Five SEO skills you need for a successful content marketing campaign

A successful content marketing campaign isn’t just about releasing content into the crowded cyberspace. It’s about communication – either visual or linguistic. It’s about navigating a multi-faceted spectrum of options and conditions to find the perfect channel to your future clients. And, more often than not, this path can’t be found without proper knowledge of search engine optimisation (SEO).

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SEO is everywhere

Some say SEO is dead – but it’s more alive than ever. SEO is now inter-connected with almost every other branch of digital marketing. Social media, PPC, and content marketing, to name a few, owe at least some success to effective search engine optimisation. Therefore, developing any digital marketing strategy should involve SEO – even if just as a starting point. Whether you’re a social media manager or content strategist, you can guarantee you’ll get your hands dirty with some optimisation. Here are five things content marketers, in particular, should master:

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the absolute basics a content writer should know how to perform. Of course, good writing and marketing skills go without saying – but keyword research can provide insight into what users are searching for, which is crucial in guiding your content development.

It’s worth noting that keyword research doesn’t just involve a quick search on Keyword Planner. In fact, there’s an entire process you should follow before you even get to that stage:

• Deciding on the purpose of your content
  
• Defining the target audience you want to reach
  
• Choosing a few key phrases that have the same search intent

On-Page SEO

You may not know all the technicalities of search engine optimisation – but implementing a few basic rules for making a piece of content more SEO-friendly is absolutely crucial.

Pay attention to the headers, sub-headers, opening paragraph, and metadata in each piece of text. These elements of a page can make a huge difference, but, as it’s been stressed numerous times before, this doesn’t mean focusing on keywords more than the quality of the content. Just a little reminder here: Quality is still king.

Working with SEO Tools

As mentioned before, SEO goes well beyond the Keyword Planner. It takes a diverse range of tools to “make it happen” and push your website to the first page. Most of these tools are tailor-made for a successful content marketing campaign, too.

SEMrush, MozBar, and many other SEO measuring tools can be of great use to a content marketer. They can provide you with a better understanding of what people are interested in learning about, what questions they might have, how they interact with content you’ve already published, and what types of services they would want from you in the future.

Pragmatism

SEO professionals are very analytical and goal-oriented. They make decisions based on more than just hunches – they work with data, numbers, and information that needs to be analysed over specific lengths of time.

Although content marketing might be on the more creative side of the digital world, most content marketers need to see things from a more numerical and pragmatic point of view also. In the end, the purpose of most digital marketing campaigns is to attract leads and convert them into customers. Therefore, focusing on the final objective should come naturally, no matter where in the marketing process you stand.

Resiliency

Being a marketer has never been all flowers and rainbows – if any department can attest to this, it’s SEO. Most of the time, being a search engine optimisation guru is largely about trial and error – especially in this age, when Google updates their algorithm on a constant basis. The patience to search, research, and start all over again is a quality content marketers should strive to “borrow” from their SEO counterparts.

At the end of the day, content marketing success comes through nothing else than thorough analysis, attention to detail and true dedication. Yes, it may not be easy – but the effort will be more than worth it when your campaigns are successful!