37 expert insights on how to rock SEO and content marketing (including Rand Fishkin, Jason Falls and Ruud Hein amongst others)

How is it that a new and small entrant, like Buffer, in a very competitive niche can seem to consistently attract huge audiences? How is it that they are also visible on the search engines time and time again?

This was bit of a mystery until they revealed what went on behind the scenes to make this happen.

Their SEO wasn’t so much about traffic, conversions and revenue. Rather, it focused on content marketing and content planning.

There has been something of a battle between content marketing and SEO for some time. Articles with headlines like, “Content marketing overtakes SEO,” have helped foster this perception.

The battle, if any, is for the attention and investment required for online success. The problem lies in how people view what it takes to be successful online.

Brian Clark of Rainmaker Digital in this article on MarketingLand says –

The struggle many face with online marketing is a misguided impulse to put various tactics into separate boxes instead of seeing each as an aspect of one overarching strategic process. The result is often a disjointed, ineffective mess that leads companies large and small to question the return on investment of online marketing in general.

To this day, I see people referring to content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization as three different things — as if each is a tactic that can get you there alone.

The smart way to practice effective online marketing is to treat social media and search engine results as aspects of a holistic strategy that centers around compelling content.

So it is possible for a new business in a competitive industry to dominate search results and build a powerful brand.

By linking SEO to an effective content marketing strategy just like Buffer.

So if they are tied together, how can we ensure that we rock at both? I reached out to 34 experts to find out how you can achieve similar results in your industry.

But first, let me answer a question I get asked a lot –

Which comes first?

Let’s say you created a great guide to share with your customers. Would you start with important keywords and then build the content around it?

Would you create the content and then insert the appropriate keywords wherever you could?

The fact is either way could work.

Content marketing first – With this approach, you’d focus:

1. First on coming up with topic ideas that your audience would be interested in.
2. You would investigate keywords around that topic.
3. You would find keywords that you could rank for and add those in appropriate places in your content.
4. Then you’d find ways to get the content in front of as many people as you can.

The benefits of this approach are:

1. You are not tied to a particular keyword.
2. You have the option to choose a long tail keyword to give your content the chance to rank.
3. You are focused on creating value for the reader, not on gaining search volume. Why is that important? Because search volume does not translate into value for your readers.

This can make a huge difference to your audience.

Take for example a person looking for the term “hydroponic gardening.”

The term gets a fair amount of traffic.

Chances are that most people will be looking for a definition or brief explanation of the term. So no matter how good your content is, it won’t impact most people much.

But, once they have learned a bit about hydroponics, they may have a bigger problem. Which would be, “How do I make a hydroponic system at home?”

So they might search for “DIY hydroponic systems” or something along those lines. They may then look for a guide to help them create or select a hydroponic system. They may also want to maintain the system that they can use at home.

However, such phrases get a lot less traffic according to Google’s Keyword Planner.

So if you create content based only around keywords, you will miss out on creating value for your audience by solving their biggest problems.

Why is this so important?

Your site will be viewed as being useful and a go-to resource.

When someone comes to WP Curve, we want them to be able to find just about everything they need to create and build a better business without going through the technical hassles of maintaining a WordPress site. If they don’t, we know they will move on to another site that offers such information. We want to be our audience’s go-to resource for related content, and later on, for business.

High value content converts better – if your content solves a problem for your readers, then they are going to remember it. That’s how you get loyal subscribers who later turn into paying customers. Large volumes of traffic are nice, but not if they don’t stick around or convert into paying customers.

By simply relying on a keyword tool, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to address the problems and interests of your desired audience and thereby lower the potential impact of your marketing endeavors.

SEO first – When creating content first and then inserting keywords, you may lose out on the optimal phrasing you originally had. By that I mean it might not have the same appeal as before.

However, if you know your main keyword and then create content, you will keep that in mind as your craft your content and that would change the direction you would take.

The other benefit from this approach is that you do not look at the value of the problems to solve but instead focus on solving it.

With a content first approach, you might observe and talk to your desired audience and really only hear from them when they’re having a pretty big problem. You are unlikely to hear about the smaller issues that they encounter but have learned to cope with or bypass.

By creating content around keywords, you ensure that you find all of the medium to high volume keywords, regardless of the value they hold for your desired audience. If you rank for those terms and your audience doesn’t convert as highly, you can still use it to direct your visitors to more valuable content.

The combination approach – The approaches above have their own strengths and downsides. But the combination of the two will result in better outcomes.

In other words, spend the time to research good keywords to create content around. At the same time get to know your desired audience and their issues, interests and challenges. You can then create content to address those and add appropriate keywords where suitable.

