Good SEO strategy includes a balance between onsite and offsite content marketing, but how do you balance the two with limited resources and a budget? To determine how you should be spending your time, it’s important to understand the difference between the two, so you can decide what your website needs the most.
Content is a huge part of SEO strategy, and the better the content, the better your SEO efforts will be. Content needs to be well developed and mobile-friendly, which means it doesn’t necessarily have to be written content. Content can include videos, images, or infographics.
Onsite Content Marketing
Onsite content is content that is on your website or blog, as well as any downloadable content you have, such as whitepapers and eBooks. Onsite content is important to help your website convert. Once users get to your website, they need information about your products, services, or what you actually do. Without quality onsite content, you won’t be seen as an authority on your website, and users will not want to do business with you. Onsite content also serves as anchor points for you to build your SEO strategy with backlinks. You can optimize for more keywords if you have more than just a homepage on your website, explaining other aspects of your business.
Your onsite content marketing should include the key onsite SEO elements, including title tags and descriptions, alt tags, and header tags. Your internal onsite content needs to be structured so that users can easily find what they need to; otherwise, they will bounce off your website. Make sure to link your content and have calls to action internally.
Offsite Content Marketing
Offsite content is written under your brand or about your brand, but it’s not currently housed on your website and instead is on a different website.
This can include guest posts, articles, interviews, or press releases. Offsite content marketing can help you build links and is one of the best ways to give your website better domain authority and referral traffic. Offsite content can also speak to your reputation. If other websites are talking about you and your brand, you can be seen as an influencer in the industry, which will help you get a bigger audience. If you are a newer business, offsite content marketing can help amplify your own onsite content. You can piggyback off the authority of other publishers to help create a name for your business.
Creating offsite content can be overwhelming since it’s not as straightforward as onsite content. To start with this type of content, think about your buyer personas and your target audiences, then think of publications that already have built-in audiences that target your personas. Work with them to start a guest blog or some other influencer marketing campaign.
Where to Begin?
It depends on where you are in your SEO process to figure out where to start with onsite and offsite content marketing. If you are new and don’t have any onsite content, start there. Since your onsite content will be the cornerstone of your website, you won’t be able to get anywhere with offsite content without it.
If you already have a good start with onsite content, it’s time to start planning some goals and figure out where to spend your resources. Spend money on offsite content to build up more traffic to your website and spend money on onsite content to engage more with your users and improve your website’s conversion and experience. If you are in the middle of a marketing campaign that already has onsite content, throw some resources at offsite. If you are beginning a new campaign, start with onsite content.
It’s important to be consistent in both efforts. Even with great onsite content on your website already, it’s still important to continually post new blogs. At the same time, you want to continue to build relationships with other publishers to make sure you are still working on offsite content relationships. Have a baseline of what you are going to be doing on both sides. For example, if you focus on offsite content for a particular period, still commit to posting a new blog once a week.
Make sure you are working on some efforts that benefit both onsite and offsite content. If you publish a great blog post on your website, make sure to share it on social media. If someone includes your product in an influencer marketing campaign, share that as well. If you write great content that answers your industry’s pain points that have not been written about before, reach out to other publications and ask them to share it. The more ways you can share existing content, the better to help balance both efforts.
Contact LOCALSYNC to help with both your onsite and offsite content marketing strategy.
