As content marketers, our primary job is to ensure we are producing content that will best serve our clients’ audiences.

Sometimes those clients would like to see more commercial information or an overuse of keywords integrated into their content, however this creates the risk of it simply being marketing – without the content element.

Stories that engage audiences will be commercially successful exactly because your brand or message isn’t being shouted from the rooftops.

Search Engine Optimisation VS Conversion Rate Optimisation

Just because content doesn’t mention your brand or product ad-nauseam doesn’t mean it can’t seamlessly integrate the keywords and phrases that your target market is searching for when looking for information, entertainment or solutions to their problems – which your content will provide.

Those keywords and phrases are the foundations for your SEO strategy and detailed research and clever and seamless integration with content (eg no keyword stuffing) and your website back end will ensure you are bringing in relevant traffic.

“Relevant” depends on your content marketing goals and whether it’s purely about driving traffic or if there is a path-to-purchase or conversion strategy in place.

For the latter, content should be created – and optimised – around the keywords and phrases that will best provide conversion. These are often “long tail” phrases where users search for specific information. Rank well for those, provide quality content and conversions will follow.

For best conversion rate optimisation, ensure the conversion opportunity is obvious yet subtle, intuitive, tested using Google’s Content Experiments and monitored results monitored. If a particular keyword is providing high amounts of irrelevant traffic, it may actually be better to de-rank for that keyword and optimise for a phrase that is more likely to convert.

Your conversion strategy on-site is also important. If your conversion goal is to get a newsletter signup, having a popup on your landing page screaming for an email address signup the second people arrive is unlikely to lead to a conversion.

However, offering a “request for more information” or “gated” content in the form of a white paper that expands on the information delivered in a blog post and requires contact details to access is likely to be an easy step for your audience to take. Your optimisation has already provided them with content in line with their informational desires – why wouldn’t they want more?

In fact just the act of providing quality content and useful information will lead to conversions – even without asking – simply because when you provide that to your audience, they will seek more.

Keyword-stuffed sales talk does not have that effect.

The Complete Content Marketing Guide is a 30-page white paper detailing all aspects of developing, refining and implementing a content marketing and marketing automation strategy.

Content Marketing Strategy Development
Establishing Content Marketing Goals
Audience Analysis
Marketing Automation
Content Metrics and ROI
   – Digital Content Distribution:
   – Social Media
   – SEO
   – Video
   – E-Newsletters
   – Content Seeding and Amplification
Print Content Considerations
Legal considerations