How to Stay Creative With an SEO-Driven Content Strategy.

When creating a digital content strategy, SEO will always be in the back of your mind. Actually, probably more at the forefront, as SEO is usually your main reason for creating content on your website in the first place.

With so many ‘best practices’ and ‘rules’ to follow to make sure that your content is as optimized as it can be. Nonetheless, it’s easy to leave creativity behind and focus solely on SEO. Sadly, this often leads to super boring, uninspiring, and impersonal content, which is why you need to inject some creativity into your SEO content marketing.

So, how do you stay creative with an SEO-driven content strategy? I’ll get into that later, but first let’s make sure that you understand what SEO content marketing is and how SEO and content marketing need to work together to maximize results.

What is SEO content marketing?

While you can look at SEO and content marketing as separate forms of marketing, they actually need to work together in order to fuel your online success.

SEO refers to the technical process of increasing the quality of traffic and attracting more visitors to your website by aligning specific Google search terms with user intent. 

On the other hand, content marketing is an entire marketing discipline that involves making sure that you are creating valuable and relevant content to drive client action. While this does include SEO, it also works with social media, email marketing, video marketing, graphic design, and any related piece of content that a potential customer or user views.

SEO and content marketing most often form a partnership around information content. As SEO is strategized around creating information content based on keywords used in Google searches, they both need to work hand in hand to both inform the reader and market products (even if that is done indirectly).

In other words, the basis of SEO content marketing is to create content that you know your audience will want to read, and to optimize it in a way to make sure that your audience finds it when they do a Google search. To do this, might do things like use a bunch of SEO tools to help figure out the best keywords to optimize your posts, research trending topics, or follow in Hubspot’s footsteps and put together a Search Insights Report. 

Once you’ve done the initial research, it’s then time to write the content while incorporating your keywords and other methods for optimizing your content.

Why it’s important to be creative

Some may say that there’s no bigger creativity killer than an SEO strategy. I’m here to tell you that they are WRONG! There is absolutely no need to throw creativity out the window when working on your content marketing SEO. More often than not, the best SEO content heavily implements creativity.

Why?

Well, there are several benefits that high-quality creative content can bring. It provides an added value to your audience, which, in turn, will enhance your brand and reputation as an expert or leader in your field. Consider how the discipline of marketing works as a whole. It’s actually all about creativity. The one who balances creativity with what an audience wants is always the winner.

Don’t believe me? Then consider why nearly everyone on the planet knows Coca Cola. Without marketing, it’d be just another brown sugar drink.

Furthermore, you may not think so, but most readers can spot overly optimized blog content from a mile away! There is also such a thing as over-optimization and it will actually hurt you a lot more than no optimization. This where your creativity needs to come in - you need to find the balance between creating perfectly optimized content and content that is unique and interesting.

With endless amounts of content published on the internet daily, if you're not creative in your writing process, you will be creating content like many of your competitors, reducing your chances of standing out from the crowd.

It’s not enough to simply churn out a load of mediocre content. If your audience doesn’t want it, Google won’t either.

5 ways to make sure your seo content marketing is still creative

There are ways to remain creative even within a grander, primarily SEO-driven strategy. You don’t have to sacrifice your creative freedom for the sake of organic growth - you can have both!

#1 Find the human connection

There may be some topics that while you know your readers want to read about them, they aren’t as thrilling to write. To make them interesting to write and also interesting to read, you need to find the human connection, an interesting human angle to the topic.

One way to find the human angle is to consider the reader’s point of view when searching the topic on Google. Ask yourself, “why would someone be searching for this topic”. What problem do they have that you can solve? If I had this problem, what would I personally like to read to answer my questions?

You then need to focus on solving that human need, making the content relevant as well as interesting for them to keep on reading.

#2 Include facts and figures

We all love a good fact right? Facts and figures are so important in persuasive writing. If you’re able to back up your content with relevant supporting data, you’ve got yourself a great piece of persuasive and inspiring content.

Just make sure that the data you are using easily makes sense. You don’t want your audience to struggle with finding the meaning behind the numbers you’re throwing at them. They’ll lose interest. Fast.

#3 Format your content for skimmers

As humans, our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Do you remember the last time that you read a full blog post over 2,000 words? You’ll likely read the introduction then skim through the headings to see what sections interest you and only read those.

As a writer, you need to organize your content for skim readers. Use bullet points, subheadings, and italics to highlight important bits of information. Write short sentences and paragraphs.

And make sure that all important information is up at the top, or made to jump out at your reader.

#4 Use multimedia

Your blog posts don’t have to be purely text based. If you’re struggling with a particularly boring topic, try adding various multimedia into your post, such as podcasts to videos, images or infographics. These will make your posts more enjoyable as well as open up new traffic opportunities as search engines also rank content based on multimedia components such as images and videos.

#5 Throw out the SEO handbook every once in a while

It’s important that the majority of your content strategy is focused on SEO. But every once in a while...if there’s a piece of content that you really want to write that doesn’t follow SEO guidelines, just go ahead and write it. Chances are, if you find the topic super interesting and write passionately about it, your readers will enjoy it too.

And hey, maybe they won’t find it directly in a Google search, but if you do the rest of your content right, they’ll likely still stumble across it via another blog post on your website. Or who knows, it could even end up going viral on social media!

A good mix of passion-driven and SEO-driven content on your website makes for an interesting read.

While you can’t separate SEO and content marketing, it doesn’t mean that your content needs to be boring. Meeting in the middle on creativity and optimization is a recipe for success. It can be tricky to find the balance, which is why it’s a good idea to get some help with your SEO content marketing. I am an expert in how to make your content tick the right SEO boxes, while remaining creative, interesting and relevant to your audience.