You produce great content, but is it getting in front of the right sets of eyes? Content marketing is a complex skill set that requires more than just great writing—you also need SEO smarts.
In the first installment of their content marketing series on the Look Left @ Marketing podcast, Bryan Scanlon and Look Left’s head of digital Matt Raven discuss what content marketing is, how to use tech to optimize content and gain greater visibility. Conversation highlights include:
- Content marketers can no longer ignore voice search optimization: “Think about what your behaviors are when you’re asking your smart device something in your home. (You’re) typically multitasking and, predominately, you’re looking for a quick answer to a very specific question. So it’s really important for us as marketers to have an ever-deeper understanding of users, the devices they’re using and the intent behind these searches, and to start to build and reframe our content in a way that’s not just optimized for traditional search, but also for voice-based prompts.”
- SEO is a strategic combination of art and science: “There’s an argument to be made that if you fall too in love with clever language and campaignable slogans you may miss out on getting that in front of the right audience. However, I’ve seen numerous brands make the mistake of going too all-in on the science approach, and it just becomes word vomit, for lack of a better phrase. You actually haven’t created anything that’s interesting or valuable to your audience. I would always encourage people to start that content marketing process in the same way we always have: What problem are we trying to solve, what is the specific pain point or value that we want to provide this persona or segment and what is the medium that we need to deliver this through?”
- Content marketing and SEO seem to be permanently intertwined: These two functions are entirely interdependent on one another to succeed. Content marketing without SEO is just noise. It’s just content that lives somewhere that nobody ever reads or sees. And SEO without content is just a complete and utter waste of time. You can never have a visible website and drive traffic to a site without valued content. So, the bottom line to me is that when we don’t build content strategies with SEO as the primary—or at least a primary—input, then we’re just simply creating uninformed content that more than likely is going to miss on the actual interests of the audiences we were trying to engage.”
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