Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach to create and distribute valuable and relevant content to attract and retain the target audience as well as turn them into the seller. This way, it benefits the bottom line of any business.
No matter what type of marketing you use, content marketing is the core of your process, not something separate.
From blogs, articles, infographics, to white papers, and videos, there are many ways to use content to generate new interest as well as grow your audience.
A relevant and informative piece of content educates and helps the audience, boosting its traffic, visibility, and scalability. And this is what the search engines like Google look for.
Google rewards the online businesses or websites which continually updated their website content with fresh, useful content that match the search intent with higher rankings.
Based on this, here’s how content marketing can benefit your rankings.
1. Improving SEO Results
The way to rank your website goes through effective SEO practices.
And those effective SEO practices are based on thoughtful content strategies.
However, that doesn’t mean you create a heap of blogs to get ranking.
There is no use of those 200 blogs if they are not able to solve the problem of your audience. A good piece of content engages, informs, and educates your customers. Google, the search engine giant, loves the content that is loved by the audience. Needless to say, it keeps your site at the top of the ranking.
Quality content marketing can make a difference in your search engine results. And it takes you to think like your customer and how they use a search phrase.
2. Making Your Brand Look Credible
Creating informative and educational content impacts how the audience thinks of your brand and how they relate to it.
In other words, your content builds an impression of your brand. If your target audience finds what they read information and useful, they will think positively of your brand. And Google makes sure that this type of content shows up in the top search results.
Let’s assume you are creating content on the protein supplements for muscle gain.
You can find related information easily over the Internet. But how will you make it look credible?
Keep in mind that today’s customers are savvy.
They can’t be impressed with a plain text bragging about the benefits of protein.
Therefore, you need to make it credible and authentic by adding relevant information backed by surveys, studies, and expert opinions.
Needless to say, this requires you to burn your midnight oil in researching and collect the information. That’s what content marketing is all about.
People will like and share your credible content. It will encourage them to share with their friends.
Once Google comes to know that your content is engaging and credible, it shows in the top ranking.
3. Attracting New Leads
Content marketing also helps you get leads.
According to one study by HubSpot, brands that produce blogs generate over 60% leads that those who don’t.
However, it calls for an efficient strategy to generate leads from your content. For example, you can add downloadable PDFs, eBooks, or infographics that summarize or accent a piece of content where the reader is needed to fill out a form to access it. This way, it helps you generate leads and build your email list as well.
Once you get the readers’ contact details, you can augment them with more informative content through a bi-monthly newsletter that contains educational content along with special deals and coupons. This helps the potential customers move through the sales funnel to become the converted customers.
Content marketing keeps on delivering an ROI even with mature blogs. For example, old blogs and articles continue to capture leads over the years.
4. Encouraging People to Return to Your Website
Publishing relevant, original, and fresh content regularly is the best way to keep people coming back to your website again and again, whether they’ve only visited once before or they are a regular visitor.
In the digital world, your website is your storefront and stands for your business and brand, so the more time prospective and existing customers are exposed to it, the more likely you are to convince them to buy from your business or inquire about your services.
The frequency of your content marketing will be determined by your time and commitment, but looking for one blog post a week can keep your content section fresh enough.
Making them sign up to your mailing list is a great way to keep them coming back to your website. For example, you can add a call to the action button to make them subscribe to your blogs and other updates.
Sharing your content on social media also encourages your audience to check out your blogs.
Furthermore, savvy websites use interactive elements like polls and videos and maintain a comment part for live conversations and debates.
This way, content marketing helps encourage the people to visit your site again and again, signaling the search engine that your website is worth ranking.
5. Traffic from Social Media
Social media platforms are a great way to reach and engage new leads while promoting long-lasting relationships with your existing customers.
The more valuable content you create, the more material you will have to share on your social media outlets. Once customers find out that your contents are valuable and useful, they will have no option but to follow you on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and wherever else you might be. In fact, they are more likely to share it with their friends and followers, widening your audience on these platforms.
Bottom Line
So you must have understood how content marketing strategy helps boost the ranking of your online business or a website.
It works by improving your traffic, building your brand authority, spreading positivity about your brand, encouraging people to visit again, and getting traffic from social media. By working over all these elements, content marketing shows to Google or any other search engine that your brand understands people and their search intent better.
What do you think? Let us know by commenting below!
Helen Wilson is a marketing manager at Savah. She is a keen follower of technology and loves to write about latest trends and tips from the tech industry.