Content marketing is your collective online presence for stimulating interest in your products or services. Your goal is to drive traffic to your website and hopefully channel revenue from this interest. And it all starts with your SEO.
SEO Content Marketing
A stable structure must have a stable foundation. Think of your website as the foundation to your online presence– it’s where you direct all your traffic to from your social media, email marketing and paid advertising campaigns. And its building blocks are your onsite optimization.
Onsite optimization, or search engine optimization (SEO), is the foundation layer to all of your internet marketing. There aren’t any tricks or ways to beat the search engines (which in fact detect and penalize any attempts at trickery). Simply focus on a topic to determine your keyword, write about your industry objectively and post it to your site so it’s as searchable as possible.
In addition to well-developed copy with acceptable kayphrase distribution, search engines crawl for image tagging, url optimization, inbound linking, outbound linking, and much more. There are plenty of tools to help you determine whether or not you have enough on your title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, etc, and if your keywords are effective and the best density on your page (latent semantic indexing, which we’ll talk about later). I recommend using the WordPress content management system with the Yoast plugin.
Paid Advertising
Content marketing is much more than just SEO. Once you have a solid SEO foundation, you can build from here with your paid campaigns, primarily with Google Ads.
Display or paid advertising campaigns let you supplement your organic content marketing, targeting users based on their search engine behavior. And as its name implies, it’s something you pay for. But let’s discuss the pricing and what it is you actually pay for with pay-per-click advertising.
Let’s say you sell coffee cups. Google will target users with your paid-for ad, given the target demo recently used the search engine for coffee cups. On their search engine interface, your ad will be displayed with the parameters you set (specific search terms, time of day, etc). And the better your website performs organically in conjunction with the price you pay for your ad, the better your ad placement is.
Take the screengrab from above, for example. 4imprint.com pays more for their paid Ads than DiscountMugs.com or WestElm.com. I know this because their Google Ad is displayed more prominently, as you can also see.
Paid Ads– What You’re Buying
You don’t pay for the ad to display on the search engine– this is technically free brand advertising. It’s once the user clicks the ad, plays your youtube video or, if you have the “Call Only” parameter selected, calls your number.
You: “So James; why am I even worried about building the organic SEO content marketing on my website if I can just pay to have all my ads at the top of the search engine?”
Me: “That’s not how it works.”
Google and other search engines are well aware of this approach. So they require you to have organic content marketing in place on any website with a PPC URL. Otherwise you will be penalized with the price you pay per click. And by a lot. So the better your organic, the better your cost-per-click advertising.
And regardless of how much you pay for your Google Ads, the search engine won’t improve your organic ranking whatsoever. However, if people do see your paid ad they’re more likely to select your organic link, especially if it’s right on the front page.
Though Google Ads will help you drive business, it won’t do anything for your organic presence. The only way to truly have better organic rankings is to focus on your onpage content and searchability.
Make sure you are correctly managing your internet marketing or, better yet, leaving it to the pros. Organizations such as Red3Mediawork with your company to effectively target your audience organically. Supplementing your SEO, we also offer design, social, paid and email marketing campaigning. Learn more how we can help your internet marketing efforts here.
