Content marketing is an umbrella term used to cover the creation and sharing of online material like videos, blogs and social media posts. Is it important for SEO and branding?

The Importance of Content Marketing

The creation and sharing of online content is critical to a successful digital marketing strategy. Sharing interesting and engaging content for free is a great way of building your brand and stimulating interest in your products and services. This content should not explicitly promote your brand, but should provide useful information to readers and viewers. The Husaria Marketing blog is an example of content marketing, whereby we share our knowledge with you, while also building our brand awareness and enticing you to get in touch with us! By sharing your knowledge, you will raise your profile in the industry and demonstrate expertise to potential clients.

Using a Blog for Content Marketing

Blogging is probably the best-known example of content marketing, but there are other forms like videos, news articles, pod-casts, how-to guides, whitepapers and more. Essentially, anything you create that provides useful information to people for free can be considered content marketing. While in some industries giving away information may not be a good strategy, that’s not the case with most internet-based brands and services.

Content marketing is a great way to expand your customer base and generate leads, as people who visit your content decide to learn more about you and your services. This increases both brand awareness and consequently sales, while also keeping your clients on board with active community engagement. A company providing regular and engaging content is perceived as healthy and trustworthy.

Hone in on Your Target Audience

It’s also important to make sure your content is targeted to your market and is on topic. You want to make sure that the content you are producing is being read by potential clients, or else there is little point. Clickbait-style content may drive a spike in traffic, but if the visits don’t convert then the effect on your bottom-line is nothing. Be sure to produce content that is not only on topic for your target industry, but also regionally relevant. If you’re targeting people in a specific area, content about that area is a great tactic to raise your visibility.

Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

Content marketing is also critically important to a successful SEO strategy. Google and the other search engines out there are going to read your content and index it. The more you write about your target keywords, the more relevant your information is, the better your PageRank and SERP (Search Engine Results Page) performance will be. As the volume and quality of your content rises, so too will your SEO performance, increasing organic traffic to your web page and giving you visibility to more and more potential clients. You should also remember that as search algorithms become more advanced, they are starting to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to not just identify the content on your website, but determine its relevance and where it should rank.

You should have a few key pieces of content that form your core, related to your main keywords and topics. From there, you can write more and more content, related to these key topics from different aspects. Duplicating content is something you should avoid, but expanding on already written content is a great strategy. Finally, don’t forget about creativity in your content! You’re writing for humans, not for search engines, and your content should reflect that.