Even though SEO and content marketing both aim to raise your website traffic, they tend to do so in different time frames.

What do you after you create a new post? Perhaps like others, you promote it right away by sharing it with your email list. Do some outreach to others that operate in your niche.

This generally results in a quick burst of traffic. But that’ll soon die out unless you have an authoritative domain. But if you were to promote your post over time and it accumulates backlinks you’ll notice a change. You’ll notice that the search engine traffic continues to increase for those posts.

This is a problem. After all, no one wants to spend the time and resources to create content if it only gets seen for a short period.

So how do you get it to be visible for years to come and get a compounding increase in traffic over time?

By getting your content to build on itself by creating evergreen content.

Evergreen content refers to any content that is just as useful in the future as it is today.

So content around the latest Instagram features, for example, will be interesting for a few weeks and then be forgotten and outdated. But an evergreen topic like a guide to building a following on Instagram will provide traffic in the short term via content marketing and also provide a steady flow of traffic from the search engines over time. Assuming that you have done the work to optimize the content and position it as a valuable piece of content.

How do you spot evergreen topics?

Think about the content you are considering to produce.

Ask yourself – Will the content be useful a year from now or even five years from now?

If the answers to the questions are a “yes” or “maybe”, then you might be onto an evergreen topic.

You could also try searching for the keyword and note how old the results are. If you see many posts on that topic, then it is likely to be an evergreen topic.

Having said that the significance of certain topics does change over time. That does not mean a topic is not worth writing about because you do have a guarantee that the post will be useful in a couple of years’ time.

Take Brian Deans post on Google ranking factors. It continues to stay relevant due to ongoing changes in the SERP algorithms.

Brian continues to update the post from time to time to make it relevant to his audience, instead of letting it fall into obscurity.

Now that we know how to create the best possible content, let’s examine how we can ensure the best possible outcome for SEO and content marketing.

How to get the best outcome for SEO and content marketing on each content piece?

To answer this question, I looked at a few key areas and reached out to several experts. Here are the key areas and the experts answers.

1. Examine your content requirements

Without content, there is no point to SEO. In fact, if there were 2 tactics that belong together like PB&J, it would have to be content marketing and SEO.

Because they are both about the same thing – giving your desired audience exactly what they want. You need the search engines to help prospects find your content. At the same time, you also want your content to capture your visitors’ attention and interest.

So that they return to your site having discovered you.

Sounds a little like the chicken and egg scenario, right? It is.

That’s why the 2 need to work together. SEO without engaging and compelling content for your audience is just noise. Content that cannot be found might as well be placed in a dark closet, as it stands a good chance of not gaining any long term visibility past its publication date.

The good news is that you don’t need an elaborate strategy or a great deal of technical knowledge to make the 2 work. You just need to understand which elements of your content to optimize.

Here are a what a few experts do :

My secret is contradictory to what most people do. Instead of publishing around a content calendar or on a set schedule, I only write when I have something new, useful or meaningful to say. That way, the content is sure to resonate with the audience and provide value rather than more noise.

It’s all about the title. We spend a lot of time researching what people are actually searching for online. Instead of researching keywords, we research topics (both for our clients and our agency). We gather a list of topics we feel we can create content around, then check to see if the competition has already created something similar. We do this by checking Google search results and our competitor’s sites. Once we find a gap or little competition, we create the piece of content. Before publishing, we have a checklist to run through and one of the key items is to double-check the title, making sure it is perfect before hitting publish. To me, a perfect title reflects what people are actually searching for online and makes them want to click on my title to engage with the content.

There is really no easy answer for this question. It all depends on the client, goals, industry and audience. The main objective is to connect with the audience. Once you have them hooked on the content, the rest of the pieces fall into place. This requires an integrated, multi-channel, online promotional strategy. Every channel should be promoting the content – it’s all about integration. This increases the chance of traffic, conversions, branding, inbound links, social shares and increased revenue.

If it’s a blog post or content marketing piece, I tend not to focus on keyword targeting too much. Instead I try and create the most epic content I can and make sure it’s easily shareable. It needs a killer headline, empathy with the reader, and a compelling reason why they might share it with a friend or their followers. I use Buffer to promote blog posts and often email key Twitter followers who have previously shared my content.

The only trick I’ve ever used is to make sure the content delivers on the promise of the headline. If people click and don’t get what they expected, that’s the definition of ‘clickbait’ which is a bad thing. If they click and get what you promised them, they’ll be happy and the metrics that feed back to the search engines that the content is good will happen too.

