Our SEO Specialist gave us some insight into content marketing in South Africa, showing the importance of having a blog for effective SEO and content marketing purposes.
“A blog may seem a bit archaic in the age of video and infographics, but it is still imperative for boosting your SEO value, and thus, your presence online. People may be less inclined to read than they were in 2004, but
blogging statistics speak for themselves. Every business needs a blog.”
Does Blogging Boost Content Marketing?
A blog is an essential part of a working SEO strategy. It will directly impact your brand’s ability to rank higher on Google for certain keywords and phrases related to your business.
In order to rank higher, that keyword will need to feature on your website multiple times in the most natural way possible – don’t flood your site with the same keyword over and over; you could end up getting the opposite result, and may even get penalised.
It is possible to have that keyword featured on your service pages, but it doesn’t make sense to continually add service pages. This is where your blog comes in, especially when your SEO strategy is to start targeting
long-tail keywords. Blog content is an easy way to target long-tail keywords and common questions surrounding your services and products.
Keyword Research in Content Marketing
Keyword research is one of the biggest components of SEO. They are the absolute foundation for SEO strategies, as they provide guidance surrounding the content of your business’ blog.
“For example, at Starbright, we offer
SEO services, so we need to ensure that it’s a keyword we rank for if someone searches it on Google. After looking at the monthly traffic driving keywords, and doing some keyword research, I established that we are missing out on traffic for the long tail keyword ‘SEO packages South Africa.’
With this information, I set out to write a blog post that specifically targets that keyword. I could have tried to make changes to our SEO services page, but it would be more difficult to rank with the keyword “SEO Packages South Africa” on there, and it could potentially confuse Google, meaning a loss of the rankings we have already built with that page.”
Expertise, Authority and Trust
The best way to establish that your content is reliable enough for Google to recommend is to E.A.T. (expertise, authority, and trust) it. Google is the only website in the world that tries to get users away from their websites as fast as possible. They don’t want you to click a result in the SERPs and then hit the back button shortly thereafter. Google’s job is to supply you with the most relevant results and content related to your search query.
Video and podcasts can also convey E.A.T. but Google far better ‘reads’ and understands text, than it can video or audio content. It’s for that reason that smart content marketers (and SEO experts) producing video and audio content will transcribe their videos or podcast. The transcription helps Google better understand the content of your video or audio content.
“Blog content is an easy way to deep dive and provide information on a specific aspect of your business or services. As an example, SEO Packages in South Africa (or anywhere in the world really) can be explained in detail with a blog post. With the help of a copywriter’s editing, I wrote the content, and we published the blog post. The blog post is informative, conveys expertise and will help any person looking for SEO services get a better understanding of what SEO packages are and how they work.”
Content Over Link Building
If you have done any research on SEO, link building will be something you’ve heard of. Although link building is part of most healthy SEO strategies, it is a time-consuming process (if done correctly) with many factors that are beyond your control.
You can 100% control the content on your blog, and if you produce high-quality content (E.A.T.) there is also the chance that you will get the holy grail of links: Organic links pointing to your content. The more natural links are, the better they are for SEO.
Blog Content Can Help Structure Your Site
Using the SEO packages example; to remain relevant on this blog, I will add links to our SEO page. Not only will this help users to better understand your content and the services you offer, but it will also help search engines like Google to better understand your content and website structure.
Internal linking in your blog content can also help your product or service pages to rank better for your targeted keywords. It is far better to spend your budget on having quality blog content written and optimised, based on keyword research done by an SEO expert.
For more information on this and other digital marketing services,
contact us.
