How good SEO content can have pleasant, unexpected financial results

I've always been a staunch proponent of inbound marketing - in particular, I think creating genuinely useful, highly-relevant, SEO enhanced content can, in the long run, benefit pretty much any type of online endeavor you can imagine.

I also need to make it clear that this particular article focuses on a benefit of SEO that might take some time to develop - it won't happen overnight. It also relies heavily on having a good web platform. By "good", I mean flexible and powerful. Something like Drupal, as opposed to more cookie cutter type websites that, while easier to set up, are not as flexible or easy to modify.

Adding lots of SEO content

Whether you are running a blog, eCommerce website or anything in between, marketing your site online requires you to create a range of content. To get the most benefit from this content, it needs to be SEO enhanced so that Google and the search engines start showing your pages in their search results.

Obviously, the type of content you create dictates the keywords and key-phrases that you will begin to have an impact on as time goes by. For example, my content focuses on helping entrepreneurs and businesses develop and market websites, so I tend to get a lot of hits from phrases like "SEO blogging", "Internet marketing for business" and so on.

The more content you create, the more phrases you will start to perform on. Remember that the "long tail" accounts for 70% of all search engine traffic. This means that the vast majority of search traffic comes from keywords and keyphrases that aren't super competitive - everyone spends all their time competing over 30% of the pie.

Ranking highly for SEO keywords and phrases

After building up a good body of SEO content, you will start generating traffic from a huge variety of keywords and phrases. Often, many of them aren't even ones you specifically aimed for. The reason for this is that having depth and breadth of coverage in your content allows search engines to find phrases for which you can achieve first page results quite easily.

Once the site starts getting first page results, some interesting things start happening. For example, perform a Google search for the phrase "Create drupal test site".

You'll see that apart from the Drupal website itself, siteprebuilder.com ranks the most highly out of around 13 million results. Admittedly, this is probably not a highly competitive search phrase because it is four words long, but there is value in appearing in the search results with the content I wrote on the target result page.

Advertisers and SEO

While I personally am not too bothered about appearing at the top of the results pages for that particular search, other people may be. There may be services that help people install Drupal websites, or help develop Drupal websites, etc, who are interested in appearing prominently for this result.

Advertisers stand to gain a lot by leapfrogging ads to the top of search engine results without having to go through the effort and expenditure to compete for top page results. Instead, it is easier for them to simply approach the websites that do rank highly for the phrases and SEO keywords that they want, and offer to pay them for ads on that particular page.

Web platform flexibility, advertising and SEO

This is where the whole equation comes together. If you have a website that is flexible enough to allow you to target ads directly to a piece of content, and if you have enough SEO content to rank highly for a range of SEO keywords and keyphrases, then it is likely that people out there will be prepared to pay you to place advertising on those specific pages.

This is a win-win situation for everyone because advertisers are paying for exactly the page they want to advertise on - and not a broad swathe of pages loosely connected to their niche as is the case with traditional advertising. You are getting revenue by placing focuses ads on specific niche content that has already given you the benefit of an organic first page search engine result.

Remember though, that it takes time to learn how best to create interesting and engaging SEO content that will ultimately spark debate, go viral, generate backlinks, SEO goodness and more. You've either got to do this yourself or get some pretty talented, cost effective SEO services to help you out.