How do you ensure that your Content Marketing efforts are as effective as possible?

By combining content creation with an effective SEO strategy. Indeed, even if your content is of excellent quality, it is necessary to perform certain actions to improve its referencing in search engines. 

Content Marketing and SEO are therefore two complementary concepts.

 Creating optimized content is at the heart of Content Marketing strategies

Do we produce content for humans or for search engines?

That's a thorny question really, to which only Seth Godin has found a satisfactory answer: "We make content for humans who use search engines."

In other words, we need to  target the interest of content for readers while making it easy to access through SEO actions.

Content creation has limited value if it can't be seen by the right target audience, which is called Buyer Persona in the vocabulary of Inbound Marketing. To do this, each new article / ebook / post must be designed to reach its maximum potential, established through the analysis of past results. 

Make sure your content is well referenced and optimized throughout your Buyer Persona's engagement tunnel. This is essential to achieving your content marketing goal.

Frequent updates to Google's algorithms place even more emphasis on user experience (UX) by favoring the most relevant content for a query.

Brands with a clear digital marketing strategy can significantly increase their traffic, conversions and revenue. They direct their strategy to their target audience through technology and they optimize their visibility across all search engines.

But the essence of SEO still relies on a combination of links, traffic and rankings.

 Here are 6 tips to help optimize your content, from creation to conversion.

1 - Understand your target and segment your strategies before creating content 

Before you create SEO-optimized content, it's crucial to know who you're writing for and for what purpose. To start, you can analyze your already existing content to see what type of topics resonate with your target audience.

In parallel, establishing Buyer Persona's will help you coordinate your content with the issues of your typical profile. This step requires a study of keywords that will be used throughout the user journey.

2 - Observe what is being done elsewhere to seize opportunities

This is about understanding how your content is perceived in the existing offering on the Internet and against your competition. Brands that don't take the time to do this work can waste a lot of time (and money) in a saturated market.

Look at what you're competing at well (and not so well). This will help guide your content creation and optimization efforts.

3 - Plan topics around your Buyer Persona and conversion cycle

Understanding what type of content fits what stage of the engagement cycle allows you to maximize conversions throughout the process. You may not have spotted all of the existing opportunities in your content already online.

4 - Optimize content to meet readers' needs and differentiate yourself from the competition

In the war brands wage for attention with content, only the most creative companies can truly stand out. This is also where photography, video and web design make a difference.

5 - Amplify and distribute content with social networks

The social-networks allow for amplified distribution and allows you to show your content to the largest number . When brands produce fan-favorite content on a regular basis, they increase their chances of it being shared by the most people.

6 - Convert and measure success

While each article or white paper has a different purpose, it is vital to conduct an analysis proving the value of your efforts. You need to define and track different metrics. They will provide an overall picture of your results and how your readers are interacting with your content and how those results appear in the results pages (called SERPs).

Setting quantitative goals (conversion or revenue) in line with your priorities will make the optimization process easier.

A clear SEO strategy helps authors build content that matches the right target.

Thanks to data, they can recognize the topics that consumers are interested in, improve the position of their publications in Google and therefore increase their conversion rate.