Once upon a time, SEO met up with Content Marketing, fell in love, and vowed to never separate, to always work together in harmony.
Anyone who’s been around the ‘Net a while understands a little about optimizing content so that the search engines can index it according to topic and relevance to readers. About ten years ago, someone decided to give a name to the type of marketing that occurs that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers: Content Marketing. How do the two differ and how are they alike?
This week, I invited Jack Dawson of webfia.com. to share his insights on working with SEO and CM together instead of separately.
Where and How They Met
There are many techniques that make up internet marketing, two of which include search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing. SEO has been around for quite some time, more than a decade at least, while content marketing has only gained popularity in the last few years.
One mistake webmasters make is taking the two fields as completely separate entities, when in essence one cannot properly function in the absence of the other. Content marketing cannot completely replace SEO, neither can the reverse happen, but they are certainly not two separate entities.
Successful online marketers have understood the relationship between the two fields, and they know that to succeed, one must harness the power of each to make the other better. If SEO and content marketing were to be considered as people, they would not be two individuals, but rather two personalities within the same individual.
SEO and CM are distinct yet inseparable
If you want your online marketing campaign to succeed, you must be clear about the overlaps and differences between SEO and CM. Here are two of the most important differences between SEO and CM:
- SEO encompasses a more technical, narrower approach
- Content marketing offers a broader, more complete approach
And here’s where they meet:
- SEO can be broadened by channeling the specificity of its technical aspects towards content marketing
- Content marketing can only succeed if the important SEO markers that improve visibility are implemented within the strategy.
In other words, SEO makes certain demands, and these demands are fulfilled using content marketing. Consider the following illustrations:
- SEO demands for content. CM is content
SEO is impossible in the absence of content. Content makes the very foundation to which SEO tactics are applied. From keywords to title and meta description optimization, SEO techniques are applied to content, and are useless where they are not backed by high quality relevant content. Content marketing begins with the creation of high-quality relevant content. Content is the personification and practical application of SEO.
- SEO identifies keywords. CM uses keywords
Keywords researched and identified using SEO techniques would all be useless in the absence of relevant content. Remember the old days when keywords were haphazardly stuffed in content just to get noticed by search engines? If you tried that today, you would be hit by Panda so hard it would make your head spin.
Google has become more advanced so that keywords must be placed in meaningful and relevant ways. This includes all variations of said words: changes in tenses, synonyms, long forms, etc. If you want to succeed at keywords, you must use high quality content to push them forward, and that’s part of content marketing.
- SEO wants links. CM creates links
Link-building is the cornerstone of search engine optimization. However, it’s not about links alone, you have to attract high quality links from relevant authority sites within your niche. To earn these links, you must have high quality and value-adding content to share. This is where content marketing comes in: you create stellar content for your site, or your blog, and post within other sites, and in so doing earn backlinks to your content and site. Job done!
There are innumerable interactions between SEO and content marketing. The bottom-line is this: to succeed at internet marketing, they must be taken together, and not as one being separate and/or more important than the other.
Guest Author: Jack Dawson is a freelance content writer. He has written many articles on technology, SEO, hosting, internet, etc. He is greatly experienced in the field of writing. To know more about him, click here – webfia.com.
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