SEO and content marketing have been the key to marketing over the last 15 years. They have become the heart of digital marketing and no online marketing is complete without the integration of both into your overall marketing strategy. Brandon Leibowitz from SEO Optimizers and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss pro tips on how small business owners can excel at SEO and content marketing.
Summary
How Small Businesses Can Excel At SEO and Content Marketing
As a small business owner, your knowledge of SEO and content marketing can be critical to building your brand. Digital marketing isn’t easy but knowing SEO best practices can help drive traffic to your websites, increase conversion, and generate maximum results.
Creating SEO-friendly content that ranks above your competitors demands excellent SEO skills.
Read on to know how you can become an SEO pro and level up your content marketing strategy.
What is Content Marketing in SEO?
There’s no doubt that SEO and content marketing have dramatically changed the digital marketing world. Content marketing is a marketing technique that involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire customers. Small businesses leverage content marketing to drive profitable customer action.
However, to succeed in content marketing, you need to build a comprehensive and holistic SEO strategy. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) simply means improving your site to enhance its visibility when customers and prospects search for your products or services related to your business in search engines including Google, Bing, Youtube, and more.
Search Engine Optimization is an integral part of content marketing. In fact, content marketing without SEO is like a car without an engine. Both must go hand in hand for your overall strategy to be successful. 
What is Content Marketing Strategy?
Every marketing activity needs a working plan to be successful. Content marketing strategy focuses on mapping out the implementation and distribution of your brand’s content marketing materials. It’s a plan that gives you a sense of purpose and direction and helps keep you on track in your journey to ensure that your content marketing effort reaches its goal.
You don’t want a disjointed and confusing content marketing experience. A good strategy helps you become systematic in your content marketing endeavor by having specific goals, success metrics, and processes for continuous improvement. In addition, it ensures that the efforts and resources you invested in your marketing strategy significantly impact the bottom line.
Why Do Content Marketing?
Undoubtedly, marketing content has assumed a prominent position in today’s marketing enterprise that it’s no longer fashionable for businesses not to be online. Virtually every business has realized the overwhelming importance of leveraging creative content marketing to build their publicity and get profitable outcomes.
There are many compelling reasons you want to optimize your content marketing, including building trust, developing relationships, generating leads, and improving conversions. Customers want to know how your products can be a perfect solution to their problems in today’s world. Plus, to compete favorably in your business niche, you must educate them through high-quality content.
What’s more, consistent content helps you build credibility and trust and up your business reputation. Below are the main reasons you don’t want to miss out on the many opportunities that content marketing brings.
- To build a loyal audience
- To generate more leads
- To improve conversion
- To build brand awareness
- To educate your customers and prospects
How to excel in SEO and Content Marketing
Content marketing offers numerous benefits to small business owners, but many marketers don’t know how to implement a result-oriented strategy despite its immense impact.
Knowing the right way to go about your marketing content effort is key to having a successful content marketing strategy. Below we have highlighted the tips to help you create a valuable strategy.
Create content that has a measurable business goal
Simply writing content is not enough. Your content should be purposeful and targeted toward serving a defined audience. While crafting your content, you should be strategic to ensure that it ties back to your overall marketing strategy. Your content won’t attract prospects if it doesn’t connect to your business, no matter the quality. In addition, you’ll want to use analytics to know whether your content reaches the right audience.
Understand Your Audience
You need to brainstorm with your team to find the ideal customer your products will best serve. In other words, you should create a buyer persona document that your team will readily refer to. Knowing your audience helps you craft compelling content that resonates with them as they go through the buyer’s journey.
Write Content that Educates and Solves Problems
When you’re crafting content, you have two major objectives: to educate and proffer solutions to a problem. With these goals in mind, you will establish your brand as a reliable source of information and prove your expertise in your business niche.
Do Keyword(S) Research and Use them Appropriately.
Keyword research is critical in content writing because it gives you the knowledge of what people are actively searching for on search engines. Using the right keyword(s) in your content increases your organic search visibility, rankings, and traffic. Keywords are an essential aspect of content marketing and SEO. When you don’t optimize your content with the necessary keywords, it will be near impossible for your target audience to discover your online presence.
Link Building
Link building is one of the major ranking factors of search engines. You should consider link building because it has a tremendous effect on optimizing content to be SEO-friendly. It means acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own sites. Link building is important in content because search engines use links to crawl the web. In addition, It’s also used to connect one website to another.
Track Your Performance
Besides churning out quality content daily, you should put in place some metrics for measuring success because it means little if viewers don’t convert into customers. By carefully monitoring and tracking key performance indicators, you will know what’s working and what’s not and improve.
Be Consistent and Up-to-Date
Consistency is essential in content marketing strategy. For you to rank in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), you must publish consistently. Additionally, being consistent helps you establish trust with your audience.
About Our Guest, Brandon Leibowitz
Brandon Leibowitz runs and operates SEO Optimizers since 2007. SEO Optimizers are a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium-sized businesses get more online traffic, which in turn converts into clients, sales, leads, and more.
More About Financing Solutions.
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