Is Content Marketing The New Trend in SEO?

Once upon a time in the land of Search Engine Optimization, a business could assemble a sub-par website full of carelessly written content, throw in a hefty helping of meta keywords and tags, craft a few links and… PRESTO… they would enjoy instant search engine ranking!

Those days are gone.

As Search Engine Optimization evolves, different factors are being considered as to what makes one site worthy of higher ranking than another. Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithm updates are rooting out anything that seems like spamming or keyword loading. The days of the old SEO schemes are over, and the time for new and more solid Internet marketing strategies is at hand. A recent survey of digital marketing professionals conducted by Econsultancy indicates the consensus that content is increasing in importance as a marketing strategy.

Consider this noteworthy information from the Econsultancy Content Marketing Survey Report:

• 90% of respondents believe that content marketing will become more important over the next 12 months.
• Nearly three quarters (73 %) of digital marketers agree that ‘brands are becoming publishers’.
• 64% of in-house marketers agree that content marketing ‘is becoming its own discipline’.
• 38% currently have a defined strategy in place.
• Of in-house respondents, 55% are saying that they (or their clients) are working on a strategy, as do 58% of agency respondents.

Neil Patel, co-founder of two Internet companies, Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics and one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Top Entrepreneurs in the Nation”, understands the importance of content marketing:
“I’ve always built my organic search traffic through content marketing. Why you may ask? It’s cheaper and it provides faster results… We were able to launch KISSmetrics and get over 100,000 monthly organic visitors in less than a year… just through blogging and creating infographics. We didn’t build one link manually… we just spent our time and money on content marketing.”

For the small business owner, this type of strategy is a worthwhile investment of time and resources. Some of the more popular and effective methods used by marketers are:

• Blog posts
• Articles and guides
• Press releases
• E-newsletters
• Infographics
• Social media content (tweets, updates, etc.)

The impact of such a strategy can be substantial. Good content has a proven correlation with conversion rates as shown in a survey by Digital Social Media agency, Sekari, in which:

• 52% of consumers surveyed said that blogs have impacted purchasing decisions.
• 57% of marketers surveyed acquired new customers via their blogs.
• 61% of customers surveyed said they would be more likely to purchase goods from a site with custom content.

Also, the creation and promotion of quality content encourages sharing on social sites such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. These “likes”, “+1s”, and “tweets” are gaining importance as ranking factors across search engines. It’s the new trend in SEO! But there is one more thing that sets content marketing apart from traditional SEO methods, and it’s a big one: Content marketing does not get affected by algorithm updates! While an SEO agency may be able to promise you an increase in ranking, the results, if any, may be short term, at best. They will be subject to the next update of the search engine algorithms when the next Penguin or Panda (or Possum or Parakeet or whatever the next one is called) is released. The advisable tactic is to invest in the production of high quality content for a carefully planned strategy that will prove financially fruitful and will endure the changes of the search engines’ ranking factors.