Operating and growing a business in the digital world has a different set of requirements than traditional brick and mortar businesses.

Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimization are two of the most powerful tools available to Digital Marketers.

Search Engine Optimization, often abbreviated as SEO, is the technical process of optimizing and enhancing your website and the content therein to increase its visibility on the internet and among the results of searches carried out using search engines.

SEO enables a business to rank higher in the SERPs which in turn translates into more website traffic and subsequently more lead generation and sales; all organically!

Content Marketing is a practice where you create and publish content on your website that provides relevant value and information to your target audience.

High-value content drives traffic to your website and subsequently high-value customers.

When Content Marketing and SEO work in unison, the returns they produce are astronomical. Let us find out how this exactly works.

How does the union of SEO and Content Marketing work?

By now you have an idea of how these two benefit businesses in their own ways but when they are made to work together, they act as catalysts for one another and significantly boost each other’s effectiveness.

Content is the primary requirement for SEO. Every piece of text on your website counts as content – it's not just the blogs.

Having an adequate amount of keywords in your content is the second requirement for SEO, without that it would be hard to rank among the top results of your intended industry or niche.

Ensuring these points will help you raise traffic to your website, but it’s necessary to ensure that the audience is presented with something that provides them value or else they will just bounce off your website.

Source: Status Labs

This is where good, high-value and well-curated content comes in. When you provide the audience with value, it builds trust between the two of you and helps create a steady flow of recurring web traffic.

Many search engines promote websites that exhibit large flows of recurring organic traffic, so this entire process is like a closed catalyst loop.

Source: Crystal D Smith

Good SEO practices boost traffic which exposes more people to your good content, which in turn makes people keep coming back and bring along new users, which in turn makes search engines notice you and boost your ranking even further.

In essence, high-quality and high-value content that is well optimized for SEO will compound the benefits of both, SEO and content marketing.

But this raises a question. How does one create high-quality content that has a higher chance of being ranked by Google and other search engines?

While there isn’t a definite answer to this, there are a few insights that we have that can guide you in creating content that gets ranked by search engines.

Understanding how content is ranked by search engines

Though there are plenty of options when it comes to search engines, the internet is dominated by a single player, Google. It handles over 91% of the total internet searches worldwide. This is one big reason why everyone wants to rank better on Google.

Here comes the problem however, Google doesn’t disclose as to how exactly their algorithm works, for obvious reasons. Google wants to provide the best service to its users and doesn’t want marketers exploiting its algorithm for profits.

If this is the case, is there a way around this?

There is. Google decides the quality and ranking of a webpage based on how “helpful a webpage is to the user”. This is what their algorithm looks for but how exactly the algorithm works is still known only to Google.

Google, like every tech company, strives to keep improving. So their algorithm keeps changing in order to improve.

What we know from public records is that Google has a team of Quality Raters that monitor and provide feedback to Google to ensure the algorithm works as intended.

These Quality Raters follow a guideline that has them rate pages in accordance with Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (E-A-T).

So even though Google says that E-A-T is not a ranking factor, it indirectly is as it’s what Google uses to crosscheck the workings and performance of their search algorithm.

How does E-A-T work?

Google will never clearly tell anyone anything about how things work but when it comes to Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, but there is a clear general understanding of how they operate.

Though these in theory are qualitative concepts, Google has ways of quantifying these qualities. This is why they have human Quality Raters who ensure google's search algorithm is accurately quantifying these qualitative properties.

Source: CoSchedule

Let us consider each one thoroughly:

1. Expertise

Google itself defines expertise as ‘expert skill or knowledge in a particular field, while the Oxford dictionary defines it as ‘ expert knowledge or skill in a particular subject, activity or job’.

Having a thorough knowledge about the field you work in is a necessity but it’s essential that your expertise is displayed well onto your website through your content.

Google uses bots to crawl through your website and they will go through your content to check it for the level of expertise you have in a particular field by comparing it to other web pages of the same field.

2. Authoritativeness

To put it simply, to what degree your brand or business is synonymous with the industry you work in is what Authoritativeness is. Authoritativeness reflects the general reputation of your expertise.

Being an expert is just not enough, carrying a good reputation among the experts of your particular industry and an overall good reputation is important.

Google may have more than one way of measuring this but the most widely used way to measure authority is by measuring how many authors, webpages, etc. are citing you as a source.

Citing your work is usually in the form of backlinks to your blogs or web pages.

