and providing your consumers with helpful answers to their issues, content can be utilized to increase client loyalty. For businesses, content marketing can be very beneficial both in the long run and the short run if done well. Every organization ought to have distinct marketing and commercial objectives. The entire sales and marketing funnel can leverage content. From establishing online presence through a variety of channels to generate interest in the beginning through conversions.

The marketing strategy known as SEO, or search engine optimization, aims to increase the quantity and quality of visitors coming to your website through natural search results on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Additionally known as “free” or “natural” traffic. Digital marketers can employ a variety of strategies—some of which are technical—to do this, including improving metadata, making use of the right tags, building strategic sitemaps, and correcting broken links, to name a few.

Along with this, optimizing your website for your most profitable keywords is a crucial component of SEO technique. Your organic ranking for the same keywords will rise as a result, which illustrates how content marketing aids SEO strategy.

As easy as it may sound, increasing traffic to your website is accomplished by optimizing content with pertinent keywords that potential buyers are using to do searches on search engines, namely Google. Since Google accounts for 94% of all search engine traffic, organizations will profit most from adhering to their SEO recommendations.

This will improve the visibility of your company for the key phrases you want to rank for. When Google crawls the content, it ranks it according to its usefulness, quality, and relevance. Great content will be rewarded by Google.

Your SEO strategy will produce fresh, educational material that uses your most valuable keywords if content marketing is given priority. material marketing will enhance your website rather than over-optimizing your current material, which will eventually have a detrimental impact on your search rating. However, Google prefers fresh, updated material. Newly published material is quickly indexed and helps you move up the search results. Your SEO rating rises as more material is added and carefully positioned around your most profitable keywords.

Content marketing assists companies in engagingly and helpfully distributing their desired organic keywords throughout their websites, which can also result in a rise in backlinks. Eventually, this will result in an increase in your domain authority (DA).

From Google’s perspective, domain authority is the same as a company’s reputation. The higher the DA, which is calculated on a scale of 1-100, the more trustworthy and pertinent Google considers the website and its content to be. The secret to raising your score and ultimately being rewarded by showing up on the first page of Google SERPs is producing excellent content and high-quality backlinks.

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Other websites will link back to your website if its content is worthwhile. In order to market your content and obtain some backlinks, you may occasionally need some extra assistance. This may take the form of outreach activities, social media amplification, or digital PR.

Once more, you can only accomplish this if you have a content marketing plan that enables you to create worthwhile, compelling content that is worthy of links.

There are four simple steps that organizations should follow to ensure a successful digital strategy.

1. Set objectives

First and foremost, identify and set the right goals for both SEO and content marketing. Ensure they’re both working towards the same results and are easily measurable, (for example, to increase web traffic and conversion rates).

2. Keyword research

Secondly, understand your target audience and their journey. Start researching keywords that your target audience may be searching for, this will help you produce content that is relevant. This helps you better understand their journey and will help identify the keywords you need to rank for. Industry digital marketing tools such as SEMrush, Moz and Keyword Planner are a great way to research: search volume, competition and average bid costs. These tools will give you a starting point or topic when writing content.

3. Optimize your content

Create SEO friendly content that considers keywords, search volume and interest.  But also make sure it’s optimized for mobile devices. Ensure that all on-page SEO factors are successfully implemented, such as: internal links, title tags, headers, meta descriptions, keywords optimization, alt tags and content quality. This will ensure that the content will rank higher in SERPs.

4. Amplify

Finally, promote your content on social media and through digital PR activity. If you want to go the extra mile, think about outreach content or guest posting in order to transform your content marketing effort into high quality backlinks.

It’s important that marketers bridge the gap between SEO and content marketing, merging both strategies into one. This will lead to greater conversions and leads from organic website traffic, resulting in a better ROI.