Olivia Atkinson
It’s easy to understand how there can be confusion about SEO and content marketing as they are so often talked about separately.
However, they come hand in hand and work together to achieve great results for your building products business.
They both fuel each other and act as the cogs to any successful digital marketing campaign. To get a clearer understanding of how they work together, lets first review them individually.
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimisation is the practice of increasing not only the quantity of traffic but the quality too. This is done through organic search engine results.
Position 1 on Google, for example, gets 43% of traffic. Comparing this to paid ads which have a CTR of about 2%. That’s why although you may see companies higher than your listing on Google, be aware that ads will always show at the top, but don’t generate as many clicks.
If you want to find out more about SEO vs PPC, read more here.
Of course, you want to be ranking position 1 on Google, how often do you look through to page 5? The answer is never.
Common behaviour for people that are struggling to find a website that answers their queries or solve their problems is to change the keywords they used in the search query.
This can be a challenge in itself within the building products and construction industry as there is a lot of terminologies and normally more than one way of describing your solution with keywords.
Google is trying to provide the best service possible, naturally, they want to be the best. To do this they are continuously improving the way that websites rank, for the better.
Effective SEO will ensure you get the right people looking at the right piece of content, every time.
There are more than 200 ranking factors used by Google’s Algorithm, therefore a combination of efforts and understanding are needed to win at:
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Link Building
- Content Marketing
- Keyword Research
- Meta Data
- and so much more!
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is self-explanatory, marketing using content. Content can include blogs, case studies, eBooks, guides, whitepapers, articles, press releases and more.
To find out more about content marketing for construction, read more here.
The foundation of every effective piece of content is the SEO work done in the background.
Simply applying great SEO does not mean that you can easily fix bad blogs and turn around websites, and the next day they appear on page one of Google.
Search engines like Google factor in the quality when looking for content. If your content marketing is inconsistent, sporadic, contains errors or poorly written – no amount of SEO is going to fix that.
This leads on to why SEO and content marketing come hand in hand when it comes to effective digital marketing for your building products business.
The Perfect Duo: SEO And Content Marketing
When it comes to content marketing and SEO, its not a question of choosing one of the other. It’s about approaching how you’re going to improve the visibility of your current high-quality content with strong SEO.
If, however, you are yet to create high-quality engaging content, then here are some ways you can use content marketing and SEO together in harmony to get better results.
Create Your Content With Search Engines In Mind
The first thing this doesn’t mean is stuffing your content with keywords, thinking the more times you mention it the better. This is known as ‘keyword stuffing’ and should be avoided. Google has evolved a lot in the last 15 years and can punish your website for such offences.
It’s worth being mindful of how search engines work. They are trying to figure out what your page or blog post is about, so they can categorise it accordingly.
You should have a clear understanding of what your keywords are and how your customers search for your solution. That way you can apply them to your content effectively, increasing the chances of being ranked.
Produce Regular Content
One thing SEO isn’t is a one-time thing. You can’t ‘do SEO’ and it’s done, it’s a continuous effort that should be applied to everything you do on your website.
This includes all your website pages, your articles, news, brochures, landing pages, case studies, images and more.
One factor that search engines look for is how often you publish new content. Therefore, we advocate blogging, as it means you can regularly add content to your website easily.
You don’t want to be changing your main pages often once they’re optimised as unless you add new products, your offering remains the same.
However, if you want to talk about aspects of your product or solution or how the customer can benefit, then a blog is the best way to do it.
SEO vs Content Marketing: Can You Have One Without The Other?
If you want to do a good job then the answer to this is no.
Of course, physically you can have one without the other. However, the content marketing will be poor without proper optimisation and the SEO won’t achieve results without high-quality content.
It’s important to combine SEO and content marketing to have a strong digital presence. Content marketing is a part of SEO and SEO is nothing without content marketing.
It’s about being found organically, but also having great content to lead your prospects down the funnel.
At Insynth, content marketing is just one of the services we offer. Having a clear understanding of what Google favours in terms of content and SEO means we deliver engaging, keyword-rich content again and again.
Take a look at our case studies to see for yourself the impact content marketing can have, helping your building products business grow.
About Insynth
Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing agency based in Shifnal in the West Midlands.
They use the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to support building product companies to grow their business by proactively driving sales lead generation activity.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.