There’s sometimes confusion over SEO and content marketing and how they tie together. While they are often viewed as two different things, to get better results, they have to blend. Here are some ideas to start connecting your SEO and content marketing strategies:

Keyword Research
There is no point in writing a fantastic piece that does not contain the keywords you need to highlight. The whole point of SEO and content marketing is to research the keywords that are going to be relevant to your client and write content that contains these words, making sure that they are not forced, and ensuring you do not overuse the keywords. Making those keywords work must keep in mind that when someone searches for a phrase, it is because they are interested in knowing more about it or buying it, etc. Thus, it must make sense. If you “keyword stuff” an article just to become relevant to a search engine you miss the whole point, which is to satisfy whatever query the human behind the search has. Search engines are quite intelligent and can distinguish between natural writing and keyword stuffing, so the later can hurt your SEO and online marketing efforts.

Content content content.
The content you are writing is for people, not for Google’s algorithm. At least it should not be. If you write only to satisfy an SEO and digital marketing initiative you will miss the point entirely. It may get the user to an article, but the user will not likely read it.

Write enough to make it count.
When you write an article, search engines look at it and try to decide how relevant this content might be. One of the criteria they look at is the article’s length. If you write approximately 100 words, it will not give it much importance. On the other hand, if you write 500-600 words, the blog becomes more likely to get some attention and be seen as relevant as far as search engines are concerned. There is also a school of thought that advises writing very long pieces of about 2,000-5,000 words as such a long article would be categorized as in-depth rather than just skimming the surface of a subject, and as such is given more value.

Keep an eye on the analytics.
How are long people staying on your page? What is the bounce rate? And pages per session? Insight into these metrics is invaluable. If things are not lining up, revise the content, tweak and fine tune until your audience reacts well. Do not be afraid to keep editing your material until it strikes a chord and people respond in the way you want.