How to Combine SEO and Content Marketing (Ahrefs Method)

SEO and content marketing are different marketing channels. But you don’t have to choose between them. They are complementary.

In fact, to achieve greater effectiveness of marketing activities, they should be combined.

Two main reasons:

1. Content Marketing and SEO Are Like Peanut Butter and Jelly – They Go Well Together

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing content to attract and retain customers.

Here’s how SEO helps content marketing:

• It tells you what interests your audience — If you know what people are looking for on Google, you can create content they want to see. This is known as keyword research, a key aspect of SEO.
• Creates a predictable distribution — Sparktoro study showed that 63.41% of all US web traffic referrals come from Google. Most of our blog traffic also comes from search engines.

SEO is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines to gain more traffic.

Here’s how content marketing helps SEO:

• Helps you get more traffic from search engines — If you want to get more search engine traffic, you need to rank at the top for more keywords, and that requires you to create more content.
• Thanks to this, SEO becomes more effective — Thought-based content drives backlinks, content shared through social channels generates leads, and sales enablement turns traffic into sales.

2. The same amount of invested effort, money and time can yield results for both content marketing and SEO

We are a perfect example. Our content ranks high in Google and generates hundreds of thousands of visitors per month:

This also attracts links and social shares because we make sure that each article is unique and not simply repetitive or “AI-powered” content.

Finally, each piece of content introduces visitors to our product and teaches them how to employ it to solve their problems. (Read on and you’ll see it in action too!)

Achieves all your content marketing and SEO goals at once:

• Gets traffic from search engines ✅
• Builds thought leadership ✅
• Attracts links ✅
• Generates sales (in the long run) ✅

How do we do what we do? Believe it or not, there is a method to the madness. Here is one line that sums up our entire SEO content marketing strategy:

We create and maintain high-quality, product- and search-oriented content on topics that have business potential and can generate search engine traffic.

Let me explain how we combine SEO and content marketing:

If you want to get traffic from search engines, you need to focus on topics that your potential customers are searching for.

The easiest way to find these keywords is to employ a keyword research tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer:

1. Go to keyword explorer
2. Enter some general keywords related to your website or niche
3. Go to Matching appointments report
4. Filter keywords with traffic potential (TP)

Go through the report and choose keywords that are relevant to your website. For example, if I were an e-commerce store selling coffee equipment, this could be a potential keyword to target:

The business potential of a keyword is the ease with which you can present your product by discussing a specific topic. It’s our “trade secret” – that’s why we can easily present our product and its features in every piece of content we create.

Here’s how to assess the business potential of a topic:

So, taking the above example, a topic like “best coffee grinder” would receive a rating of “3” (assuming we sell coffee grinders), while a topic like “does decaf coffee have caffeine” would receive a rating of “1” or even “0”.

Topics that have high business potential should be prioritized, i.e. “2” or “3”.

What does all this jargon mean? Let’s break it down.

Focused on search

Part one of being “search focused” is finding the keywords people are searching for. Part two is figuring out Why are looking for those specific keywords. This “why” is known as search intent.

Given that Google’s goal is always to rank the most relevant content, we can look at the search engine results pages (SERPs) to discover search intent. Take your target keyword, enter it into Keywords Explorer, scroll down to SERP Overview and click Identify Intentions:

So we can see that people searching for the keyword “best coffee grinders” want detailed reviews and expert recommendations on the best coffee grinders. Not only that, we can also see that searchers want list this is fresh.

If we want to tackle this topic, focusing on the search means matching it to this search intent – ​​we will have to create a list of the best coffee grinders of the current year.

Product-controlled

Product-wise, you’re not just creating content for the sake of it; you’re also “selling” your product. You want to know what employ case, feature, or service you want to weave into the narrative. Of course you do.

Assessing the business potential of the topic would do 90% of the work here. If you’re creating content on a topic that has a “3” rating, then your product offering would come naturally. For example, we could easily link to our coffee equipment store after discussing the best coffee grinders. Or, if we make our own coffee grinders, we could present them as some of the best. (That’s why I say assessing the business potential is our secret ingredient.)

The challenge comes when you are discussing topics that are rated a “1” or “0.” It’s not impossible, but you have to be imaginative.

For example, I recently covered the topic of “SEO Specialist.” It had a business potential of “1” and was challenging to include a product offering. Fortunately, I noticed that some of the job postings required experience using various SEO toolkits (including ours). This was a perfect introduction to introducing our product and certification course.

High quality

This is subjective. Everyone’s standards are different. But this is how we think about quality:

• True — No exaggeration, no lies. Each of our statements should be as exact as possible.
• Brilliant — No frills — remove all unnecessary words and sentences. Utilize jargon only when necessary. When necessary, create illustrations to develop ideas and concepts.
• Helpful — Being product-centric is vital, but content shouldn’t be just about selling. Content should be focused primarily on helping visitors solve their problems while creatively weaving our product into the context.
• Unique — One way to make your content unique is to engage in the game—running experiments, conducting data studies, and writing from personal experience. If engagement is challenging, interview practitioners. Focus on he didNO could.

something I always pay attention to when assessing the credibility of a text:

could/should/did

~ could: most writers talk about things you, the reader, could do. theoretical. abstract. not based on any first-hand experience. probably to be ignored. mainstream “content marketing”…

— Ryan Law (@thinking_slow) December 6, 2023

Deterioration in the quality of your content is inevitable:

• Focused on search — Your rankings may drop due to competition. Or you didn’t even make it to the first round. Or the search intent for your target topic has changed (e.g. keyword crown(Search intent has changed from 2020 to 2022, where there were no search results.)
• Product-controlled — You may have modern features, services, or employ cases to introduce. Or your team has retired some features or abandoned some services.
• High quality — Statements can become inexact over time. Or your unique idea has become so successful that everyone else has copied you (and outranked you). Or you may have better ways to rephrase sentences and paragraphs. Or your ideas, screenshots, and content have simply become old-fashioned.

That’s why you don’t build train tracks and they disappear. You have to actively maintain them to keep them running. (I’m looking at you, London Underground.) The same goes for your content.

To maintain content, you need to do regular content audits. We do this quarterly—each writer on our blog team looks through their portfolio of articles and selects at least three pieces to update. Each writer can also select a couple for a full rewrite.

I highly recommend checking out our content audit template to support you figure out what went wrong with your content and what to do next.

Final thoughts

SEO and content marketing may be different types of marketing, but that doesn’t mean you have to employ one to the exclusion of the other.

Both channels are largely compatible and, as you can see above, can be designed as part of a holistic strategy that will meet all of your vital marketing goals.