There have been long standing battles about whether or not SEO and content marketing efforts should be kept separate from each other, but those viewpoints are slowly beginning to erode away as marketers and businesses begin to realize the mutually beneficial relationship between the two.
The truth is that having an interconnected relationship between your SEO and your content marketing can be extremely effective in establishing credibility and getting content in front of more people.
Creating quality content is crucial to any successful marketing campaign. With content created, you will only find more success if you effectively optimize that content to reach a larger amount of viewers. The promotion of that content is where SEO comes in and helps your content marketing efforts.
Collaboration Over Coexistence
Marcus Miller, an experienced SEO consultant and guest contributor for Search Engine Land, argues that SEO “supercharges” content marketing efforts and that content marketing does the same for SEO.
“When your content ranks well organically, you get free exposure in the natural search results. This improves brand awareness, drives engagement with your business and helps set more people on the pathway to profitable customer actions,” he said. “Your content appears in the right place at the right time with no associated cost per click. That’s some marketing gold right there.”
Miller also said that content marketing makes link building easier, which improves authority and SEO for a given sector.
Marketing expert Barry Feldman agrees and compared SEO and content marketing to newspaper headlines and copy, respectively.
“As I see it, saying SEO and content are two separate marketing tactics is akin to saying headlines and copy are foes. How preposterous is that?” he said. “You write headlines to get people to read copy. You then optimize your online content to get people to discover it.”
What Does This Mean?
Digital marketing tools all exist in the same space, each with a different purpose. SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing and SEM are all useful assets in marketing your business to new heights. Rather than turning these tools into adversarial, ideological battles or quarantining them away from each other, smart marketers need to use these tools to their advantage.
Blending quality content with strategic keyword planning, while not easy, can only serve to make your content more fit for search engine results, enhancing your content in ways it couldn’t do on its own.