If you’ve just become a member of the Digital Marketing club, knowing some names can be important.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing, for example, are a pretty big deal.
Both of these strategies are used to bring traffic to a website, create brand awareness and, ultimately, increase revenue.
And when SEO and content marketing are used together, your business can see some amazing results.
Want to know how you can make this connection? Keep on reading!
First of All, What Is SEO?
Let’s start defining both strategies, ok?
SEO is a way to attract more visitors to your website through search engines.
It’s a form of optimizing the content on each page so that search engines will know what the content is about and will be able to recommend it to people who are searching for content like it.
One of the most important parts of SEO is the use of keywords.
This is done by doing keyword research to find out exactly what people are typing on Google (or other search engines) when looking for answers to their questions.
Then, those words and phrases can be used by brands to create content that will respond to a user’s intention.
Ranking goals
Your goal in an SEO strategy is to get your page to the top of the rankings on search engine results pages.
Most people go with the first few results they get, so site owners want their pages to be in those top results.
That doesn’t mean that keywords should be stuffed into the content and repeated again and again, though.
The best action is to include them naturally, exploring synonyms and other variations, so that the content isn’t seen as spam.
SEO is also about getting links back to your site.
Backlinks are like votes that search engines count for your site. The more links you get, and the better those sites are that link to you, the better your page will be ranked in the search engine results page.
A better user experience
The key to SEO is generally creating a better experience for the user.
It includes making pages load quickly, a responsive design and getting plenty of links to your site.
All of these methods together help search engines to know that your site is a quality one that users will want to read.
If you wrote a page of content that was not optimized, it’s hit or miss whether the search engines who look at it know what it’s supposed to be about.
With an SEO strategy, you seek to make sure they do — therefore, this is a smarter approach for driving more traffic to you.
For search engines, SEO tells them what your site is about so that they can match the intent of a user with the right sites in the results.
What About Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the use of relevant content to get an action from a user that might translate to a sale.
The content that is created for each page of a website can be long and complex enough to be seen as high-quality but simple enough for everyone to read easily.
We’re talking about text articles, blog posts, quizzes, infographics, product descriptions, cases and more.
All of these pieces of content need to be brilliant in the eyes of your website visitors.
You need great content
Google rewards high-quality content, so the need for better and better materials is always there.
If you can create something that is easy to comprehend and focused on answering a question well, search engines will appreciate your efforts.
Longer-form content is often considered to be the best for its ability to thoroughly cover a subject.
But don’t look at this as a math formula. At the end of the day, the best content size is the one that responds to a user’s intention.
And yes, we’re repeating this information to show you how important it is!
What Is the Connection Between SEO and Content Marketing?
Both SEO and content marketing are used together to create an overall drive for better traffic.
➤ Content marketing uses SEO principles to become more visible to search engines and more read by users.
➤ At the same time, SEO depends on that content to be good.
After all, it doesn’t matter if you are following all of the search engine rules if your text is poorly written.
Using SEO and content marketing together
To build a successful SEO campaign, there has to be plenty of content to optimize.
And to create a successful content marketing campaign, that content has to be well optimized.
Trying to use one of these strategies without the other makes little sense, and it isn’t likely to be successful.
Take meta descriptions, for example.
You need them for SEO, because they are incredibly important ranking factors — meaning that they can influence your position on a search engine results page.
And you also need them for content marketing, since only the best texts will attract clicks from users.
What Is the Difference Between Content Marketing and SEO?
If we must talk about differences, an important goal of SEO is to drive as many people as possible to a website.
That traffic has to be quality, however, as driving the wrong buyer personas to a site isn’t helpful.
On the other hand, content marketing is the use of the content itself to get users to do something specific, such as downloading an ebook, calling your business, or ordering a product.
Both of these methods are used together, but each is a different process.
How Do SEO and Content Marketing Work Together?
As we mentioned, all of the SEO techniques, such as link building and meta tags, are useless if there is no content to catch the attention of users.
Content keeps people on the page, and SEO is a way to get people there in the first place.
If you have bad content that is not well-optimized, search engines can “punish” your website.
Maybe your content is incomplete, maybe it is spammy — what matters is that it will never be on the coveted first page of Google.
So, in your creative process, make sure you’re not only respecting the rules of SEO but also producing good content.
Wrap Up: To Be Successful You Will Need SEO and Content Marketing
Combining both strategies will increase your traffic, strengthen your authority and help you offer better experiences to users.
Of course, this was a short blog post on SEO and content marketing, so we invite you to look for more in-depth materials on our website.
To get you started, here’s a tip.
The entrepreneur Joe Pulizzi spoke to us in a super informative webinar on content marketing. Watch it now!