I use a simple 5 step process:

1. Write content for search intent that is underserviced i.e: great content that helps the user doesn’t exist, is unpopular, or is outdated. I also look for content that already has other people linking to it or sharing it on social networks.
2. Make a list of influencers who would likely link to or share the content. I do this by conducting competitive research via buzzsumo or ahrefs.
3. Write the content and maximize for three things a) N-topic score b) engagement, by introducing visual breaks and white space and (c) sharing via call to actions such as click to tweet.
4. Email influencers with a link to the content prior to it being published.
5. Publish the content, email the influencers, and follow up with paid promotion via social media platforms.

What I do to ensure the best outcome from each content piece is plenty of research. Not only do I make sure that each piece has a focus that aligns with interest from our audience, I also research who might have interest in it when it’s published so I have a list for outreach once it’s live to alert people who might pick it up or share it.

2. Don’t just use keywords

Perhaps you’ve heard keywords don’t matter as much anymore. Well, they may not matter as much but your content should still include keywords.

Traffic that comes from a search engine starts when a user enters a keyword. So keywords are how your content gets found. Sure there are other factors that matter as well, but people still search with keywords.

Smart businesses research not just the industry terms they want to rank. They also research words and phrases their audience might use. These include long tail keywords that are indirectly related to your product or service. Each of these long tail keywords get less search traffic. But they usually also have less competition, which makes them easier to rank for.

So how does one use keywords on a practical level?

You are likely to drive traffic to your site if you produce content based on what your visitors want to read and the keywords they use.

It doesn’t really matter if Google Analytics hides most of your search traffic via the “not provided” label. You can still ascertain what most of them are via the geographical summary report, landing pages report and queries report.

You can then use them throughout your content in a manner that makes sense to readers and search engines. In other words, when SEO and content marketing do what they are meant to, they do so quite well. They do so without earning the unwanted attention of the search engine algorithm changes.

Also searches for long tail keywords tend to convert to leads and sales better than head terms. That’s what “my little nomads” did with a content piece around the long tail keyword – “south east Asia family holiday destinations”. It has earned them the first position on the first page of the Google search results.

Here are what a few experts do:

I use insights from SEO to understand the specific content needed (what questions customers have, what are they searching for, what holes exists?) and then I use my understanding of who that audience is to write content that pulls them in and fills that need. By crafting a content marketing strategy that puts users first, while using SEO tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush to inform language, you’re able to write content that offers the best of both worlds – a strong focus on both users and organic search.

Seek linking opportunities

Did you know that there is a correlation to the number of words on a page and the number of links that a page receives? Research by SerpIQ and Buzzsumo support confirms this.

It is for this reason, as well as to earn the attention and respect of your audience, that you should create in depth content.

Also don’t just create content for your own site, but look to have your brand mentioned on other sites. Google tracks mentions, not just links to your brand, so you can grow the authority, ranking and recognition of your site via mentions.

Rand Fishkin in a recent video suggests using a combination of 1-to-1 outreach, broadcast to your audience and paid amplification.

The best links for SEO are also the best links for content marketing.

Because they send traffic, increase authority and rankings.

Take the following for example:

Guest posts – If you’re guest-posting on highly authoritative sites, your links will not only send you direct traffic but also improve keyword rankings.

Contextual links – A contextual link on an authoritative page is gold. The better your content marketing, the more of these you are likely to get, and in turn get more traffic and keyword rankings.

Internal links – These links may not seem to have much effect if your site isn’t authoritative, but will help you rank better for keywords by sending link juice to other content to help your SEO efforts. It also exposes your audience to more of your content.

Focus on on-site optimization + UX

Another way in which to leverage both SEO and content marketing efforts is through on site optimization. Optimization can be a technical process which includes things like ensuring:

• Posts and pages are being indexed by the search engines
• 301 redirects are setup to ensure that visitors reach their intended destinations etc.

To do this, you need to know what content you have and where it is located through a content audit.

This post and this one will take you through the details of conducting a content audit and then enabling you to optimize it.

Here are what a few experts recommend doing:

To assist our clients in succeeding with content marketing, we typically recommend the following steps:

1. Use the most searched term within the title, 2nd most searched term within the h1, 3rd-5th within H2’s, etc.
2. When possible, include keyword-rich illustration ( has $20 illustrators); name them using the target keyword and include descriptive ALT text (wrap in  markup).
3. Include a call-to-action within the copy to keep them on the webpage or to capture an opt-in for marketing automation.
4. Include 1-3 links within the copy to related topics in the same topic silo (another how-to) using keyword-rich anchors.
5. Include an interview or quote from someone influential we speak with before the page goes live; encourage them to share when it does go live.
6. Create a project in Buzzstream called Content Marketing; tag each post respective to the keyword theme and create a custom filter to work on one page at a time (for outreach). Use Link Prospector within Buzzstream to dump all the keyword targets for the page in quotes, and name the filter based on the keyword theme. Sort opportunities by page authority and spend Wed-Fri performing outreach to authors with similar content containing the target keywords with a goal of curation (or if you’re lucky a link – but NEVER ask for one).
7. Rinse and repeat weekly – Tuesdays are great.
8. Measure your results in terms of traffic, keyword rankings, links, shares, and mentions (setup Google Alerts for 6 words in quotes from each article).

