"You'll learn how great content can be used to attract attention and generate awareness of your organization, business and/or products.0:27 Wikipedia definition 1:42 What content should you create? 2:29 Market research
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This is lesson number one of the Content Marketing and SEO Fundamentals course, here at SEMrush Academy. In this lesson, I plan to talk about what content marketing is, and about content marketing plans and how to build a good plan.
So, let me start with a Wikipedia definition. Here's what Wikipedia says about content marketing: Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used by businesses in order to: attract attention and generate leads; expand their customer base; generate or increase online sales; increase brand awareness or credibility; engage an online community of users if there is more than one.
Now with that definition in mind, you could create content that could operate throughout the entire customer journey life cycle. Most content you create might be for the top of that funnel, but organic search works across the entire customer journey. So, you may be creating content that addresses multiple stages of that journey. Depending on where your users are on their customer journey, you might also use different types of content.
So, how does all of this drive SEO? Well, as we discussed in the Role of Content and SEO course, great content can rank for key search terms, attract links, and they can play a critical role in building your overall visibility in SEO.
So, what content should you create? This is where a content marketing plan comes into play. A content marketing plan will help guide the nature of the content you should create. You create a content marketing plan to ensure that you are using your investment in content marketing wisely, and to make sure that the content helps you meet all of your SEO goals.
As part of the planning process, be aware that your content marketing program will be part of a broader market ecosystem. You have targeted audiences shown on the far right - yes, that not only includes your target customers but also media, bloggers and influencers. These three groups can act as major amplifiers of your content: they can share your content, or they can link to it.
Because of this ecosystem, the content marketing plan starts with market research in order to define the overall market, so you can see whatever great content already exists out there, and what content has already attracted a large number of links. Once you've identified that, you can see where the gaps are in the available content on the market. In other words, what hasn't been written already. You can identify creative new approaches to make content easier to understand, and you can identify content that people will consider linking to.
So, there are many different elements that play into this. One of those is keyword research, which can help you identify the critical terms for which it might be wise to create content .
You can also use backlink analysis to collect a lot of data on other pieces of content that have gotten great responses from the market. If you take a look at lesson seven of that course - the Role of Content and SEO - you can learn more about the backlink analysis process, but you can also use creative Google search techniques to discover other pieces of content in your market. Consider this example of the results for the query, 'page speed study'.
Your research should also identify the people who regularly link to great content in your market, and what they tend to link to. You should also identify the major influencers in your market and what they like to share.
This should act as key input into the content you plan to create. If links, shares and visibility is your goal, then you need to think about who your actual audience is. Yes, you do want content to be of interest to your potential customers, but you also need to target media bloggers and influencers. Once you've identified this, you can take that into account along with other considerations, such as your budget, the type of content that fits your brand, what content your subject matter experts can create and so on. But those are beyond the scope of this lesson, which is focused on how to ensure that your content marketing program will have a plan to drive significant SEO value.
