Matt Jones Matt Jones | 10 Nov 2016

This blog post is to support our webinar on content marketing for SEO. For those who were unable to join us, we have embedded a recording below. We cover a lot of detail in this webinar, so there are also some notes below the recording.

In this webinar you can find out how to integrate your content marketing and SEO activities to deliver long-term ROI.

This webinar focuses on how you can use your content to earn links, thereby build up the authority and trust of your website so it ranks better and gets more organic search traffic.

Focus on achieving links

Social shares are a red herring as far as SEO is concerened. At the time of publication they are not part of Google's ranking algorithm. To improve SEO traffic, your objective for content marketing must be links.

Studies consistently show that links are still the most important factor in getting good rankings. Link quality is more important than the quantity of links you achieve!

Because the focus is on quality you’ll need to report and measure to ensure that the links you’re getting are ‘strong’ enough. See our other recent webinar: what is a link worth?

Create content to attract links

Good content can get shares but it doesn’t cut it for achieving links. You need to aim higher with your content. In order to attract links from authoritative websites you should be aiming to produce content that is ten times better than anything else out there.

Although social shares are not a ranking signal, this doesn't mean that shares from social influencers are unimportant. You should still aim to get content shared by influencers because the social amplification they provide can lead to more links.

As a rule of thumb, aim to spend as much time on outreach as you do creating content.

There are economies of scale to be had: often a large piece of content will achieve more links than several smaller pieces. Consider whether your objectives would be better served by producing one amazing piece of content per quarter rather than two blog posts per week.