How Content Marketing and SEO Work Together
These days, it seems content marketing is often touted as an alternative to SEO. However, it is possible to create content that not only creates value for users, but also build and improve on SEO.
SEO used to be as easy as throwing keywords in the meta tags, and you could rank for anything, regardless of whether the content on your website matched the keywords in the meta tags. But as the web has evolved and search engines have discovered it’s important to treat their users as customers, the way you build rank has changed significantly. And the competition for that ranking has greatly increased. The problem was, most of the content out there wasn’t designed to help people looking for information – it was garbage written to game the search engines into higher ranking.
Content marketing became a way to provide the search engines with the quality content they wanted to serve to their users. It also became a way to educate your prospects about the products and services you offer, without directly being a sales pitch.
Content marketing and SEO became linked the moment we started turning to search engines to solve our problems, and the search engines started weeding out the poor content in favor of well written, informative content.
The Differences Between SEO and Content Marketing
While the two disciplines are interdependent and overlap, there are some clear differences between them.
- SEO is a narrower discipline that is more technical in nature.
- Content marketing is much more broad and holistic.
You must use Search Engine Optimization techniques when you implement your content marketing campaigns, or you’re setting the campaigns up for failure.
Still, there are some “experts” out there claiming that content marketing has replaced SEO – and the two are completely different. Yes, there are areas where they are different, but the idea that you don’t need SEO for content marketing is crazy – because SEO is necessary to ensure the content ranks in the first place.
You can get eyes on your content without it ranking highly in Google, thanks to social media and paid advertising, but the far better long-term pay off comes from organic traffic.
