How SEO and Content Marketing Work Together to Boost Your Online Success

Let’s look at how to combine SEO and content marketing for absolutely incredible boosts to your online business revenue.

If you’re a digital product or course creator, you already know that content marketing is not optional. This is how you get the word out about your business, and keep customers coming back.

Yet one of the things a ton of entrepreneurial business owners miss is the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when it comes to content marketing.

Sure, paying for ads and building traction on social media is important, especially over the short-term.

But if you’re a business owner who wants to implement a marketing strategy that delivers exponential growth down the road…

…then we recommend you start thinking about how you can combine your existing SEO and marketing efforts to create even more efficiency and value for your brand!

The trouble is, SEO remains a somewhat elusive topic for most content and course creators.

Sure, we all want our names to be at the top of Google…but how can we achieve this through our marketing efforts, specifically?

In the past, we have worked hard to Demystify SEO through our expert guide on the subject.

Yet we’re still seeing business owners struggle to incorporate it into their marketing rotation.

That’s why today we want to provide our step-by-step recommendations for how to unify your SEO and marketing efforts so you aren’t doing more work than you have to.

In fact, this is one of the reasons clients hire us in the first place–to handle all the technical aspects of SEO that amplify digital content, including analytics and research, as well as create that content on their behalf.

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What to expect from this content marketing for SEO guide

First, we’ll do a quick refresher ‘course’ about how to define content marketing and search engine optimization.

Next we will expand on these concepts to explore what you need to do to get your existing content marketing strategy up to speed for optimization.

(This is when you’ll leave behind the content marketing vs SEO mindset, and adopt a content marketing AND SEO mindset).

Then, we will give you actionable steps for how to combine SEO and content marketing to sell more and create the passive source of income you always dreamed of.

Throughout the process, we’ll give you behind-the-scenes insight on how we integrate SEO and content marketing for our clients.

Plus, we will provide examples to help you visualize how the whole thing will work for your business!

Just remember: if at any time you have questions, or trouble working out how to implement these improvements for your business, you can reach out to us for help.

We’ve deployed these strategies with numerous clients, and would be happy to provide expert insight on what to do next.

Until then, here’s our expert take on combining SEO with your content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

Most people know content marketing as everything you do to generate revenue and increase sales with your content.

What is important to remember though, is that content marketing is also the way you use your own subject matter expertise to create the content your audience will want to read about.

However, the content you create for content marketing will be different from your sellable course and membership content, and not just because it’s available to students for free.

It also differs because this content should supplement or support the quality expertise you sell as courses or through membership perks.

“I don’t think business owners should make free content first, and then try and convert that into a course or into a membership. It should be the other way around–your membership and course content should be converted into free marketing material.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

The thing that really makes content marketing so exciting though, is how many options you have.

Your freely available marketing content can be anything from image-type marketing on Instagram, to our preferred content marketing methods, including:

The best part is, as you develop your content marketing system, these methods form a feedback loop, and end up informing you on what course and membership content you should create and sell next.

That’s why with content marketing, we advocate making your content do its own marketing for you by implementing SEO practices into your process.

Ideally, as you work content marketing with SEO into your regular business operations, you’ll find yourself with even more passive income than you ever thought possible.

Content marketing example: How to market content online

Let’s give a quick overview of how to market your content online before we jump into the SEO part of the equation.

Content marketing can be quite simple–just start with a product you already sell and work from there.

Let’s say for example that you’ve got a course on offer, and it comes in ten parts.

To market that content successfully, we would recommend you:

1. Isolate two to three parts from your main course content,
2. Summarize course excerpts into a publishable form of content, like those listed above,
3. Publish that content to your website, socials, and email network to share your expertise and draw in new potential customers.

When the right people get a taste of the content you provide with your free marketing materials, they’re more likely to want to get a taste of the full thing.

By summarizing the content of that course, you’ll also be priming prospects with the knowledge they’ll need to explore your topic more in-depth.

This process is the same whether you have membership content behind a paywall, or content that is available in a course or certification format.

