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Content Marketing: Choosing the Right Content Types for SEO Value

By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO

Content marketing can provide tremendous value to a search engine optimization campaign, as outlined in our recent eBook, “Content Marketing Like a Pro.” There are many different content types that can be leveraged as a vehicle for lead generation with a strong return on investment. Today, we’ll examine how you can choose the right content type to increase your brand’s SEO value.

eMarketer recently published a study conducted by CopyPress in which marketers were asked which types of content are the most cost effective. Results of the study showed the growing demand among marketers of content marketing as a leading digital focus. Thirty-five percent of marketers surveyed identified content marketing as their leading focus in 2013 as compared to 19% in 2012. It is no secret that content marketing is a powerful lead generation tool and that the return on investment is high.

When it comes to segmenting the various types of content, a vast majority of the marketers surveyed identified featured articles as the content type with the best ROI. The main differentiator between featured articles and other media types is the relatively small cost and simplicity of development which makes the investment very low. The minimal hard costs and effort associated with producing featured articles combined with the innate value of any content marketing piece that follows best practices, makes these articles very attractive to utilize.

Another advantage of featured articles that makes them a priority content marketing piece is the ability to use authorship mark-up to help promote the content and improve organic search authority. Since featured articles typically contain a byline, the rel=“author” rich snippet can be leveraged to tie the content to an authoritative author, making it much more likely to rank for keyword-targeted search queries in search engine results.

One thing that has been overlooked by many respondents in this study is the indirect return value of the various content types. For example, infographics scored relatively low for ROI ability because of the higher costs involved with production and implementation. Therefore, when looking at top-level numbers, they wouldn’t show the same level of ROI as a featured article. However, rich media such as infographics provide a great deal of SEO value because they are more commonly shared via social media and linked to, which increases the organic search rankings of the website hosting them. The website authority generated from a content marketing piece is much more difficult to measure than direct ROI and is therefore not always considered when deciding what type of content to invest in.

Regardless of the type of content used, content marketing is a growing initiative with strong potential for high return. In order to be truly successful, a full content marketing strategy should leverage multiple types of content and include strategic planning for a distribution schedule. It is also important to look past the top-level metrics and dig in to gain as much learning as possible on how content marketing is affecting other channels and indirectly increasing the ROI of those.

Download our new eBook, “Content Marketing Like a Pro,” to learn how you can improve search engine visibility and your brand’s SEO value with content marketing.

How is your brand using content marketing to improve SEO? What are some of the best practices you have found for incorporating authors’ authority to improve the search rankings of your content marketing pieces?