The power of content marketing

Guest blog by Dan White

One of the earliest conversations I have with clients is about what keywords or phrases they’d like their website to appear for. Often their suggestions make a lot of sense but the unfortunate reality is that they’re trying to compete against other players in both their industry and beyond.?

While we can work on the SEO of a site to eventually compete in the spaces, I know that you can’t be waiting years to see your website start to rank and finally generate sales. So alongside this we look at implementing content marketing to bridge the gap.?

This is a fundamental pillar of the SEO work undertaken by the internal marketing teams at Lifestory. Collaboratively working on content calendars and sharing best practices to ensure all of the websites and news articles across the group have relevant, topical and authentic content, it has been great to see the buy-in from the marketing teams across Lifestory.

If you haven’t heard the phrase content marketing (in SEO terms) it is the process of adding content to your website that’s non-commercial in nature. You will have seen it online. How to articles, calculators, key stats and so on.?

If you want to see one of the best examples out there take a look at Purina and their Finding a Pet content hub to see what I mean. The result of just this page? They rank in the 1st position for ‘finding a pet’ a phrase searched for 6,600 times a month in the UK. And after those people arrive on Purina’s website? At some point they’re going to need pet food.

There’s some major advantages to content marketing when you know you operate in a competitive field:

• Content keywords are generally less competitive than regular commercial keywords meaning more chances to rank on Google earlier on
• Each content piece can bring in a small amount of traffic. However, there’s often hundreds of topics you could write about so over time you attract add a sizeable amount of traffic to your site from relevant audiences
• The presence of quality content on your website can also help attract links from other websites. That in turn boosts the authority of your website as a whole

There is a whole range of things to consider if you embark on a content marketing campaign but here’s 3 of the most useful things to keep in mind:

• See what people are searching for using tools like alsoasked.com and answerthepublic.com – there’s a wealth of topics you’ll uncover which you hadn’t thought about
• Take a deep dive into Google and actually look at the content that Google is ranking. What are the similarities between the top ranking results? It’s likely you’ll need to do something similar if you hope to rank there
• Show your expertise – don’t talk about topics where you have no authority to do so. You wouldn’t be giving tax advice if you weren’t an accountant for instance. This all falls under the umbrella of a term called Google EAT which is incredibly important to understand and will play a key component how your website performs

Over the years I’ve seen so many businesses commit to content marketing with some incredible results. It certainly takes time, effort and patience but content marketing can make a sizable difference to both your website results and your revenue. With a committed team at Lifestory, who understand the importance of organic traffic and SEO, it has been great to see the results of the their hard work - with much more to come in the future!