How to Use Article Marketing to Improve SEO and Increase Traffic
Write, publish and share great SEO articles to reach more users and drive traffic to your site. Here are 9 steps to make it happen.
Sharing is caring – especially when it comes to content.
A great article can have many lives, spread across platforms, and generate traffic for months or even years to come.
But what is needed for this? Write an article that will not only drive organic traffic, but also expand your reach across different channels?
In this guide, we’ll delve into the masterful art of article marketing, from theme ideation to content writing to developing a viral-worthy distribution strategy.
Of course, article marketing has a bad reputation and is abused by some. And yet, it’s still a viable content marketing tactic if done right. This is what we will focus on.
What is article marketing?
Article marketing is a field of content marketing that involves writing and distributing articles to various sources.
These articles are usually designed to promote the author’s business or website through backlink building, authority building, and brand awareness.
How Article Marketing Helps Search Engine Optimization
Article marketing involves creating valuable informative content that users can read online.
When users search for a specific topic (on Google or Bing), they go to the most popular web pages and blog posts related to that topic.
This means that website owners can publish their own article content optimize it for search engines, and rank high in Google searches for various topics.
Make the right optimization game and you can attract tens or even thousands of users to your website with your articles.
Benefits of Article Marketing SEO
Article marketing offers many benefits when it comes to SEO, including:
- Increase your site’s ranking for a wider range of keywords.
- Increase the credibility and reliability of your site.
- Attracting more organic traffic from search engines.
- Convert users to subscribers or customers.
- Providing ranking opportunities in image or video searches.
- Redirect authority to other pages on your site with internal links.
- Attract valuable backlinks to your website from other websites and blogs.
Can article marketing work on other channels?
However, article marketing is not only an SEO strategy. It can also give you the ability to generate traffic through a wide range of social, direct, or referral channels.
For example, with article marketing, you can drive traffic from:
- Facebook.
- Twitter.
- LinkedIn.
- YouTube. .
- Other blogs.
- Email Campaigns.
- Paid Campaigns.
Benefits of Multichannel Article Marketing
Using an Omnichannel approach to article marketing is the smartest way to get the most bang for your buck.
If you’re going to invest time (or money) into creating content, why not use it to attract visitors from multiple platforms?
With that in mind, here are a few benefits of article marketing on other platforms:
- You can increase user engagement and interaction on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
- You can generate organic traffic to your website and referral traffic from various sources.
- You can repost your articles on Pinterest, third-party sites, Medium.com, and more.
- You have many opportunities to turn visitors into subscribers or paying customers.
How to write, publish and share great article content
Article promotion is made easier when you create a transition process that suits your business and the users you are trying to reach.
This process may vary slightly from website to website, but the general steps are as follows.
1. Choose a theme
Brainstorm and come up with a list of broad topics that your audience might be interested in. Whether you’re a blogger, business owner, marketer, or whatever, you’re most likely sitting on a treasure trove of topics if you’re just giving yourself time to think.
For example, if you are a freelance graphic designer, you may believe that your target audience is interested in everything related to digital design.
They may want to know:
- What are the best graphic design tools?
- How to create a logo
- What fonts are best for business flyers?
- How much does graphic design cost?
- What are the best projects of this year?
Try to be exhaustive when it comes to thinking about topics related to your business and the people you hope to attract.
You can then move on to step 2, which involves narrowing down your ideas with keyword research.
Answer the Public is a useful (and free) tool that you can use to generate ideas for article topics.
2. Do Keyword Research
Coming up with interesting article topics is great, but matching them with searchable keywords is even better. After all, what’s the point of writing an article if no one is looking for the topic you’re writing about?
Keyword research tools like Semrush allow you to browse a range of broad topics and see how many people search for that word (or related words) each month.
This search volume is a good indicator of whether or not to write an article for SEO purposes.
Another factor to consider is the level of competition. You may find a keyword with high search volume, but it is too competitive for your small site.
In this case, it’s better to choose a less competitive topic and then move on to competitor keywords.
3. Draft an article
Writing an article can be either the best part or the hardest part, depending on your experience as a writer.
One option is to hire an SEO specialist to keep your content informative and optimized. However, you can certainly write your content yourself.
If you’re taking the DIY path, we highly recommend the Inverted Pyramid Method for SEO copywriting, which is an easy-to-use structure for writing an article from start to finish.
This method will help you become a leader. users really enjoy reading.
4. Optimize your content
Next, you need to optimize your content according to on-page search engine optimization best practices.
It includes:
- Writing a click-worthy title tag optimized for keywords.
- Add a descriptive meta description.
- Add an interesting H1 heading.
- Include short headings H2 and H3.
- Write useful main content.
Adding internal and external links.
- Using an optimized URL structure.
Checking all the boxes in terms of on-page SEO will help set up your article for success, making it easier to rank high in search results and drive traffic from Google.
5. Add media
Once you have the bulk of the article’s content, it’s time to get creative.
Now you can add media to engage users, add value to your article, and improve your chances of ranking in an image or video.
Some types of media that can be added to an article include:
- Pre-recorded videos.
- Original photo.
- Standard images.
- gif files.
- Graphic design.
- PDF files.
- Polls.
- Digital Instruments.
- Infographics.
6. Set a Sharing Strategy
Before you click Publish, think about all the channels you can share your article on to maximize your reach.
In fact, many CMS platforms make this easy by adding social media icons when posting an article.
Similarly, there are third-party tools like Buffer that allow you to automatically post your article to Facebook, Twitter, and other countries.
Whether you choose the automatic or manual route, be sure to share your article with everyone to reach as many users as possible.
7. Include related resources
One of the most important pillars of SEO is backlinks. Backlinks channel your site’s authority, which makes search engines essentially “trust” your site as an authoritative source of information.
Adding what is called “linkable objects” to your article can help attract links back to your site. Some of the resources you can link to may include videos, infographics, free tools, resource guides, images, and more.
Learn about it here: Want links? Here’s how to create link-worthy content
8. Get (re)published!
It’s one thing to post your content on your own blog, and another to host it on other websites. You may need to pitch your content to other publishers to expand your reach.
HARO is a free, subscription-based platform where you can find publishing opportunities on other sites. Publishers not only publish their content search tips, but they often accept cold offers for new articles.
Another option is to approach industry websites directly to request guest posting. If they bite, this could be a great chance to add your own content and direct links to your site.
Finally, social blogging sites like Medium.com allow you to post content for free and link to your own site.
These platforms can help bring more attention to your article, up to and including “promoting” your post for free. (In fact, that’s how I got over 13,000 views on a single Medium post.)
9. Interact, engage and follow the news
Instead of waiting for traffic to trickle through, you can double down on marketing by engaging users when they interact with your content.
It might look like this:
- Replies to comments on Facebook.
- Replies to comments on blog posts.
- Like and comment on reposts on Twitter.
- Reader retargeting with Facebook ads.
- Track new subscribers to your email list.
- Reply to people who respond to your email newsletters.
It is important not to let your article disappear into the abyss.
You can re-share your content over and over again, giving your article new life. In this way, you will be able to attract traffic for months or even years in advance.
Get Creative with Article Marketing
Is article marketing part of your content strategy? That’s how it should be!
Every blog post is an opportunity to get more traffic, subscribers and customers from different platforms. Don’t let your blog go to waste!
Another pro tip? Ask your audience what topics they are interested in and add them in turn.
You can make a permanent list of article ideas to use to keep your traffic flowing.