The SEO's Guide to Content Marketing for SEO Has Finally Arrived

It’s always great to see a huge project you’ve piloted come to fruition. Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing for SEO is one such effort. I partnered with a great team at SEER Interactive—I wrote five chapters; they wrote five chapters—to put this guide together, and I’m happy with the final product.

From my vantage point, as a consultant who works in the B2C space helping startups, SMBs, and well-established, successful brands grow their online and offline reach through brand and content strategy, the guide can help any business, or business owner, use content marketing to be more successful. And, as it regards the guide, that success means more authority, more relevance, and more reach via organic search.

Here’s a snippet from the guide’s section on content strategy:

“Content strategy acts as a glue, tying together numerous elements important for SEO, from your overarching brand vision to promotional campaigns, all of which we will be addressing within the following chapters of this resource. As SEO has moved past manipulative tactics such as keyword stuffing and link buying, what’s important is creating content that’s relevant and engaging to your customers, which in turn strengthens Google’s understanding of your website and its topical authority.

Let’s dive into the steps you’ll need to take in order to create your own strategy.

If you have a dedicated content team, great! See what strategic plans they already have, and collaborate with them moving forward. If not, no problem. Many SEO teams may act as hybrid content/SEO/PR teams, and the following steps are still well within your wheelhouse.

Boost your content with SEO

What’s the difference between content strategy and content marketing?

While many, many people use the terms “content strategy” and “content marketing” interchangeably, they are not the same thing, because you can strategize about non-marketing content. For our purposes, though, when we talk about “content strategy,” you can assume we’re talking about “content marketing strategy.”

    Content strategy: Internal guidelines and governance

    Content marketing strategy (overlap area): Vision, goals, audience research, voice and style, ideation, external governance

    Content marketing: Editorial calendar, creation, curation, promotion, iteration

Content strategy concerns itself with the vision — the ins and outs of how and why your content will be created, managed, and eventually archived or updated. It looks at all of the content your customers ever encounter. It overlaps with content marketing, which is why you’ll see a lot of things in this guide that look like content strategy, but they are not the same thing (did we say that already?).

Content marketing focuses on the tactics and execution — the actual creation, curation, and editing of content that’s specifically created for the purposes of marketing. This could be anything from blog posts to the confirmation page and is aimed at building a trusted connection between a company’s products or services and the market that might end up purchasing them. It’s about creating content that people not only want to consume, but that will also help them through the sales funnel.

For example, a content strategist might find that there’s a lack of trust between their company and their customers, suggesting a number of ways that trust might be built. A content marketer might do the work to gain that trust by featuring an interview with the company’s founder. See how these disciplines complement each other?” …