If your customers reach strategy relies on traditional and digital advertising, rewards and promotions, this means your marketing budget is getting dried up faster than you can track conversions. It also means that you are missing the most important piece from the puzzle; your relevance.

Search engine optimization (which has been around for many years) is your answer to creating the relevance for your brand, company or project. It’s the one digital marketing method you cannot live without.   

Did we just say relevance?

Think for a moment of Netflix and The aNew York Times.

Netflix is your best friend on chill out days and nights. It is your go-to source for entertainment. Your new TV.

The New York Times is a credible news source as well as your supplier of great journalism. Plus you really like their opinion pieces, even if you don’t always agree with the authors. If something shows up in The New York Times, then you can be sure it is real.

Netflix has curated content for everyone. The old school cinephile gets Ingmar Bergman movies, millennials get cult and author movies, and there is a good selection of reality shows for your grandmother.  

As long as you can name what you are looking for and type into the Netflix search bar, you will find it (provided it’s on Netflix of course).

The same principle applies to The New York Times. Their archive is massive. Whatever you may want to dig for, you’ll discover it. They are the Holy Grail of content and not any kind of content, the highest quality.

What do these two giants have in common? They are relevant. Strongly anchored into the present; they know what the user wants, what they are preoccupied about, what they are searching for.

So what does relevance have to do with marketing?

Relevance is the number one marketing tool you have to master in order to get your target’s attention. If you get to master relevance, all your customers’ eyes will be on you.

Marketing relevance is so important in today’s landscape. Marketing relevance is SEO.

And SEO cannot be great without its partner in crime: Content Marketing. 

Are you still there?

Let’s summarize it a bit for you. You run a drone review website and you’re trying to get conversions through traditional marketing methods, you may hit a wall. People skip TV commercials, YouTube ads, and many ignore the google ads. Why?

This is because they can find exactly what they are looking for by searching for the exact or relevant keyword in a search engine. And they do not waste time doing it. 

Say what?

Let’s say for example that your air conditioning broke and you are melting. You jump onto the internet, type ‘fix air conditioning today’ and you click on the first description that says ‘fixing air conditioning installations in an hour’.

Who remembers all the emails from some random company called Glitches something or those leaflets hanging outside your apartment door?

SEO has not only done wonders, but some believe it has outshone the likes of print, radio, and paid digital ­­­marketing. The main reason is that people are using the internet to look for answers to their questions. 

Let’s dive deeper into SEO and Content Marketing

SEO adopts different marketing rules. Its main focus is to optimize your website to fit your target’s desires. This usually involves a long-term strategy and a significant amount of work and research.

First, you need to think about keywords, secondly about optimizing them within the structure and content of your site. After this come the technicalities with onsite and offsite ‘tweaks’.. Sounds easy, but trust us, it is quite complex.

On the other hand, SEO is the most affordable and effective form of advertising.

Search engines have algorithms and bots that seek out web pages to rank them based on a number of factors. The more popular a page, website or document is, the more valuable its content must be.

You cannot have great SEO without great content. Look at it this way: if SEO represents the question, then Content Marketing is the answer.  

It’s foggy

We threw so much information at you that you probably have no clue what to do or where to start.

Think about what marketing tactics you are currently using and what results they are bringing.

SEO focuses on inbound traffic while traditional advertising often requires a larger spend and a lot of guesswork.

Look at how SEO could add value to those tactics.

Start small. You can get great results on a small budget. The key is to invest time in creating relevant content and building healthy online relationships.

Written by www.kadimadigital.com