If you’re new to content marketing, now is a great time to hop in and see why content is king! A recent #PRWebchat with Laura Crest helped us figure out some best practices for content marketing and SEO. Laura is a certified SEO copywriting and content marketing strategist and editor for SEOCopywriting.com. Get your pencils out, here are six tips to make your content marketing and SEO go hand in hand:

 

• Your customers buying cycle affects content marketing. The customer buying cycle is awareness, research and then purchase. Content marketing tries to capture the customer at all phases. Blogs, press releases, social media, etc. are content-sharing funnels to lead the buyer to your website. The goal of content marketing is to meet the customer where they’re at in the buying cycle: info-rich content lures them to your site. So, generating awareness can be done through having broad, overarching content; having your customer research you would be through product reviews and more specific content; while purchases are generated through targeted, highly-detailed content.
• Did you know? Keyphrase density is no longer relevant. It’s a persistent hangover from the pre-Google days of Alta Vista when 5.5% was the rule. A smart keyphrase strategy is 2-3 targeted keyphrases per page that actually match the content of the page in strategic places. Strategic places would be in the page title, meta description, headers and sub-headers as well as hyperlinks.
• Best practices for optimizing web pages. Web page titles and meta descriptions are paramount for SEO. Page titles should include the main keyphrases of your content. With web page titles, you’ve got 70 characters with spaces to work with, so you need to keep it tight while working in your keyphrases. The web page title is the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP), and weighs heavily for SEO. Web page meta descriptions allow for 175 characters with spaces, so create a killer marketing statement that includes the benefits to your customers.
• Awaken your sleeper pages from their slumber. About pages and FAQ pages are heavily trafficked but often neglected or boring. Spice up the About page with personality and branding. Show your expertise while daring to be different and personable. The same holds true for FAQ pages, except here you want to direct and internally link the visitor back to your conversion/sales pages. Google crawlers like updated pages and rank them better. If your pages update regularly, it’s a metric indicating that you have “stuff going on” and tags you as a more credible site.
• Creating your own content marketing strategy. Here are a few highly recommended content marketing authorities: TopRank Online Marketing, Content Marketing Institute, SEO Copywriting, Copyblogger and Junta42.
• Writing for the web vs. writing for print. Writing for the web means incorporating keyphrases, vying for a seconds of our readers attention, and then some! Good writing should exist on both (period), and longer copy can be a good thing. Here are some more tips.

#PRWebchat is a weekly Twitter chat that takes place on Thursdays from 2:00pm to 3:00pm EST. Join @PRWeb and use TweetDeck or TweetChat to follow hashtag #prwebchat to get in on the conversation!

(Photo Credit – Flickr Creative Commons: aless&ro)

Filed under: Content, SEO by Stacey Acevero