In other words, whatever content you’re providing at a cost can be broken down into smaller chunks, and used as marketing material.

Should I share every part of my paid content for free?

Sure, some people might want to share the entirety of their content library in a more open-source fashion.

Here, the idea is to provide value through more in-depth and guided versions of that content behind a paywall.

The thing is, when content is delivered in this unstructured setting, it can be a little more difficult for students to then onboard with paid content.

Not only are they perhaps less willing to opt-in for purchasable perks, they may miss critical parts of the learning process that you’ve cultivated through your program set-up.

Like we said before, it’s better to take the course content products you already sell, and then break down that content into smaller, sizable marketing materials that attract the right students to sign-up for more content!

Alright, that’s content marketing–but in this article we are talking about content marketing with search engine optimization, or SEO.

So for those of us who need a bit of a refresher: what is SEO?

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Because we break down what is SEO in our SEO Secrets article series, we’ll keep this definition simple–though we recommend you bookmark that series for later to help boost your content marketing efforts!

Basically, search engine optimization is anything you do to get your business to appear in top search results on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other similar platforms.

These rankings are what get you organic, profitable traffic and targeted leads, and what ultimately drives your revenue and business profits.

More than anything though – and as you likely have heard before – SEO is centered on keywords or signals that help search engines find your page.

If a search engine ‘thinks’ your page has the answer to a searcher’s question, then it will show your page higher in the search results.

How to optimize content for search engines?

Again, our Demystifying SEO article will break this all down for you, but the process to incorporate search engine optimized keywords and other ‘signals’ into your content includes:

Great SEO can also include practices like incorporating transcripts into all your published videos, or updating one or two web pages a month.

At its most basic though, optimizing content for search engines can be done when you:

1. Create a list of topics on a spreadsheet,
2. Conduct keyword research using tools such as ahrefs or SEMrush,
3. Identify keywords with low ‘difficulty rankings’ and high ‘search volumes’ to find primary and secondary keywords,
4. Work to understand the intention of the person who would search for found keywords. Ask, “are they my ideal customer?” and if yes,
5. Address this intention in your created content, including found keywords in headers, subheaders, and paragraph content where possible

When creating content, the idea is to create the most comprehensive answer to searcher questions to rank properly on search engine results pages.

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

The benefits of combining SEO and Content Marketing

We imagine by this point, you’re already connecting the dots to understand how, when SEO and content marketing work together, you’re more likely to get noticed online.

With improved search results from freely available content, and a streamlined process for marketing content that is created organically from your sellable products, you’ll…

The great thing about learning how to combine content marketing and SEO is that there are a ton of services out there who can help you build out your strategy…

…or even do all the tough work for you.

We know because we offer a service to do all your keyword research, and even have a team of writers to produce your marketing content.

All you have to do is provide us with a little of your expertise on found keyword topics, and we take the rest of the work from there, including publication to your website!

We can also say with great confidence that hiring someone to take care of content marketing and SEO will free you to focus on creating the content that actually makes you money.

Just look at how one of our top clients, Jen Gilchrist of SoulSuccessUnleashed.com, managed to turn her focus from marketing to creating the content she loves.

Read Jen’s Story

So what is your story going to look like?

Likely, it will start with optimizing your existing marketing strategy.

That’s because you’ll want to make sure you have a great system for your marketing efforts in place first.

Then you can begin implementing the longer-term SEO tactics involved with SEO content marketing from there.

How to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

The first step to getting your content marketing strategy up to speed with SEO is to invest some time in ironing out your current marketing strategy at its core.

That means implementing a repeatable marketing funnel system you can use again and again with the sellable digital content you produce.

Because the marketing funnel strategy you choose will be instrumental in promoting a specific course or program, as well as your overall business and brand, you’ll want to make sure you create a strong one.

For example, in our free marketing funnel template (which you can use to optimize your content marketing), we explain the four stages we use to market all our content, and our client’s content as well:

By making your client aware of, engaged in, converted by, and ascended into your content as part of the content production process, you’ll effectively double or even triple your investment on the content you produce.

