8 Reasons You Need an SEO Content Strategist

“Content is the new SEO” has been one of the resounding slogans guiding marketers in 2014. As you know, it’s not just enough to churn out content — writing about whatever is on your mind… often. You need to have an overall strategy in mind, too. Mod Girl Marketing helps businesses take their content marketing further by incorporating search engine optimization and social media marketing into an overarching strategy that’ll get you to page one of the search engines. Still not convinced? Here are 8 reasons to hire an SEO content strategist.

1. Expertise

Content is the new SEO… but do you know how to do it?

Content adds value, builds community, distributes information naturally, improves brand awareness, and goes viral, according to a recent Huffington Post article. Yet, “content strategy is not easy,” the article cautions. By nature, people look for shorter processes and faster results — rather than investing the time and money into quality resources that’ll yield the best results. You can free your time by enlisting the help of a content strategist devoted to your business success online.

P.S. Check out my Huffington Post article, Get Your Blog On!

Inbound marketing is crucial to any SEO strategy

Content is great, but the more inbound links you have pointing to that content, the higher your rankings will soar. According to Wikipedia inbound marketing is defined as:

Inbound marketing is promoting a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing which serve to bring customers in closer to the brand.

SEO is nothing without inbound marketing. You need a strategic inbound marketing plan that is attainable and scalable. An SEO content strategist can help devise the perfect inbound marketing plan for your business. A strong inbound marketing plan will result in not just high rankings in search engines, but higher conversion rates and higher quality leads.

2. Results

Are you ready to take your online marketing to the next level?

When a content strategy is properly executed, you can expect the following worthwhile perks:

- A great deal of content that can be reused in many ways to offer greater value for your customers

- A large, specific subscriber base that is primed and ready to buy

- Relationships with other thought leaders — who come with subscriber bases as well

- Improve social media interactions and popularity

- Boosted search engine ranking, organic traffic, and authority

- Increased web leads

3. Organization

Are you publishing regularly and on time, with relevant content?

Entrepreneur Magazine recommends starting off with “a topic or keyword list that’s relevant to your business, products, or services, and target location” to create compelling, search-friendly content. Once the initial game plan is devised, you’ll need to post fresh topics regularly on a schedule to build an audience. A strategist knows how to build a cohesive batch of content that links people’s online inquiries with your company’s offerings. Ultimately, that’s what sells!

4. Team Effort

Avoid the problem of “too many cooks in the kitchen!”

Sometimes an online marketing effort can come across disjointed and messy. All the different cogs of the machine are going in different directions and nothing is working properly to drive brand awareness and popularity. To be truly effective (and not just a bunch of empty words published into the vastness of cyberspace), one must consolidate content with other facets of online marketing, including:

- Web design

- Copywriting

- Search engine optimization

- Social media

- Public relations

- Offline marketing

- Brand building

- Business shareholders

- User experience

The best teams include a senior administrator, a creative team member, and a “go to” person within your company. Specialists in SEO, writing, web design, and online marketing then weigh in with the core team regarding their individual parts of the project. It can be overwhelming to manage such a large operation, which is where a content strategist from Mod Girl Marketing comes in handy.

5. Efficiency

Are your content marketing efforts sabotaging your website? We’ve seen many examples of well-meaning content efforts gone awry. For instance, a company that churns out too much content — and good, popular content, at that! — can end up displacing their main website from the search engine rankings. That’s exactly what happened when Barclay’s launched a popular “Ask Barclay’s” sub-domain. Content is good, but you want it to work for you… not against you. The content needs to direct traffic to your main site, which is always top dog in the rankings. We have also seen examples where a business simply republished another site’s content word for word — and was then penalized by Google and pushed to virtual obscurity! You need more than loads of content: you need direction and talent as well.

6. Competition

Amplify your audience & capture market share! Even “Content Rockstars” need a little extra help amplifying their messages. As Promotion World reminds us, “the competition is something fierce,” with 144 million email marketing messages, 4 million Facebook shares, and 499,860 WordPress blogs posted every 24 hours. A content strategist knows how to get you noticed amid all the clutter. Other companies are tapping outside talent… so why aren’t you?

7. Relevance

Do you have someone watching the shifting sands of SEO? It would be nice if Search Engine Optimization was a static thing you could just learn once — like how to ride a bike or how to bake a pie — but it’s not. SEO is dynamic and ever-changing, as we’ve seen with the many different Google updates (Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, Pigeon, etc.) On top of the big algorithm updates Google also releases smaller updates almost weekly. Regular business owners don’t have the time to keep up, but it’s the full-time job of an SEO strategist to stay abreast of the shifting sands. We can help you understand which ranking signals are most importantat the present time and if any additional techniques are recommended.

8. Preparation

Do you need to gear up for greater holiday marketing exposure?  In the U.S., Black Friday through Christmas accounts for nearly 20% of the year’s retail sales. For some industries and enterprises, this percentage is much, much higher. Now is the best time tobegin ramping up your brand’s internet presence to gather a larger percentage of the consumer purchase pie this holiday season.