Reasons Content Marketing Outperforms SEO
Your website content has to deliver your promise and communicate your value. As more and more people get online to find answers and do their shopping, it’s become increasingly vital that your business be visible, front and center. That’s the business of search engine optimization or SEO. But it’s also why your content is king.
We’ve written about this idea before:
SEO for the Rest of Us
But there’s still more to say. For many business owners, SEO is a “black box” that seems like a marketing necessity, but no one quite knows how it’s supposed to work. Ask five different SEO experts, and you’ll likely get five different versions of the best way to approach SEO for business websites.
Some say backlinks drive ranking. Others say you need long-form content on every web page. Still others swear by keyword research and Google Adwords campaigns. Then there’s the growing reliance on landing pages. While all these strategies play a role in improving your website rank toward that coveted Number One on the First Page listing, they may all fail without website content that converts.
Content Is King Because…
SEO delivers eyeballs to your website. It maximizes your website to attract the people most likely to buy your service or product. It positions your website listing so that more people see it. But it’s your website’s job to convert those visitors into lasting customers. Without useful and persuasive content, your website wastes all the chances that SEO delivers.
Content is king because it prepares your website for all the traffic it sees. When it’s done properly, your website content:
- Communicates your competitive advantage
- Connects with your target audience
- Delivers useful information and answers questions
- Makes your site the “go-to” destination for your industry and location
- Persuades visitors to contact you
Keywords and Content
Keywords do actually work to help people find your website. But once they’re there, reading your content and perusing your pages, the keywords should be virtually invisible. This doesn’t mean hiding your keywords in invisible ink at the bottom of each page — that kind of behavior now gets you punished by search engines, and rightly so.
Keywords need to appear within the content, as part of the content. But if content is king, your keywords are the pawns that shouldn’t knock your readers senseless. In other words, if a visitor to your website notices obvious keywords, you’re overusing them. Subtlety is the champion of effective website content. Ray Access writers shoot for a one percent keyword density and sometimes purposefully under-deliver. A higher density smacks of an advertisement.
Attract, Don’t Repel
For your content to achieve all of the goals listed above, it must speak to your audience and it must deliver value. It can’t do that if it screams out its keywords every chance it gets. Above all, make friends with your audience. Offer your virtual hand and provide something that’s worth the trust you’re asking for.
In other words, provide value to your website visitors. If you can do that, they’ll remember you; they’ll think of you first when they’re ready to buy — or recommend — what you offer. As one content marketing firm once wrote: “To be good at SEO, you need to stop thinking about SEO.” Because content is king, it remains at the top of all online marketing efforts.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.