Content marketing may be a buzz term centered around search engine optimization, but the practice can be a bit confusing when it comes to improving a brand or increasing sales. It’s a hard practice to stay on top of, and the finish line may always seem to be inching further away, but the benefits are clear cut. Before deciding on the best route to take with content marketing, inform yourself of a few of the common misconceptions.
Content leads to purchases
How often have you read a blog post and then decided that because you loved the writing you would purchase a product sold on that site? There’s a good chance you’ve never done that. This isn’t the purpose of content marketing. Instead, blogging and creating landing pages organically builds a brand into a reputable, knowledgable company. After maintaining white hat content marketing practices for years, your page may be ranked higher on Google, which would, in turn, lead to more consumers visiting your page.
Content marketing takes a little while
Investing in content marketing is the key to success. As previously stated, the goal of content marketing is to build a brand overtime. There’s no quick fix, over-night miracle worker in the content marketing world. In fact, many people who chose those get-rich-quick options tend to fall backwards instead of jumping to the forefront. Google is highly sophisticated, and we will never be able to keep up with what Google is thinking. However, sticking to white hat practices is the best way stay on the good side of Google.
Brands are jumping on the content marketing train, and in order to keep up, it’s important to start blogging with a keen eye on the ever-changing world of search engine optimization. So does it take a little while for content marketing to increase sales? It may take a long while.
Content marketing is a viral effort
Posting content on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and more is a great way to share information with various circles, but there is a lot more than needs to happen to increase Google rankings. For example, using keywords and intralinking are both more productive ways to increase SEO. However, we’re not recommending you ditch social media channels altogether, they should just be used in addition to SEO-specific practices.
