There seems to be a bit of confusion in the marketing world over SEO and content marketing. Many people assume that SEO and content marketing are either two separate techniques or the same thing. The truth is, however, that they are natural complements and work in unison with each other.
What Is Content Marketing?
As we've discussed in our previous blogs, SEO is the technical process of improving your website to improve search visibility, which in turn leads to increased organic traffic. On the other hand, content marketing is the process of creating relevant content that attracts and engages your target audience.
By providing your target audience with free content aimed at their interests and pain points, you and your company can become experts in the field. As a result, this helps boost traffic to your website and eventually leads to conversions and sales.
Blogs, eBooks, White Papers, quizzes, and videos are all examples of content marketing that provide your audience with valuable, in-depth, and educational information.
How SEO and Content Marketing Work Together
While both SEO and content marketing work alone, there is a lot of overlap in the middle. A good SEO strategy helps improve the visibility of the content you create. Think of it this way:
- SEO demands content that targets a specific audience. Content marketing fulfills this demand.
- SEO demands keywords that your target audience is searching for. Content marketing applies these keywords strategically throughout your content.
- As search engines try to understand your content, your SEO strategy and keyword research focus your content marketing efforts to help them appear and rank on SERPs.
Optimize Your Content for SEO
You may devote hours to writing a perfect piece of content. But if you don't understand the mechanics of how search engines work, you will not reap any benefits of your content marketing efforts.
By organizing your content using appropriate tags, improving your metadata, using your robots.txt and your XML sitemap, you can ensure that search engines can read, access, and view your content.
- Meta descriptions, header tags, and title tags help users and search engines understand what your content is about before they even click into it.
- Image alt tags improve user accessibility and help search engines interpret and understand images, as well as your overall page. It can also aid in driving traffic to your website from Google Images.
- Your robots.txt file allows a search engine to understand which content it should and should not crawl.
- Internal linking helps users and search engines easily navigate and find the relevant subpages and categorize the different parts of your site.
- Backlinking helps increase your overall authority and improve your site's ranking.
- Canonical tags and redirects help assure you're not penalized for broken links and duplicate content.
Content marketing is only successful if it has appropriate SEO and vice versa. Your content will get you nowhere unless it can be searched and found. You can have a great SEO strategy but it will fail if your content is lackluster.
