How Content Marketing Plays Into SEO (and Vice Versa)
Content and SEO go together so well, it seems almost frivolous to talk about them separately. However, there still seem to be a wide variety of businesses and even marketing experts that believe these silos don’t really have a lot in common. After all, an Altimeter study cited by Curata found that 30 percent of marketers don’t have a consistent or integrated strategy, meaning that they have siloed their different areas of marketing.
This can hinder productivity, communication, and improvement. When marketers have worked together on an integrated strategy, the majority of content creators have cited SEO as one of the aspects of marketing that has had the biggest impact on their organization’s bottom line. Below are some of the ways that content and SEO influence one another to create better content, search visibility, and an overall more effective online presence.
Good Content = Better Search Visibility
As search engines continue to refine their algorithms for indexing and displaying content in its search results, the need for high quality content to display for user searches has become even more crucial. As more and more content is created each day, the only way to stand out amongst those who create useless content is to focus on creating high quality, useful content that gives users what they are looking for. Yoast lays out its case for why the quality of content affects SEO. Its main points are this:
1. It provides better user comprehension, e.g. it gives them what they are looking for
2. It lowers the bounce rate, which is something search engines monitor
3. It creates more trust in the website, which may lead to more inbound links and return traffic, both of which are relevant to SEO
4. It leads to more social media shares, which some SEOs believe has some sort of impact on search (though search engines haven’t directly confirmed this correlation as of now).
In addition, making sure your past content is still useful to the reader has SEO benefits as well. Because of Google’s “freshness” ranking factor, updating content to make sure it’s as relevant and up-to-date as possible has long-term SEO benefits. SEOs have long known about Google’s interest in the dates of content. It was first introduced in 2003 with Google’s patent on information retrieval based on date. Then, in 2011, more information came out about the “freshness” ranking factor as part of the algorithm and how content recency affects content’s place in search engine result pages (SERPs).
