If you’re looking to improve your San Diego website’s SEO, the best thing you can do might be to forget about SEO for a while and focus instead on content marketing. As the name implies, content marketing means using “content”—articles, blog posts or basically the words on your website—to market your business.

Why will content marketing help your SEO? Because if done right, content marketing produces good-quality content that customers and prospective customers will click on, read and share. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you with your content marketing and, ultimately, with your SEO.

1. Provide relevant information. No matter what your business is, you can produce content that your customers and prospects want to read about. Think about what type of information will help them—not what will help you. In other words, your content shouldn’t read like an ad—it should provide useful information that teaches your readers something.

Suppose you own a San Diego website that sells surf and sport attire and equipment like surfboards, bathing suits and wetsuits. Instead of doing a post about the new line of board shorts you just started selling (i.e., something that sounds like an ad), you could write about the most popular styles in board shorts, how to choose a wetsuit, what bathing suit styles are hot this summer, how to take care of your surfboard, beginner surfing tips, surfing for kids….you get the idea. These are all interesting topics that people interested in the beach lifestyle would want to read.

1. Add photos. Putting images in your content helps it rank higher in search engines. Make sure you have the rights to the images you use. For instance, the surf site example above could include photos of products they sell or take their own pictures of store employees modeling the goods. You can also add keywords to your photos to boost your San Diego SEO even more.
2. Share your content. Share your content not only on your website, but also in your email newsletter and on your social media accounts such as Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. The more places you link to your content, the more people will see it and click on it.
3. Use keywords. OK, now we’re talking a little bit of SEO. You should use the keywords that you want to rank high for in the titles of your content as well as in the first paragraphs and captions of photos. Don’t worry about stuffing your content with keywords, though—that leads to articles that are clearly just written for SEO purposes rather than for informational ones. If you make your content relevant to your customers, SEO will in most cases follow naturally.
4. Measure results. Don’t obsess about it every day, but do check in to see the results of your content marketing strategy. Which articles get shared the most or clicked the most? What places (email newsletter, social media, website) attract most of the readers? What topics get the most clicks, and what do those posts have in common? If you find that people really respond to surf-fashion topics, write more about that and less about surfboards.

It takes time to build a content marketing strategy, but the results for your SEO San Diego will be worth it. Be patient and you’ll eventually see the investment of time pay off.