Why is ‘Content Marketing’ Becoming Increasingly Important for SEO?
Before we understand why content marketing is becoming increasingly important from an SEO standpoint, let’s look at how SEO has traditionally benefitted marketers.
The sole purpose of a search engine is to deliver quality content and provide a great experience to the user. When someone searches for a keyword, search engines crawl multiple websites to find the most relevant piece of content. Search engine technologies rely on an algorithm that ranks websites based on more than 200 factors. Broadly, these factors are divided into two large categories called “Off-Page and On-Page”. The chart below gives a basic understanding of these categories and calls out the critical elements on which marketers optimize their websites.
Apart from “Off-Page and On-page” categories, SEO also involves technical interventions on aspects like the site architecture, user experience, design, and page loading speed to get a site to rank higher on the search engine results page.
While SEO has been around for almost two decades, it started gaining prominence in 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Backrub, which eventually became Google. In the beginning, marketers could easily hack the Google algorithm and rank higher on the search engine results page by leveraging keyword stuffing and backlinking to link farms or spammy links. It didn’t take long for Google to realize this, and they began changing the algorithms to ensure users receive quality and unbiased content. Over the last fifteen years, there have been numerous algorithm updates, and all of them were geared towards providing relevant information to its users. This sums up the relationship between good content marketing and SEO, and we can state that content marketing and SEO have been in a relationship since 1996!
Earlier, creating a set of blogs would suffice from an SEO standpoint. However, the modern algorithm does not only crawl through websites but also video channels (YouTube), presentations(SlideShare), and social mediums(Twitter) around the internet. Thus, the SEO content strategies have evolved to transcend blog creation and now focus on ensuring keyword consistency among other content formats like social posts, videos, infographics, and SlideShare presentations.
Over time, algorithms also started tracking elements such as content freshness and the time users spend interacting with a blog to determine the ranking on the search engine results page.
The modern SEO approach is not to even think of a particular search engine as other search engines will gain prominence sooner or later. It is about building content that positions your site as a one-stop site for all queries around your industry. In short, SEO has become more about making your website the go-to destination for anything related to your industry. Your website is no longer a website but the source of truth for everything within the industry you operate in; simply put, it is a “thought leader” that provides answers to every question a prospect in your industry might have! This is exactly what a search engine algorithm needs, in any case, to rank your site higher. It makes your website or blog easier to crawl and makes life simple for its users. Over time, you stop being at the mercy of search engines, and your commitment to good content creation and thought leadership translates into direct traffic on your website. You become a site that people want to talk about offline and share content from. This approach can also be adapted in video formats due to improvements in data plans and internet infrastructure. Nowadays, videos are being extensively used to consume information and reviews around products; plus, they are the starting point in the search for many users worldwide. Using artificial intelligence, search engines can also slice videos and only showcase relevant information that a consumer is looking for.
Building a content-driven asset like this requires commitment, budget, and effort from your business. However, if you do this, I assure you will benefit as a business, stand the test of time, and the long-term gains are far too many.
~ Soham Bhagnari, Digital Marketing Practitioner
SEO stats for 2022 state that 86% of people searching online click on organic search results. Be a part of this growing domain by upskilling yourself in the latest trends. You can explore our digital marketing programmes offered in collaboration with top universities or connect with us for more information.
