If search engine rank were like swimmers in a pool, there’d be no water left because it would all be displaced by the sheer volume of people trying to splash around.

If your organization is striving to compete in a crowded pool of efforts toward search engine rank, here’s a life preserver:  search engine rank is only one piece of a content marketing strategy that really works. If combined with content creation tools like blogs, online articles, eMarketing and strategic social media posts, you can clear up some space. You can stand out and be free to show off your latest moves.
Essentially, Google rank is only one part of the pool. It’s important, but search engine rank isn’t the focus of a complete content creation strategy. A recent article outlines a few reasons why:

1. User clicks drastically drop off after the first few listings when they perform a Google search. Readers try to find what they’re looking for on the first fold of the Google page, so spending a great deal of resources just on increasing search engine rank is ineffective – especially if you’re landing near the bottom of the first page or on any pages that follow. The answer is having a strategy that gives people many more inroads to find you, such as blogs, online articles and your use of this content across social media.

2. Google continually changes the way it ranks pages, and you have to compete with bits of content across video, social media posts and things like photos people post online. If you sell top quality garden accessories, your search efforts to rank high on Google may be thwarted by a garden club’s photo from ten states away. However, if you pair keyword usage with blogs, online articles, videos with tags and strategic use of keywords in social media posts, you can likely beat out the Garden Club Tea Party group pic with valuable information about your products.

3. Only quality, consistent information helps maintain a good search engine rank; just investing in keyword optimization isn’t enough. You may appear above the Google fold for a bit, but to stay there and attract the kind of steady audience you’re after, you must have consistent, new, valuable content on your site and across your other message platforms. Quality content posted often is king when it comes to maintaining an effective page rank.

Creating a strategy to connect page rank with a set of effective content marketing tools is critical, but it isn’t complicated. Once the strategy has been prepared, following an editorial calendar keeps it all together and guides you toward real results.