3. Trustworthiness

For the longest of times, trust has played a crucial role in the business world. Businesses cannot operate without trust and trust is what gets a customer to keep coming back.

Google definitely did not leave this out of their algorithm and their algorithm does consider the overall level of trust people have for your brand and business. Google relies on user feedback, reviews and ratings for your brand or business.

They have their own platform where they can track reviews and ratings but they’re known to not rely on a single source and reach out to other rating and review sites to cross-reference the ratings and reviews to ensure they’re accurate.

Let’s move on to understand how you can apply this knowledge to create content that ranks on Google search results.

Creating content that ranks

Knowing how search engines work and rank web pages and websites is one half of creating content that ranks, the other half is knowing how to apply that understanding into actually creating content. Here is how to do it:

1. Create user-centric content

Here’s one common thing both google and businesses want: to help users. While Google wants to do so by guiding them to helpful web pages, businesses help users by providing them with products and services.

If you want Google to guide people towards your website, all you have to do is create content that assures Google that you want to help users by solving their problems.

Source: Product Tribe

Your web content needs to reflect your intention of solving peoples’ problems by providing them with solutions through your content. You can monetize your content by subtly placing and highlighting your offerings but make sure it is subtle.

User-centric content serves the objectives of SEO and Content Strategy at the same time. By creating content that pleases both the audiences and search engine algorithms you’re essentially doubling the ROI.

2. Proper and careful use of keywords

Keywords are important as Google’s bots usually look for keywords in your web content and report back. Keywords are what match your content as an answer for a web search or query.

So if you want to be seen every time someone searches for a particular thing, you need to incorporate the relevant keywords in your web content.

Source: Search Engine Journal

This process of finding and using relevant keywords can be aided by using various tools available on the internet that suggest the best combination of keywords to use along with the ideal keyword density.

Keyword density is important as you cannot stuff your content with keywords expecting a better ranking. Contrarily, your page will be flagged by Google. The key here is to only include keywords wherever they fit natively.

3. Matching your content to search intent

People on the internet ask a lot of questions, mostly to Google. If you create content that serves as an answer to these questions natively, it significantly boosts your chances of being ranked by Google.

To make this happen, first, you need to research all the questions and queries that people ask Google relevant to your industry or niche. After finding out the most relevant and widely searched queries, you can create content that answers those.

This approach not only boosts your organic reach but offers more in terms of value, problem solving and solutions to your audience.

When people come across an article that helps them solve a problem, they tend to share it on social media, leave positive comments and reviews. Google takes note of these interactions and decides how much to boost your ranking accordingly.

4. Creating good headlines and titles

The title of your blog is an important ranking factor that often gets overlooked as most people pay more attention to the body of the content. People aren’t going to know how good your content is if they don't click on your link.

Titles are what get people interested as titles are what is displayed to users in results when they search for something. So if you have a powerful and catchy title or headline, chances are that more people are going to click on it.

Source: Exposure Ninja

Google monitors how people are interacting with your content, the more they click and check your content, the more it raises your engagement levels and Google is known to boost such web pages by ranking them higher in search results.

5. Citing good and reputed sources

One way of raising your credibility in front of Google is by citing sources that are already well regarded and trusted by Google. You can either provide references to well-reputed websites or cite works of reputed authors.

Source: Backlinko

Providing source hyperlinks to claims, facts and figures you’ve included in your content allows Google to verify those and if the sources are well reputed, it automatically raises the credibility of your content.

This even raises the chances of others in your industry or niche to cite your content in their blogs and posts. This raises both your authoritativeness and trustworthiness in one go, further raising your chances of ranking higher in Google’s results.

You can even opt to Guest Posting on reputed sites and backlink your own blog posts to the Guest Post for the stated SEO benefits.

As stated earlier, there is no sure way of definitely getting your content ranked on Google or any other search engine. You will have to resort to experimenting with the above-mentioned points until you get it right.

The final verdict

When you have a Digital Marketing Strategy that ensures SEO and Content Marketing work in unison, it will bring exponential benefits and growth to your business.

Having a unique website theme does help your business but it is the content therein that does the bulk of the lifting.

While there isn’t clear insight of a definitive way of getting your content ranked on Google, there are some good practices that can definitely raise your chances of having your content ranked.

Though the general consensus of the internet, when it comes to answering how to rank on Google, is to create high value and relevant content. This alone is not enough.

Following the guidelines in this blog while creating high value and relevant content is what will ensure that you have the highest chances of being ranked high by Google.