What do Content Marketers Need to Know About SEO?
By Graham Charlton
Search Engine Watch
The way that search marketing has evolved over the last few years has brought content marketing and SEO ever closer together.
Content creation and SEO used to be very separate disciplines in the past, but now it’s hard to see how either can be practiced effectively without at least some knowledge of the other.
Which brings me to the question: what do content marketers need to know about SEO (and vice versa) to achieve the best results?
In this post I’ll make an attempt to answer that question, with the help of Kevin Gibbons, MD at Blueglass and Sticky Content’s Content Director Dan Brotzel.
What do content marketers need to know about SEO?
Here are some of the tactics and skills, mainly associated with SEO, that content marketers need to be aware of.
I’ve not mentioned technical SEO here, though it is of course important as the foundations on which effective SEO (and content marketing) is built.
Keyword research
Keyword research enables SEOs to find gaps and opportunities to help target pages rank, by understanding the popularity of keywords.
For example, a site producing content around wedding dresses needs to understand the most popular terms used, and the range of terms they need to optimise their content around.
There are lots of useful SEO tools (many are free) which can help with keyword research. Google’s Keyword Planner and Trends are obvious ones (though Keyword Planner has just become less useful), while just typing terms into Google and seeing the suggested searches is another way.
One tool I’ve found useful recently is Answer the Public, which provides some great insight into the kinds of questions people have around a particular topic.
Here are the results for ‘content marketing’. It provides some great insight into the kinds of questions people are asking around a topic, which should help content marketers to target more effectively, as well as generating some useful ideas.
According to Dan Brotzel: