How to Use Content Marketing to Boost Organic Search

Google and other search engines are constantly changing and adopting new algorithms affecting the organic search traffic.
Keyword optimization and page optimization are essential factors in boosting organic search.
Always check what is working for your competitors who have higher rankings and improve on their strategies.

Marketers spend so much time creating content, but content is meaningless if it does not yield results. The goal of content marketing is to create content that gets found. One of the most popular questions we get asked is, "How can I use content marketing to boost organic search?"

Here are five things you can do to achieve that goal.

1. Create content that focuses on your target audience with keywords in mind.

While keywords don't play as big of a role in content marketing as they once did, it's still important to research and consider keywords that revolve around your target audience as you develop content. In considering your target audience, lay out buyer personas that you can cater to. Buyer personas should answer these questions:

In which age range is my target audience?
What are the interests of my target audience?
What problems do they have?
What's keeping them from overcoming challenges in business?

As you create content focused on your target audience, keywords will flow naturally.

As noted by Sprout Social, Facebook gets more than 8 billion average daily video views. Facebook Live works wonders in getting content found organically, but you need to give it a boost.

Embed your Facebook Live video onto your website.
Add a user-friendly, SEO-friendly description to your Facebook Live post that tells users what the video is about. Consider which relevant, long-tail search terms you could use. For example, let's say you sell vacuums and create a video about cleaning. Your video and post description may read, "How to clean your living room carpet in 5 minutes or less."

While it's possible for your Facebook Live videos to be found organically on Facebook itself, this boost will increase its likelihood of getting found.

Check out these tips on our sister site Business News Daily for more information on how to use Facebook Live for business.

3. Generate high-quality links back to your website.

Editors and writers get bombarded with pitches from businesses that want press, and they could always use great new content ideas that stand out from the pack. Identify the most relevant content creators who cover content that's relevant to your industry and put together a pitch they can't refuse. Some editors and writers will naturally link back to their source's content, but it's certainly OK to ask them to do so.

Here's a little secret: When applicable, create a study of some sort and publish it to your website. When you submit your pitch, send the link to the study, which could be cited as a source.

Another way to generate high-quality links is to write guest posts, as business.com's expert contributors do. Connect and build relationships with like-minded people, then offer to write a blog post for their websites in exchange for a byline with a link back to your content.

4. Optimize your content for featured snippets.

Search Engine Watch defines a featured snippet as "a summary of an answer to a user's query, which is displayed on top of Google Search results." The snippets are pulled in from a webpage and include the title and URL of the page. Also, as noted by Search Engine Watch, featured snippets could increase a website's traffic by as much as 30%. Featured snippets come in three different forms:

Paragraph
List
Table

Neil Patel goes in depth on how to get content ranked in Google's featured snippets. These are some of his general tips:

Use Google to uncover snippet opportunities.
Do keyword research.
Answer multiple questions.

5. Optimize images for search.

Every single image on your website or blog needs to be search engine friendly within its name, alt text and surrounding areas. AllBusiness.com goes into depth on how to optimize website images for SEO.

6. Write guest blog posts.

This is an SEO and content marketing technique where someone publishes a post on someone else's blog to promote their corporate or personal brand. Its boosts your SEO ranking in a cost-effective way. To help you gain traffic, it gives you the audience of a large online community. Guest blogging allows you to establish authority and credibility by provide valuable information. It also provides backlinks to help your SEO ranking. Having a highly ranked website means that you receive more traffic on your site.

7. Include infographics and visuals.

The brain processes visual data 60,000 times faster than text. Infographics allow you to share complex information in a simple image-based format. Ensure the information you share is relevant to your business, and promote the graphics massively to get consistent, quality traffic and inbound links.

Images you use must tell a story that connects with the audience emotionally. For infographics, use strong, statistical data. Clients will not be interested in your opinion but the data that backs it up. To build trust, use data from verifiable sources. This gives the audience assurance that other trusted sources believe in the same fact. For successful use of infographics, pick trending or evergreen tropics.

8. Analyze the data.

Data collection through web analytics helps marketers make better decisions for campaigns to achieved the desired results. Web analytics has four major benefits: to collect, measure, analyze and optimize data.

Identify the channels you are getting the most traction from. Use these channels to make your website more visible to your target audience. Also identify the sites that have referred the most engaged traffic to your website, and put more effort into those sites that have proven to drive results.

All of these efforts combined can help you boost your organic search. They may not work right away, but be patient and don't give up.