Content marketing is where a lot of focus from the entire digital marketing industry is falling this year, and this is set to be the case for the near future, too. Why is content marketing important?
- Fresh content on your own website (your blog) is great for your SEO as well as for showing your expertise to your audience.
- Quality content written on your own website will attract inbound links as bloggers and other websites look to add value to their own content.
- High-quality content written as a guest blog post or article will enable you to build a backlink on other websites.
It is clear that content marketing represents a huge opportunity, and with Google continually updating their algorithm to favor the highest quality content, it is one way you can ensure that you’re always prominent in the search results for your chosen keywords.
Writing on your own blog is easy to do, you can do it whenever you wish, and your only challenge is ensuring that the content is high quality so that it attracts readers and potential linking opportunities. However, to supercharge a content marketing plan with SEO in mind, you need to be targeting a number of different avenues.
Industry Blogs
This is the easiest opportunity for you to exploit. Whether you’re a digital marketing agency or an eco-goods retailer, there are always websites that provide information about general industries rather than existing to sell products. This is probably something you’re already doing. If you are, then you should leverage your existing influence in order to find more content writing opportunities.
You obviously don’t want to be over-extending yourself to the point where you’re not producing any content for your own blog, but if you can build a regular schedule of posting opportunities, you’ll ultimately have a great campaign.
Do a Competitor Check
Who are your competitors and where are they getting their backlinks from? After starting to build relationships with industry blogs, this is the next place you should be looking. Is your main competitor producing a monthly piece of content for an influential website? If so, is there potential for you to do the same?
Ensure that you check out each site yourself and are happy that it fits in with what you do and will give you a quality link; don’t just blindly follow your competitors, what they’re doing might actually be harmful to their SEO activities!
Where do You Advertise?
If you’re using a website for banner ads or have citations in dozens of directories, look at the options you have for increasing links from these websites.
Do they have blogs themselves that you could produce content for? Do they have a number of advertising partners or subsidiary sites that could present an opportunity for you? This option is all about exploring as many avenues as possible for content creation; where can you get high-quality backlinks?
Finding New Opportunities
Discovering new content creation opportunities represents a major chance for you to grow your online presence and strengthen your link portfolio at the same time. Always remember that quality over quantity is the approach that you need to take, and you’ll start to find excellent linking opportunities that have a hugely positive effect on your website.
About the Author: Allen Greene is an SEO expert who specializes in content marketing. Allen is currently using the new enthuse.me social media site to discover content marketing opportunities for his clients.