To properly implement these tactics into your content marketing strategy, we thus recommend watching our free 40-minute marketing funnel webinar for more in-depth examples of how this process looks for coaches, content creators, spiritual teachers, and other online experts and trainers:

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Then, once you’ve developed this marketing system and incorporated it into your business, you can move into optimizing your content marketing strategy based on the product or service you are providing.

The main idea is to think “what am I selling” and then asking, “how can I make content related to that?”.

This part of optimizing your content marketing strategy can still be complex for some, especially for those who are still below the $100K a year mark with their online business.

So, let’s make this process a little more tangible:

Content Marketing Strategy Example

Say for instance you have a course that you’re selling that teaches people how to use Excel.

Now imagine the course focuses on efficiency and productivity when using Excel, and provides a higher level analysis for advanced Excel users.

More specifically, it provides knowledge on how to pivot tables inside of Excel.

This is your core offering. You are selling a niche course for Excel users.

With that at the ready, you can plug your product into the first stage of your marketing funnel: the awareness stage.

That means creating blog articles and videos, hosting live streams or doing podcasts, even sitting down to talk to other industry experts about your methods over interview.

As you then share this content, you’ll be engaging your audience as well as improving your chances of getting organic traffic.

Best of all, you’ll be improving your own authority with this supplementary content, meaning more trust, and more likelihood to buy your source content–or at least encourage a visit to your site page.

From there you would enter the conversion stage where you bring on prospects to your email list, or provide a downloadable piece of content to get them further along the marketing funnel.

As you add on more valuable content to that stream of expertise, you can then ascend these initial students or leads to provide extra insight from your experience.

You could for instance provide students with a package of materials to hand out to colleagues in the industry (just make sure they’re branded).

This means getting creative with the overall campaign, and then making sure it is repeated with other clients and product offerings.

Then again, it could be that you are more interested in cultivating a sense of what it is you’re an expert in with your marketing campaign, as opposed to marketing a specific product.

If that’s the case, then you’ll want to understand and navigate the main lanes your business is based on, and then build out marketing content based on those ‘lanes’.

At The Digital Navigator, our ‘lanes’ are website content, SEO content marketing services, eLearning, and digital sales, and so we cultivate free content in those niches to position ourselves as an expert in the space.

So then we would make a cloud of ideas related to those different subjects that would be interesting. We next consider our customer avatar, asking “who is our ideal customer, and what are their goals?”

This allows us to design more content perfectly aligned with their needs, desires, and questions.

Going back to the Excel example, you could for instance start with ultra-basic tutorials or how-to videos. Then, for the more technical audiences, you would want to dive straight into advanced formulas, like Javascript for Excel.

It’s all about recognizing the skill level of your audience, adjusting your tone for that audience, and then using the content you create for that audience in multiple pieces of your content marketing.

For example, your published video could be transcribed into an article that also contains the video content from its source.

Next you would break down that content into a couple of emails and social media posts that you can then schedule and share. You might even be able to use the video or article or transcript excerpt in an ad!

“One tip I have during marketing optimization is to create a regular publishing schedule, and to limit the number of marketing channels you rely on–at least at first. One is a good start to help you gain clarity and focus before you diversify into two or more channels. It also helps with consistency, and reduces business risk.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

How to create a content marketing schedule

Nailing down your regular publishing system or schedule is just as important as the consistency of that strategy.

That means when you’re coming up with a creation and marketing schedule for your content, you should consider how often you want to publish content.

We recommend starting small, and then ramping up your growth from there.

You could for instance send a weekly email, publish one article per month, and do four videos on your channel or social media feed.

To improve consistency and efficiency, you could then use the content from your videos to inform your weekly email, as well as use their transcripts to build the article you plan to publish each month.

Just make sure you’re not being too lax with your content publishing and marketing schedule. If you publish once every six months, you’re just not going to have the results you’re looking for.

Not only will search engines ‘forget’ about your content, but your prospects will too!

