Using SEO to Drive Content Marketing

If you think search engine optimization is just keyword repetition and directory submissions to fatten up your link profile, you’re living in 2006. Modern SEO is central to content marketing, from the early planning stages to measuring success and acting on the data.

Plan the Content Marketing Strategy

Before a single line is written or frame of video is shot, every content marketing program needs a strategy. SEO data is a critical contributor to the process both because it tends to illuminate what customers want and because planning for SEO in at the start increases the odds of winning those free organic search eyeballs at the end.

Keyword research is an important – and free – piece of insight in the strategic process because it identifies exactly what real customers need, want and worry about. And 90 percent of the time the language those searching customers use will not mirror your marketing speak.

Every data source requires critical thinking. It’s important to keep in mind that keyword research only shows “what” people search for, not who they are. We can’t know for certain that these shaving-related searches are performed by women, but the odds are that the majority of these leg- and bikini-shaving searches are done by women based on societal norms in the U.S.

Beyond keyword research, SEO can influence the strategic planning process in other ways. Monitor phrases that drive traffic to your site — using Webmaster Tools, AdWords, and analytics. Depending on whether the goal is increased brand recognition, increased traffic for poor-performing products, increased traffic for top-performing products, or increased conversion rates, your organic search analytics data will identify how customers are already thinking of your content and finding your content.

The difference between how marketers planned to communicate with searchers and how they actually are frequently surprises them. Understanding this dichotomy in the strategic planning phase of the content marketing process will help you better plan for content to target your customers’ wants and needs.

Produce the Content

Most marketers suddenly realize that SEO should be involved somewhere in the content creation process. However, if SEO hasn’t been baked in from the beginning of the content marketing program, applying some keywords just before the content launches will almost certainly fail to drive organic search visits and sales.

SEO impacts a wide variety of content decisions from platforms and URLs to site features and information architecture to how content is developed. Oh, yes, and the words used on the page. Some of the most important decisions for SEO success, however, happen before copy writers are even getting started.

If one of my primary goals of the content marketing program is organic search visits and conversions on my ecommerce site, there are far more ways to go wrong for SEO at this stage than to go right, including:

• Syndicating recipe content from major recipe sites;
• Hosting the recipes as a microsite on a cool new keyword domain;
• Posting the recipes solely on Pinterest;
• Contracting with a reviews or internal site search vendor that uses JavaScript or Flash to capture and display recipe content in your store pages.

All of these scenarios could be fantastic ways to meet the goals outlined in the content marketing strategy, but they will severely damage the program’s ability to attract customers via organic search. And all of these scenarios would be decided before marketers typically think to consider SEO, long before the writers get started creating copy.

Promote the Content

Too often marketers stop here. The content is finished, it’s amazing, and it’s live! But where are the visitors? Without promotion, the content you’ve worked so hard to target and create may not drive any additional visits or sales.

Promotion is even necessary to prime the organic search pump. Think about it this way: New content hasn’t had the time or the viewers needed to establish authority of its own. So until it can acquire authority as other sites mention it and link to it and people share it with their social networks, your amazing new content is not “amazing” to the search engines.

Promotion, then, is critical to get the ball rolling to drive organic search. Traditional promotional channels like press relations, email marketing, social media, PPC and offline advertising all benefit help to get the messaging in front of more eyeballs to start that initial flow of mentions, links and shares. Once that happens organic search itself becomes a promotional vehicle, exposing more and more searchers to your content.

Perform and Perfect

Closing the loop on the content marketing process, we need to measure the effectiveness of the content and optimize it to produce greater returns. This performance feedback should also feed into the next round of content marketing strategy.

Seo works beautifully within this framework because it is at its core about measurement and optimization of organic search performance.

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