What role does content marketing play in SEO growth?

Digital marketing is a complex business discipline with many strategies to promote one’s brand online. It offers a wide range of tools and opportunities that skilled marketers leverage to achieve outstanding results.

What often happens is that marketers become so persevering and immersed in a particular strategy (like SEO) that they overlook other wonderful opportunities within their reach. They live in marketing silo islands and are reluctant to explore collaboration opportunities around them.

One such opportunity, a true treasure, is located on the conditional content-marketing island. It holds a synergistic potential to boost SEO growth and help drive brand visibility and recognition.

Curious to know how? Join us on a quick tour of the powerful role content marketing plays in SEO growth.

At a glance: the connection between SEO and content marketing

Assume you are NOT happy with your as-is SEO. For example, your website, social media profile, blog, or anything else ranks poorly in search results (SERPs). 

From here, you have two strategic options:

1. Optimize what’s already available;
2. Create and add new, fully optimized content to enhance SEO.

With either option, you’ll need to work on the content to enable your brand, business, or product to perform better in search results. And this is exactly where content marketing comes in.

Content marketing accounts for up to 80-90% of an average e-commerce website’s content and structure. As long as the content’s role is to attract, educate, and convert customers/users — it is all pure content marketing.

The key takeaway from this chain of thought is that content marketing has the potential to drive a larger part of SEO success. To achieve higher search ranking, one must elevate content marketing in SEO to standards commensurate with search engine expectations.    

Content distribution strategies for SEO growth

Before investing time and resources into creating high-quality content, one should think ahead and plan for how to distribute the content efficiently. Even the best content in the world without effective distribution strategies is not worth the effort.

Here are some top content distribution strategies for effective SEO growth:

Collaborating with influencers and industry leaders

People always listen to the authoritative voices of influencers and industry leaders. For content marketers to engage with the target audience, they should actively collaborate with authoritative personas and leverage their popularity and audience reach for the success of content distribution.

Implementing a strategic link-building approach

Link-building helps promote your content and achieve higher search engine ranking. It does so by combining high-impact content creation with effective link insertion outreach. If it sounds complicated, using a professional service to secure ranking factors like backlinks can be a smart business move, helping you achieve your SEO goals faster.

Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC)

UGC is the latest and rapidly progressing trend in SEO content marketing strategy. Its role is to encourage users to become agents for distributing and popularizing one’s content, products, and services. This strategy can significantly boost SEO and quickly move your content up the search engine result ladder.

Leveraging social media

Social media platforms combined have the potential to reach an audience of 5+ billion. That’s how many people are actively using Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Marketers should utilize social media for content amplification and engage with users through comments and polls.

Content quality and its impact on search rankings

One of the key aspects of content marketing is the quality of content. Even with the best marketing strategies, including advertising and distribution, poor-quality content won’t bring you the desired SEO effect.

What defines high-quality content for SEO? Well, we have to look at what search engines have to say in this regard. In content, search engines value the following factors:

• Relevance: does your content match users’ search intent and provide useful information?
• Depth & accuracy: is the topic explored deep enough, and are the facts and arguments accurate?
• Readability & engagement: is the written content easy to read (i.e., simple, clear, and well-structured), and does it have the power to engage your audience?
• Originality: is your content unique, and does it bring any new perspectives and ideas?
• Credibility: how trustworthy is your content? Google and other search engines value content that is authoritative and credible, following the famous E-A-T principle (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

For a deeper look at how successful marketers maintain content quality, see this article on white-label content marketing. It will introduce you to the concept of white-label marketing and its subtypes, explain how content marketing supports SEO, and lay out 10 different ways that you can leverage it to your benefit. 

Long-form content vs. short-form content for organic growth

From a conventional marketing perspective, it may seem counterintuitive that long-form content may drive SEO growth. It may seem complex, difficult to digest, and hard to make in the first place.

However, modern search engines’ algorithms have started to favor comprehensive content that thoroughly answers user queries. This is why long-form content is beneficial for SEO:

• Higher search rankings – search engines prioritize content that fully uncovers a given topic, presenting a problem from different angles and providing both pros and cons.
• More backlinks – the longer the text, the more space to place valuable backlinks.
• Increased dwell time – readers spend more time reading a long-form piece of content, and search engines take the extended dwell time as a powerful ranking factor.
• Better keyword optimization – one can stuff more keywords and distribute them more naturally, however, stuffing too many can trigger a negative search engine response.

Some cheap services produce content that reads more like academic essays than engaging SEO-driven material. Stay away from them and keep relevant specialists in your team who can easily spot content that doesn’t meet your high marketing standards.

The role of content freshness in SEO

Technical information in the world doubles every year. Students who study in their first academic term and learn technologically-rich subjects are likely to need to upskill by the year they graduate. 

This gives only a small glimpse into the rapidly changing world we are all living in. 

Under these conditions, content freshness plays a key role not only in pleasing the eyes and minds of the readers but also in the gratification of search engine algorithms. The latter prioritizes up-to-date information and downgrades the old one, which gives outdated perspectives and states irrelevant statistics.

What can you do to leverage content freshness for SEO? A few things:

• Update your existing content periodically. This implies updating statistics, facts, links (both internal and external), and contact information.
• Repurpose and expand the old content. Oftentimes, it’s easier to write a long-form article out of an available short post than to invent an entirely new bicycle (article). Similarly, you can convert texts into videos, infographics, and vice versa (use ChatGPT and similar tools).
• Dilute the existing content with new ones regularly. If you run a blog, keep posting fresh posts there; the same goes for podcasts and video streams.

Use Google Analytics to identify pages with dropping organic traffic — a sure sign to suspect outdated content. Ahrefs and SEMrush can also help as they allow monitoring for declining keyword rankings and pages losing backlinks, which often signal issues with content freshness.

The Bottom Line

SEO and content marketing pursue similar goals: increasing visibility and driving target audience engagement. Combining both tools produces a synergistic effect and helps achieve the desired outcome quicker and more consistently.  

Content marketing works like fuel for your SEO engine. It gives your SEO efforts the necessary leverage and keeps your website, social media page, blog, or app well-positioned in search results over time.

As shown in this post, the following content marketing strategies bring the best results for SEO:

• Collaborate with industry influencers
• Build a strong backlink profile
• Encourage User-Generated Content 
• Leverage social media
• Create content that is fresh, deep, and relevant
• Maintain a fair mix of short-form and long-form content

Ultimately, SEO and content marketing are both highly cost-efficient ways to grow one’s visibility. They pursue organic traffic acquisition and don’t rely on paid ads. Together, they establish a strong foundation for long-term online success.