[Masters of Marketing] How to Integrate Content and SEO strategies in Marketing

Adrian Ang, Business Director, AdVantage Digital Singapore, shares 3 areas where you can integrate content and SEO strategies in Marketing.

Write for the users

The first tip to integrate content and SEO strategies in marketing is to write for the users.

As marketers, we tend to write based on what we want to say, i.e. when we have a product launch or there are some new findings we will want to share to the market. But, we overlook what users want to hear.

Take the movie Crazy Rich Asians, for example. Although the show was doing very well, the SEO traffic is actually quite low. When we look at their Google Search Console, we noticed that a lot of users were searching “Crazy Rich Asian Movie Launches” more than the original title of the article, “Crazy Rich Asian Movie Premiere”.

To the users, the choice of words “Movie Launches” is more popular and layman as compared to the word “Premiere”. Therefore, they did not garner as much traffic as they wanted.

Bonus tip: If you are doing B2B business, find out from your sales team the words that customers are using in their conversations, the jargon that actual customers are using. These will be the words that you should be optimising.

Begin with your data

The second tip of the day is to begin with your data in mind through Google Search Console and find out what words are bringing traffic to your site now.

You may have some keywords that are ranking on the second page and their click-through rate and traffic are low. You can work hard to expand the keywords on those pages and try to bring them to the first page – that is one area you can work on.

Begin with the end in mind

Thirdly, begin with the end in mind. For example, a hotel optimised for the keyword "Hotel by the Beach” which had 2,000 searches but none of their hotels showed up, although they are around the beach.

The hotel name did not allow the word “Beach” to be carried because it is the official hotel name. So they were advised to write articles about Hotel by the Beach, such as "7 things to do when you stay at Hotel by the Beach" and end off with “You may be interested in our hotel at Langkawi, Phuket, or Bali”.

Subtly sell in and at the same time you can aim for the word “Hotel by the Beach”. Remember to make sure the word “Hotel by the Beach”, put in the title, your description, your header tags, and the content.