Once the technical and existing content have been optimized, and external accounts and profiles are set up, content marketing becomes the primary strategy and driver of organic search engine optimization work. It’s the ‘bread and butter’ of all SEO work, the primary driver of rankings and traffic, and a strong investment for your marketing budget.

Here are some excerpts from an excellent source (MOZ) specifically regarding Content Marketing: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-content-marketing

“…without content, SEOs would have nothing to optimize for search engines. The metadata they add to posts is an attempt to help robots like Google and Facebook wrap their digital heads around the complexities of the content they’re indexing. Every link earned by every marketer points to a piece of content, and the keywords that people type into search engines are an attempt to find—yep—content.”

“Creating great content will bring people to your site, where they’ll (hopefully) also find information about your company and your products/services.”

“One of the reasons some companies have hesitated to allocate resources to content marketing is that it can be difficult to really understand the benefits of content marketing. Getting people to think more highly of your business certainly sounds great, but the results are quite nebulous. In this case, it helps to begin thinking about just how many benefits content marketing can bring. Let’s start with the ones that are more intangible (though no less important):”
The intangibles
Strong brand awareness
Respect and admiration in the industry
Indirect customer conversions
Team coordination
The tangibles
Site traffic
Improved SEO
Direct customer conversions”

“One thing you’ll need to know right from the get-go is that none of these benefits is going to show up immediately. Content marketing is a wonderful example of what’s referred to as flywheel marketing: At first, it takes quite a bit of effort just to get the wheel turning. Over time, though, the wheel’s own momentum lessens the effort required of you to see the same results. Don’t expect results tomorrow, and think now about whose expectations you may need to temper, and what that’ll mean for your work. But don’t let that fool you into thinking it isn’t working.”

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A Note on Budgeting for Content Marketing and it’s ROI

The following is an example of a ‘calculator’ tool for determining how much money might be spent on content marketing, and the returns you would expect to see. It’s not filled in with any data from your company – just default info they include. This is just to provide an example of a tool used to determine critical aspects of a content marketing strategy. (This is not an estimate for your work!)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MtQNwywlxCHBfjQDgHNkMVjNX5A4ORMv9B9gZvmbCWY/edit#gid=563014280
(Worth noting that the assumed costs may be higher than you would expect, but the value is also probably much higher.)

The Investment Value of SEO
We strongly encourage you to consider this from a perspective of “new customer value.” How much does the average new customer bring you in profit? If these steps can bring you significantly more web traffic and that leads to even one or two extra customers within a few months, how much does that represent? And therefore, what is it worth to invest in this?

Factors:
This is very time consuming work – lots of details.
It’s not necessarily a linear-causal effect (spending half won’t get half the results, and spending double won’t always double the results.)
It’s not instant nor guaranteed, but it will result in more traffic and almost certainly in increased customers/sales, though the conversion will be up to you.
Assuming it does result in even just a few extra customers per month, it’s surely well worth the costs.

That said, it will ultimately be up to you for how much you want to invest in this. We’ll give you our best analysis and advice on what we think is the sweet spot is for good ROI.