Instead, keep up with your content schedule, and ramp up if you’re getting a lot of traffic, or if you’re finding your current schedule too easy.

4 More Ways to Simplify Your Content Strategy for SEO

Sometimes when we optimize our SEO content strategy, we can end up adding too many ‘efficiencies’ to our plate.

It’s like when you decide to clean out that old storage closet, and find that the mess gets a lot bigger before it gets small again.

As you continue to curate your content marketing strategy, here are four extra hints about how to keep your content marketing strategy super simple.

And don’t forget that we have a free marketing funnel template you can use over and over to systemize future product launches.

1. Prioritize your content before your marketing. As you bridge the gap between content marketing and SEO, you’re going to find that your content is most important and should be your priority. Obviously you want to iron out technical issues on your website first (our free website audit is a good starting point), but after that your priority should be focusing on content and positioning yourself as an expert in your niche.
2. Take your time with SEO. Even if you’re only spending a few minutes on keyword research per article (at first), you’re building a framework for future content development where SEO becomes a priority. And since even the best SEO efforts can take a while to start churning out results, taking a patient approach and doing your research will benefit you in the long run. Don’t feel as if you have to dive right into SEO–you can take baby steps until you truly get the hang of it.
3. Practice keyword research in older articles. When you’re identifying keywords that have a lower difficulty level for ranking, we recommend using some of the keywords you find and matching them to content you already have on your blog or website. Something as simple as updating headers, and adding the keywords to the body of your text can help you start ranking higher on search engines like Google or Bing.
4. Link older content with new content, and vice versa. As you begin looking through old content to optimize it and make it a passive part of your over content marketing strategy, keep in mind that building a network of links between your articles will help your content get more exposure…plus search engines will love it too! Don’t make this a big focus of your work at first, but keep in mind the ways you can build your own ‘encyclopedia’ web of expert information, all right in your site.

Learn How to Get Google Leads as a Life coach

Alright! Now that we have done the legwork of bringing your content marketing strategy up to speed, it’s time to start focusing more on the SEO aspects of your content marketing.

Remember, by getting your marketing funnels set up for existing content, you’re more likely to be making important sales while you start to build out newer content with SEO.

This is going to help you stay patient as you onboard yourself (and your team) to the most critical part of your business; the part that will get you those higher revenues year-over-year!

Let’s get into it:

How to Combine SEO and Content Marketing to Increase Website Revenue

Before Google started penalizing people for black-hat SEO practices, tons of business owners were content with using what is called programmatic SEO to create as many pages as possible in the shortest amount of time.

These days, this kind of tactic may make sense for referential websites like eBay or Zillow, who have multiple identical pages…

…but that is not going to be the case for your business. Even if you have a large among of courses, training modules, or programs available on your website, your content marketing for SEO should have a more dynamic feel

Plus programmatic SEO tends to be very expensive, with not enough ‘original’ content created to make sense for coaches, online trainers, and other content or course creators online.

You can even get your website removed if you get too many of these ‘pings’ from Google!

Instead, we recommend you follow a more curated, strategic approach to combining your content marketing with SEO.

That means doing exactly what you’re already doing, except in a more structured way.

This isn’t about creating hundreds of social media posts, or letting great content sit stagnant on your site

It’s about making your own content work for you by putting that content into the optimized content marketing funnel you created above.

Use our marketing funnel template

As you now expand your content marketing to include SEO practices, understanding your audience and creating high-quality SEO-optimized content, we can guarantee your commitment will result in more value for your target audience, and more leads that convert.

This is truly how you establish your brand as a thought leader, and attract more leads and customers to your business over the long term.

As you naturally grow your network and increase leads and conversions, you’ll see side-by-side improvements to your SEO efforts in as little as a year.

That’s because what you’re doing is creating synergy between the content you launch and the conversions you receive through your website…much like our client Jen Gilchrist does when she commits to a new FB ad launch to share amazing articles, videos, and more!

