Content Marketing and SEO

Content Marketing, the word and faux pas of the year. Established in the modern marketing mix despite critical corrections, restrained acceptance and sceptical objections. But what is content marketing anyway?

Content marketing technically summarizes all strategies and practices in order to create added value content for the advertised brand or product. In addition, content marketing is also used to promote your own content, whether in an informative, educational, entertaining or decorative way.

In SEO one experiences the power of impact, the content marketing that unfolds independently of the communication format and channel used, now a special focus on the generation of natural traffic on the company’s website, leads interested customers in the theme world of the company and its products, and thus sales to increase turnover. Content marketing is becoming more and more popular from year to year and the demand is constantly increasing.

Therefore, the goal is to convince the own target group of the own company and the range of services, if necessary even of the own brand, and thus to win and keep them as customers. A company can only achieve this if it addresses the customer directly and informs, advises and entertains them.

How can one speak of sustainability in SEO?

SEOs with more technical than linguistic expertise no longer strive for quick and thus short-lived ranking successes, but rather for the consolidation of organically achieved top rankings on sustainably relevant content.

This requires the creation of high-quality content and the marketing of that content, which in turn is based on demand. The aim is to build a large number of qualitative links in order to gain and maintain good positions for the keywords in demand in the search engines. This shows that the more popular a content is and the more it is linked by interested parties, the higher the organic ranking of the landing page on which it is offered.

Here again it becomes apparent that cooperation plays an important role. You have to get away from push marketing. This means that the customer must not be pushed to the product, but that pull marketing should be used. This means that you attract the attention of the customer by providing appealing content so that they enter into a productive dialogue with the company.

How and what are the effects of content strategies?

In the best case, a content strategy has a simultaneous effect on several performance indicators in modern online marketing. The goal of an effective digital content strategy is to increase brand attention in such a way that the target group will be looking for the brand’s content offering in the long term, will subscribe to it, recommend it to others and thus contribute to significant reach.

More recommendable for social networks on the Internet is content worth sharing, which inspires and keeps the exchange between users alive. The more social media users participate in this conversation via shares, likes and tweets, the more social signals the content sends to the search engine. The number and quality of rankings for the short and long-tail keywords as well as the backlinks are further indicators. Organic traffic and the resulting increase in leads and sales are ultimately the most meaningful.

What happens with the content during the content campaign?

A content campaign has a beginning, but no end. The idea behind the creation, provision and marketing of content is that the effort in terms of time and money pays off in the long run. Good content remains good, relevant and helpful, even when it is not up-to-date.

To achieve this, campaign planning and target definition is the most important but also the most difficult step. Fundamental questions must be clarified in advance from various angles, as this is the only way to build high-quality backlinks and profitable rankings in the subject area.

Perspective from the SEO point of view:

• To which keywords can you rank your own content? Is there already a demand for this topic?
• In which content can content be continuously recycled?
• How can the basic story be spun further?
• From which sites and also multipliers from the topic area do links have to be generated in order to be perceived as a source of information?

Perspective from a content point of view:

• How is the content? Interesting, problem-solving, educational, entertaining?
• Who represents the target group of our content? Who should link and distribute our content?
• What is the content supposed to achieve in the short and long term?
• How do you guarantee the longevity of the content? What are the quality requirements?

A clever alignment of content formats to their individual function in the overall strategy is particularly important. Only a correct instrumentalisation of the communication channels is decisive for success.