Desperate to save his family’s business during the recession in 2008, Steve Goedeker decided to try selling online. A traditional bricks-and-mortar appliance retailer in St. Louis, Goedeker’s was having a hard time surviving with local sales, so Goedeker had his son and daughter build a website during summer vacation. At the same time, he began taking online courses and borrowing library books on online marketing and search engine optimization.

“We were struggling, trying to figure out what to do to keep this going,” Goedeker said.

The move worked. Sales grew from $6 million in 2009 to $48 million in 2013. The payroll grew from 18 to 90 employees over the same period, and the St. Louis store now accounts for less than 10 percent of the company’s sales. “Our top states are California, Texas and Florida,” Goedeker said. “Moving online has transformed the company.”

Late last year, however, Goedeker confronted a new challenge: He was sure there had to be a way to improve his search engine ranking to get traffic to his site without constantly riding what he calls the “never-ending treadmill” of paid ads. So in late 2013, he joined what has become one of Web marketing’s biggest trends: content marketing.

“As we were looking at ways to grow, content marketing kept coming up,” said Matt Davids, the company’s search engine optimization director. “The experts were all saying, ‘You need to be in content marketing, you need to be in content marketing.’”

A buzzword that can mean different things to different people, content marketing generally refers to creating and publishing blog posts, images and other content that sets a company apart and positions it as a respected expert.

“Content marketing can help a small-business owner show why you’re different from others in the field, what’s really in your DNA,” said Andy Seibert, managing director of Imprint, a marketing content company. “Answering questions is one way to engage with the audience. If you can be a problem solver, then answering questions is a great thing to do.”

At its essence, content marketing is a tool for improving a company’s ranking on Google, said Michael Baliber, senior vice president and director of media strategy at the media agency ID Media. When people share and link to a company’s original content, he said, Google notices.

“There are a lot of positives from Google’s perspective, and that can only help your business,” said Baliber, who added that lists come up higher than chunks of text or white papers in search engine rankings.

For its content marketing push, Goedeker’s hired two full-time writers and began publishing daily blog posts about home renovation and appliances, which were then shared on social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Pinterest.

Today, the company spends between $100,000 and $150,000 a year on its content marketing efforts, according to Goedeker. He says the goal is for the company to get 80 percent of its online traffic and half of its online sales with its content marketing efforts. So far, sales generated this way have risen from 8 to 14 percent of the online total.

“It’s been slow so far,” Goedeker said. “It takes some patience and persistence. With a paid ad, you get a return on investment immediately. With content marketing, it takes awhile for the search engines to recognize your value.”

The number of links back to the company’s website increased from 3,000 in late 2013 to 40,000 today; one blog post, about painting walls with watercolors, got 30,000 visits.

But questions remain, both inside Goedeker’s and in the marketing world at large, about how best to do content marketing, and whether its return justifies the effort.

Of course, content marketing doesn’t make sense for all businesses. Some just don’t have the skills, and many have no idea where to begin. In 2012 and 2013, the online custom shirt company Blank Label published more than 50 posts. But the pieces had little impact on sales, and website traffic increased by less than 10 percent, said Fan Bi, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.

The company had two problems: Its clients weren’t looking for content, and it didn’t have the time or expertise to produce it well.

Marcus Sheridan suggests that business owners write blog posts answering the questions they hear most often from their customers. In 2009, Sheridan, an owner of River Pools and Spas in Warsaw, Virginia, published a post about how much it cost to install a fiberglass pool, a useful piece of data but one most pool companies aren’t eager to publish. Using a Web-tracking tool, Sheridan then followed how many customers came through that post.

“That one single article has made us over $2.5 million in sales,” he said. “For a $5 million-a-year company, that’s a ton of business.”