Content Marketing: original content and SEO optimized
Content marketing is the production of thematic content for the purpose of generating qualified traffic to the website and increasing visits from users akin to one’s business goals.
Content marketing is a technique ofinbound marketing, which in Italian can be defined as “attraction marketing” to emphasize the concept that users and potential customers are “attracted” to the services or products offered through valuable informational or entertainment content.
Over the years within web marketing strategies that of content marketing has gained increasing importance for several reasons:
- Informational content and communication through the Web have become strategically crucial to reach one’s audience, especially for b2c businesses;
- With the spread of social networks and the sharing capabilities they offer, content has become the main vehicle for brand promotion;
- Search engine rankings continue to be influenced by inbound links, and nothing works better than original, quality content to attract links to your site;
- Creating optimized seo content is unquestionably the best way to rank well among the search results returned by google.
Promoting the company through online content: inbound marketing
In order to develop a good content marketing strategy, you need to be clear about your target audience and what topics pique the interest of the people in it.
If the target audience is not particularly narrow, it will be useful to divide it into categories of “personas” with differentiated and well-defined profiles so as to plan the production of ad hoc content for each profile.
Topics and subject areas can be identified in many ways, among the main ones:
- Leverage one’s knowledge of the field;
- Carry out internet searches to uncover discourses around the target keywords;
- Analyze your competitors’ content marketing strategy;
- Investigate the topics covered within social channels and the type of users involved;
- Identify among blogs and social networks so-called “opinion leaders” or “influencers”: content producers with a large following from whom to draw inspiration and to whom to turn to extend the reach of their messages;
- Rely on content marketing experts and web editors to create content.
When targets and subject areas have been defined, the most suitable web formats to convey content to the various target categories should be selected: web pages, pdfs, videos, slides, etc.
Depending on the category and type of content, a certain format will be preferred; there is nothing to prevent you from taking advantage of all available formats with their specific characteristics.
Unconventional marketing: producing content and spreading it virally
The Internet and in particular social channels (social networks, forums, online communities, collective blogs, etc.) allow information, content and advertising messages to spread with a speed and pervasiveness unprecedented in history.
The sharing functions available in virtually all social web profiles and mobile applications make relationship and conversational marketing an infinitely more concrete and dynamic reality than in the pre-internet era, when the progressive enlargement of the relationship of trust with customers relied on the relentless slowness of word of mouth.
Content marketing fits within the context of unconventional marketing techniques with the goal of exploiting the viral potential provided by social technologies.
Those who choose to promote their business by creating original and engaging content should ideally aspire to make each piece of content (article, post, video, pdf, photo) a product worthy of viral dissemination.
The more value the material created incorporates, the more it will spread through the spontaneous sharing (share) of Internet users. In this sense, content marketing contains within itself the constant possibility of converting into viral marketing and greatly amplifying the company’s promotional communication.
Youtube has made viral videos a reality available to anyone; Facebook allows impactful messages to be shared with huge audiences; Twitter to launch news and news at a speed that makes people smile. Millions of bloggers around the world bounce informative content, almost in real time, turning the Internet into a global pinball machine.
Those who have something to say and added value to put on the Web find blog marketing a formidable weapon for promoting their business.
From link building to content marketing
One of the most relevant factors for seo ranking is the number and quality of links from other sites on the network, a fact that search engines interpret as a signal of the popularity of the site to which the links are directed.
For this reason, over the years seo consultants have developed numerous techniques to multiply inbound links by “artificially” pumping up the value of their clients’ sites.
The art of purely quantitative artificial link building worked until Google decided with a series of updates to its algorithms to penalize these techniques and reward the real informational value of Internet pages.
Just think of the seo impact produced by Google Panda 4.0 capable of collapsing the ranking of a behemoth like eBay.
To this is due the shift in interest of industry experts toward content marketing. This is not to say that links have lost importance as a contributing factor in improving google rankings, more simply that search engines are now able to assess the genuineness of inbound links (backlinks) and judge the quality of a website’s content.
Genuine and spontaneous links should include so-called “social mentions,” or any kind of link from social channels as a result of user appreciation. All the more reason to acquire many subscribers and good engagement through social media marketing.
As a consequence of all this, thestrategic use of qualitycontent has taken hold, not only because of its intrinsic value, but precisely because of its ability to attract links and go viral.
In this sense, content marketing borders on link baiting or link earning: making content that arouses interest to earn links and improve seo ranking.
SEO and Content Marketing
Seo optimization and content marketing are forms of inbound marketing that aim to increase site visitors without online advertising investment.
The two techniques are strongly related for a number of reasons:
- Content is the key material analyzed by search engines to determine the organic ranking of sites in relation to the keywords used;
- All types of content (text, images, video..) support some form of seo optimization;
- Content syndication is a content marketing technique of granting permission for other websites to publish their content as well. When such publication is not accompanied by SEO tricks, one risks incurring penalties related to the problem of duplicate content;
- As we have seen, backlinks and social mentions generated through content marketing translate into seo value and improve ranking among search results;
- Content is also the material on which one can (and should) act with the seo technique of internal linking (creating links between pages and content published on the site and social channels). The conscious linking of all this material is a powerful factor in seo optimization that leverages the sophisticated semantic interpretation of content developed by Google and the other engines;
- Finally, valuable, well-positioned content promoted on social networks gains visibility and generates virality which, in turn, multiplies social mentions and backlinks across the network, in a virtuous circle where content marketing activity is at the center of it all.
Of course, results also vary depending on the industry in which you are operating: a company in the industrial chemical sector has limited margins of benefit, but think, for example, of the extraordinary results produced by tourism web marketing combined with blog marketing and other promotional forms.
The content is king also in sectors such as: clothing, food, internet, entertainment, culture and many others. Undoubtedly, Made in Italy brands have not yet fully developed the potential of content marketing in storytelling version.
In conclusion, content marketing and seo are two sides of the same coin: businesses and professionals who have the perseverance to devote themselves to both achieve great results and in the medium to long term save on the costs generated by online advertising.