Content Marketing IS The New SEO For Online Marketers

Given Google and Bing’s recent revelation that social media is now a factor in determining website rankings, content marketing should be considered the number one search engine optimization strategy.  For inbound marketers this totally makes sense, because frequently publishing high quality content and distributing it via social media is the best way to take advantage of this new algorithm.  If your search engine optimization strategy focuses on content marketing here are a few of the SEO benefits you can expect.
1.  Fresh Content – It has long been known that the more frequently content is posted to a website the more often that website will be crawled by the search engines.  This will definitely help a website in the SERPs.
2.  Competitive on New Keyword Phrases – Posting on a blog at least three times per week will allow the website to focus on new long tail keyword phrases.  This is especially powerful if the keyword ranking “wish list” is over 100 keyword phrases.  Simply include the phrase in the title, body copy and alt text of the post’s image.  Also include a tag for that keyword phrase.  This will create an RSS feed for that phrase and all subsequent posts that you tag with that phrase will be included in the feed.  This will maximize a website’s chances to rank for that particular keyword phrase.
3.  Increased Website Traffic – The process of frequently publishing quality content will increase the number of unique visitors to a website and the frequency to which they visit.  Search engines reward websites with lots of traffic in the SERPs.
4.  Backlink Magnetism – Constantly publishing quality content to a website will undoubtedly drive others to link to that content.  This is considered the first rule of link building and the core of content marketing – publish quality content.
5.  Social Media Distribution & Profile Building – Distributing quality content via social media will not only increase that content’s visibility to the users of those social media platforms, but it will increase the content’s visibility to the search engines.  This will also lead to increased followers or fans for the social media profile doing the distribution.  Overtime, this process will raise the “clout” of the social media profile to users and search engines.  The result of this is better SERP rankings in the search engines.
The benefits of content marketing won’t be obvious overnight.  Content marketing is an ongoing process that typically takes six months to see measurable benefits.  Overtime, content marketing will bestow upon its practitioner the status of “thought-leader” while creating lots of brand advocates.  The search engine optimization benefits are icing on the cake.