Should SEO come before content marketing or should it be the other way around? They are both very important, but content marketing itself can positively contribute to both. Here’s how.

Creating new content that people are searching for can contribute to increased traffic. To do this, you will have to research things like keywords, popular questions, and competitors. This research is important for a couple of reasons. It is very important to know what keywords people on the internet are looking up. Question research is important because you will learn about the questions people have about the industry your business is involved in. Competitor research is important because you can see what the competition is writing about and avoid writing about exactly the same thing.

After you have done all of your research, you should have several topics to choose from. Because of the research that you did, all of these topics should include things that are important to people right now. Now it’s time to get to writing. Once you have gotten your editorial down, it’s time for some formatting. Here are some formatting tips that can contribute to your content marketing helping your SEO.

URL
Your URL extension is very important. In many situations, bloggers make the extension as the title of the blog. This is not a thing that you want to do. Instead, you should put the blog’s keywords there. The keywords need to be the focus of the URL. It is ok to use a few additional words in the extension to provide context. An example of this would be to write a blog with the title “How to expand your social media presence” and set the URL extension to read /grow-social-media-. The goal here is to avoid a really long extension.

Title
The blog’s title is usually the very first thing that viewers see. Because of this, it is very important that you have a good one. You don’t want to go with a title that simply sounds good. The keywords that you used in the editorial have to be used in the title as well. This way, Google and the other search engines know what your editorial is about. It is also very important to keep subheadings in mind. Through subheadings, search engines can see what else is included in your blog. Subheadings should also include some keywords.

Links
It is pretty beneficial to include some links in your editorials that lead to other content on your website. By doing this, you can potentially keep readers on your website and Google will know the focus of your website. Including a link within a keyword is essentially killing two birds with one stone. Very few bloggers currently do this, but it can make a really big difference with SEO.

These are just a few small changes that you can make to improve your content marketing in order to positively influence your SEO. Now get to it and create some really great content!