Learn how Jen does it

Without further ado, here are three ways to use what you’ve learned about content marketing to begin applying new SEO techniques to your marketing funnel process.

We even recommend you use these tactics to help come up with new sellable digital products in your coaching or training catalog!

3 Steps to Optimize Your Content Marketing Funnel for Search Engines

1. Identify your target audience

This first step seems like a no-brainer, but is a step that is worth quickly revisiting every so often as you develop more and more content.

That’s because as you grow and alter your content to suit popular keyword phrases, you’ll have more of an idea of what your target audience is actually looking to buy.

Then, as you get even clearer on who your ideal customer is, you can further tailor your content to meet those specific needs, interests, and challenges.

We do have a 3-part article series to help you develop the most comprehensive system for this part of your SEO journey, but at its core identifying your target audience looks like:

As people learn to trust you as an information resource, you will begin to build the loyal following that compounds all of your marketing efforts into more passive sales!

2. Create valuable, SEO-heavy marketing content

Step two in this process is to use what you’ve learned about your audience to create the marketing content that appears in every stage of your marketing funnel.

In other words, you’re creating content to offer during your target audience’s awareness, engagement, conversion, and ascension journey.

So, in order to add SEO customizations to this content creation process, we recommend:

As you start flexing your new content marketing strategy, you’ll start to notice increasing opportunities to maximize this content to make you even more money–all without having to start from scratch.

You’ve got the keywords (search terms), you know who you want to target, and now it’s time to repurpose your content so it reaches a wider audience than ever before.

3. Repurpose and optimize your content

In business just as with cooking, it’s important not to waste any scraps. If there’s a way to use every part of your content to make something new, then you should!

That’s because search engines love it when you update your content often–especially if you’re using those all-important keywords as you create new marketing content.

When you do, you’re effectively improving the visibility of your content over time!

And although we aren’t looking to duplicate content you’ve already made, for the purposes of marketing, you do have the opportunity now to transform existing material into something more.

What we suggest is to take a video transcript and to turn it into its own article. You could also take a podcast episode and turn it into a blog post, or vice versa.

Or, say you saw a conversation going in the comment section of your latest video. You could then use that to build a new article for subscribers and students to get them more interested…and even give a shoutout to loyal followers interacting on your page.

The ideas here are endless–so to get your brain ‘storming’, we’re sharing one of our in-house content marketing strategy examples using SEO!

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Content Marketing Strategy with SEO Example

When we offset our content marketing strategy with SEO at The Digital Navigator, we start the process by filling out the marketing funnel template with planned content at each of the four stages.

At the end of the funnel, remember, you want to ascend your prospect towards your biggest digital purchases.

That means every part of your content creation process when marketing should be inspired by that product; then, you can work backwards from there!

Just make sure your plan includes how many pieces of content you’ll be producing. Make a folder somewhere on your computer or in Google drive to keep track of all funnel assets, and you’ll be golden!

Here’s what we do next for each of the marketing materials we plan to create, whether for ourselves or on behalf of our clients:

Once content has been reviewed and finalized by our client, we then put that content into our publication pipeline according to the marketing funnel plan.

This is where our whole team of administrators, developers, and marketing experts use this content as a basis to create new landing pages, article posts, Facebook ads, and more.

What is most important here is to have some level of planning, even if at this point you’re doing the whole thing yourself. For example, right now we have some clients who lead their own content creation process, and who share their content with us during production or after the fact for simple checks and balances. Just get into the workflow, and grow from there.

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

Whatever your process, we also suggest inputting your marketing content into a spreadsheet to keep a record of links, drafts, and images.

These assets are great to have on quick recall during your marketing phase, and you can even list different keywords used to organize content into categories.

Plus, having this content at the ready can provide awesome inspiration for the rest of the parts of your content marketing funnel

Say for instance your largest marketing asset is to record a podcast episode.

Your other marketing materials could then be publication of the transcript to your website (perhaps curated into an article), an email blast to your followers with a link to that audio, and a Facebook ad that leads people to the first landing page in your marketing funnel.