Here are things I keep in mind when writing content to make it SEO friendly:

1. Ensure content covers every thing that educate the readers. In simple write for readers first & optimize for search engine later.
2. Internal links (This helps a lot to reduce the bounce rate & increase the avg. time on the site).
3. Compress images before uploading. This helps in faster loading of content (A search engine ranking signal).
4. Use proper heading tags (H1, H2 & H3).
5. Encourage readers to share articles. This helps in getting social signals.
6. Link to reliable resource. Outbound links improves SEO.

To maximize our SEO impact for each piece of content we publish for clients, the one thing we try to do is get other thought leader participation for each piece published. This can be a stat, a quote, or something else, but gets them emotionally tied to the piece, therefore they share it socially and link to it wherever they can.

Ensure consistent output

The search engines like fresh content, and they have for a long time as Cyrus Shepard points out in this post.

You may be aware that fresh content often gets rapidly indexed and may register higher in the SERPs than older low-value content. A great benefit of having fresh content appear on a site that is authoritative is that you can be sure it will get a SERP boost.

To ensure you get to maximize your site’s potential, you need a consistent output of content. In other words, you also need to be doing content marketing, and doing it right. It isn’t something you do once and then stop; you’ll need to do it and keep doing it.

Here are what a couple of experts do:

We follow The Specificity Strategy – this helps us write highly detailed posts about very specific topics. With every post I write, I try to target a pain point or question that someone would have. If you think of how someone searches these days, rarely do they go into Google and type in “content marketing”; they would go in and ask, “how do I get more traffic to my blog?” or “how do I hire writers for my blog?” So, our strategy isn’t to go after head SEO terms but to go after long tail search phrases instead. We try to match all of our content to search intent, so that if someone has a question related to content marketing, our content will show up. By doing content marketing this way, we show up when our audience has a questions they’re looking to have answered, we help them think through that problem, and build trust immediately. This in turn helps our sales down the road.

The best way to ensure a successful outcome is to ensure your content is aligned with other campaigns across the business. You can often create a complementary piece to most larger campaigns, especially those running across traditional media channels. That alignment can build bridges across the organization, opening up new funding for your distribution and give customers a joined-up experience across different mediums.

Use metrics that present a whole picture

Some marketers don’t really know if their SEO and content marketing efforts are actually working.

Metrics can provide the information you need to reflect the result of your efforts and to help decide on what is worth doing.

When it comes to SEO and content marketing, you can choose metrics that correspond to each separately and together. The metrics don’t have to be perfect but indicative of your success.

Here are a few common ones:

Traffic: One of the main goals of engaging in SEO and content marketing is to increase traffic to your site.

To record overall traffic numbers, you can go into Google Analytics and get the information from Audience Overview.

That in itself doesn’t tell you much about each piece of content, so you need to make note of organic and referral traffic by going into your acquisitions tab in Google Analytics, and select “by source”.

Keyword ranking: From an SEO perspective, if you are doing a good job, then your keyword rankings will rise over time. There are a number of tools you can choose from, so just pick one that lets you view your rankings over time.

: Measuring the quality of traffic is also important. So you’ll really want to know how many of your visitors are turning into subscribers and customers.

The rate at which people subscribe to your list is indicative of how valuable and persuasive your content and call to action are.

To track this, you can set up Goal Tracking in Google Analytics or alternatively look at the reports provided by your email marketing service provider.

Engagement: To determine how valuable your audience finds your content, you can also track metrics that are reflective of engagement. For example, metrics like:

You’ll need to monitor these over time to determine if your engagement is increasing.

Here is what one expert recommends:

Over to you

As we have seen above, both SEO and content marketing are effective ways to drive traffic, lead conversion and profit for most businesses. You don’t really need to pick one or the other but rather utilize both to get the full benefits at the same time. In fact, a focus on one will help increase the results of the other.

We have covered 6 areas that are affected by SEO and content marketing. To help with implementation, we created an on-page SEO optimization checklist which you can download below.