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Do you understand how content marketing works? SEO and content marketing can be impenetrable to small businesses that are just finding their footing. You're concerned with so many other factors in your business that it becomes easy to overlook one of the biggest advantages you can develop.

Making Content Marketing Work

Content marketing refers to content that you create on your site. Blogs and articles are the most regular form, but videos, quizzes, and games are all types of content. The lines between these blur, so feel free to mix and match them as you're comfortable.

The advantage of content marketing is that you develop assets that keep returning hits on a regular basis. This is pull marketing, not push marketing. In other words, content marketing is directed toward those already seeking out a business in your industry.

SEO and Content Marketing

How exactly does content marketing bring in visitors? It starts with SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Whenever you type a search into Google or Bing, it returns pages of results. People most often click on one of the top few results. How do these results work? They use keywords that line up with your search terms.

For instance, if you search for “best landscaper in West Palm Beach,” you'll get results that line up with that language. The more specific the language, the better. For instance, if you search “how to prune a palm tree,” you'll see articles that incorporate that phrase pop up. That's SEO. There are many other factors that play into it, but those are the basics.

Making Content Marketing Valuable

Content marketing develops sales and makes those sales more valuable. When you read something informative, you trust whoever delivered that information to you. The more useful and accurate that information, the more you trust the brand that gives it to you. Content marketing done right drives trust.

You may have clicked on this post because it showed up in search results for “how content marketing works” or a similar phrase. You'll notice it's used a few times in this post, including in the opening paragraph and as a title. Both of those factors make it score higher in SEO. That may have made you click on this post. However, you read this far because the post is also useful to you. It's easy to draw people in with SEO, but then you have the responsibility of making the content you give them worth their time. Developing a marketing strategy around that is the difficult part.

Driving Sales Through Content Marketing

Content creation means delivering meaningful information to those who read and view it. Customers are more likely to buy from those they trust, and if they trust your thought leadership, they'll trust your brand and view its products more highly. Delivering meaningful content on a regular basis also earns you followers. These followers become loyal customers and use social media to form online communities that are loyal to your brand. These can become your strongest brand advocates and give you much more organic inroads into social media than you'd otherwise develop.

Remember that content marketing is something that your visitor has sought out. They're looking for an answer from their search result. There's a 14.6% conversion rate on inbound leads, where customers come to your site. There's only a 1.7% rate for outbound leads. Best of all, content doesn't age. It's an asset. Often, you'll see a set of keywords become popular months after a post uses them, and that will help drive traffic on that post and your newer ones at the same time.