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Another example would be to create summaries of your content and put it into the FAQ on your sales page

This is just another way to get the attention of search engines, whose main job is to get searchers to the content that most properly answers their question.

All you have to do is ask “what question does my content answer?”, and then add that question to your FAQ with the summary beneath.

Moreso, these questions will give you insight on what doubts your ideal customer may be having, which gives you insight to certain objections prospects may have about your products.

By further addressing these objections with FAQ pages, you’re helping to build authority, all while doing some subtle product marketing along the way.

Now, as you start to link these pieces of content together in a really streamlined way, you’ll notice it does require a bit of technical know-how.

That’s why we always say the first step of SEO is to build a great technical foundation for your website.

You’ll really thank yourself later when you start plugging marketing material into your website–or getting a developer to do it for you.

Just get yourself right with your website, and then use your content marketing funnel to support new page development and website or content updates.

In summary, remember that the SEO part of your content marketing is the part where you take the time to analyze the search terms with HIGH volume and LOW difficulty.

It’s sometimes crazy to think, but these keywords, over the next 12 or so months, are going to start bringing you the best possible leads for your business

Even better, these pieces of content are going to help you get more bang for your buck as you use it to further inspire content that:

As more leads are drawn towards the free, value-added content you provide, they’ll enter the gateway to become long-term content buyers.

That’s the beauty of combining content marketing with SEO–a huge boost in year-over-year revenue for your digital content, training, or coaching business online!

Your Successful SEO Content Marketing Journey Starts Now

Are you ready to have a constant stream of visitors and leads to your website?

You better be!

That’s because once you deploy a well-planned content marketing funnel strategy with SEO for a few good products, you’ll suddenly be faced with tons of interested parties who want more of what you have to offer.

No more self-promotion at parties (though you can do that too), you can relax knowing your SEO efforts toward content marketing are going to pay off as you sell more products through your business.

Best of all, this type of content marketing is going to give you the stability and resilience you’re looking for in a career.

This is how you get that highly sought-after dream of having a passive income, where you can take a few days off of work knowing that your content is still making money for you……and that much of your content is what’s converting sales, not just your sales team!

Plus, once you get these organic traffic boosts through SEO and content marketing, you’re going to be able to reduce your reliance on paid ad spending.

SEO doesn’t require the constant spending habits that go with paid advertising.

That means, when you decide to pause your paid SEO for six months, you won’t gain as much traction than if you were still investing.

When you use our content marketing strategy, you’ll easily accelerate your sales without relying so much on ad spend.

Then if you end up hitting an unexpected financial crunch (or spend too much money on vacation), you’ll be safe from those traffic dips without having to fork over more cash upfront.

Adding SEO to your content marketing means, once you’ve invested in the funnel, you don’t have to go broke running ads to maintain your momentum. You’ll have to do some maintenance, sure, but not nearly to the same magnitude as pay-per-click marketing methods.”

 

– Pol Cousineau, Founder The Digital Navigator

As you can see, it doesn’t take much more effort to add the SEO keyword research component to your content marketing.

Most of you will already have been doing some kind of video delivery or email marketing with your digital coaching or training content

Now with SEO, you can make doubly sure that you’re addressing the questions and problems of your audience–questions and problems that actually lead them to buying your products.

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Have doubts about your content marketing strategy with SEO?

Good news.

If after reading this article you’re feeling a lot of doubt about how to move forward, or feel you’re too entrenched in your existing website to start making changes, we encourage you to reach out to us for help.

Not only can we provide you with a free website audit, where you can get actionable steps on how to improve your website and marketing (no obligation), but you can also get the inside scoop on our content marketing seo services, and connect with technical marketing experts to see how we might support you with some of the marketing tasks you find most difficult.

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We’re sure the problems and worries you’re facing are solvable, and want to relieve any stress or frustration from the journey you have ahead.

So, whatever you decide, we are here to ensure you have a seamless experience fulfilling your content marketing strategy, and using SEO to the best of your advantage.

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