Since the rise of the term content marketing, there have been many discussions about the end of SEO. But the truth is SEO and content marketing work together, or you may even say that content marketing is a part of SEO. Content marketing helps consumers to engage with your content and attracts potential customers to your business. For effective content marketing, you must create content based on the need of your customers; and SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of your website traffic through organic search engine results. If you own a healthcare business and want a robust presence online, you have to optimize your medical website so that search engines can find you. Generate unique content with the support of a medical SEO service provider and ensure better audience engagement and conversions.
Search engine optimization includes all tactics you use to make your website rank higher for relevant terms in search engines. These tactics could be using the right keywords, optimizing on-page elements, building high-quality links, maintaining a solid social media presence, and improving user experience. All these strategies involve working with some content or other. Content is what fuels your consumer interactions, engagements, and conversions.
According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), only 41 percent of marketers think that their organization is clear on what an effective or successful content marketing program looks like and according to Jim Yu of searchengineland.com, only 20 percent of B2C and 50 percent of B2B content earns any engagement at all. Given the importance of both SEO and health content marketing, let us look at some effective ways to make your marketing more effective and win more business.
- Know your audience: Find out the motive behind each customer’s types of searches and their engagement with your brand on social media, and what action they are likely to take. Develop content based on their requirements.
- Choose a good content format: A single content can be used in many types of media including socially shareable images, quick video clips and embedded media like slideshares. It provides different ways to convey your messages and allows you to appear in different types of search results. Be active on the best social media platform that will reach a wide number of people and engage with them.
- Find out opportunities using topical research: Understand the competitive environment for which you are creating the content. There are many other companies in the competition and businesses are competing for eyes and clicks and also for space in SERPs against media brands, bloggers, influencers etc. Analyzing the content gaps not covered by your competition provides you with more opportunities to develop engaging content that speaks to people.
- Choose metrics that are relevant and in keeping with your business goals: Measure your content’s performance throughout the process – lead generation and audience building, conversions and sales, and post sales. Website traffic, conversions, time on site, lead quality etc are top metrics used by B2B marketers to determine content success.
- SEO should be the core component of content creation: Strategic content optimization can improve visibility and key metrics to measure are engagement, time on site, sharing and conversions. Optimize title tags, Meta description, subheadings, images and text according to current SEO standards. Keep visitors clicking and engaged with smart internal linking that improves user experience. Reuse your most popular, highest converting content.
- Accelerate with automation: Machine learning is gaining more popularity in search especially where data sets are large and dynamic. Finding the patterns in data in real time makes machine learning a great asset to understand changes in your customer base. Your content automation system will include reporting to tell you not only how each piece is performing but also makes recommendations to help you focus on your valuable opportunities. Automation enables to handle routine tasks with less effort.
- Encourage your content creators with technical support: A creative team with technically sound, optimized online presence is important if you want your content to perform at its best. Some SEO techniques that can affect your content’s ability to rank are site structure and hierarchy, Meta data, mobile readiness, internal linking, site speed, and coding errors.
- Optimize for establishing your presence across social media channels: Search engine marketing is the second most commonly used paid content promotion tactic next to social advertising. Post your content on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn.It is important to have an understanding about your audience on each platform and also, which channels will be more receptive.
- Understand which social media audience segment responds to your content: If you track audience engagement and measure accurately, you will be able to see which audience are not only engaged but converting. This is where you want to allocate your content promotion budget. It is best not to have some predetermined amount set apart for each channel that runs its course regardless of its performance.
- Consider email marketing: According to a MarketingSherpa survey in 2015, 86 percent of customers would like to receive emails at least monthly from companies they have to deal with. However, don’t try to sell in every communication.
- Use elements that can build brand authority: The content should be made multidimensional with various elements that can build brand authority, inspire or educate on products, and encourage engagement. Include testimonials into your content, where they will help in providing you more credibility and reliability.
- Increase ROI with ongoing content management: Each content is an opportunity for ongoing traffic and lead generation but only if it is kept in line with constantly changing SEO standards.
A healthcare SEO company can provide you with the required support as regards content marketing and SEO, so that your medical website appeals to your targeted audience. Their expertise in the field enables them to apply the right online marketing strategies that will drive website traffic and conversions.