In digital marketing, people have a habit of treating SEO and content marketing as two completely different things. But a funny thing happens when businesses don’t use SEO and content marketing together. Search rankings sink. Pieces of content flounder. And businesses get minimal returns from their digital investments.
The reality is that SEO and content marketing are closely linked, and it makes no sense to treat them as separate entities. Technical adjustments can’t fix SEO problems unless great content exists on your website, and your content won’t find eyeballs without strong SEO research and markup.
The bottom line? Instead of separating your SEO and content marketing efforts, your business should be linking them so that each can amplify the other.
The Smart Approach to SEO & Content Marketing
Investing in SEO and not content marketing — or vice versa — is a little like investing in your sales department without putting any money into lead generation. Your sales team can’t do much with leads it doesn’t have. The same is true of SEO without killer content, or content that hasn’t been optimized for search.
Content marketing and SEO have a symbiotic, synergistic relationship. Smart SEO will boost content, and great content will boost SEO. So, it makes sense to co-ordinate them with one another.
Unsure how this happens? Here are some ways that SEO complements content marketing…
- SEO keyword research tells you what kinds of content your customers are searching for.
- Competitive SEO research reveals market opportunities you can seize with new content.
- Technical SEO helps content reach a wider audience through SERP visibility.
…and here are a few ways that content marketing complements SEO.
- Content quality is one of the biggest contributing factors to SEO rankings.
- Creating more onsite content allows you to target a practically endless number of keywords.
- Content marketing is one of the best ways to generate backlinks, which power SEO rankings.
Combining the Power of SEO & Content
The complementary relationship between SEO and content marketing means it’s always a good idea to co-ordinate SEO and content together.
In basic SEO and content marketing, this fairly straightforward. First, you perform SEO research to identify the core keywords you want your website to target. Then you either re-write your site’s existing content or create new content that’s designed to perform well on these keywords. During content creation, the content team optimizes the onsite content, while the SEO team will optimize the page’s backend.
When you ramp up your SEO and content efforts, things get a little more fun. This is where businesses who coordinate their SEO and content efforts tend to separate themselves from their competitors.
Here are some of the strategies your business can follow to emulate successful SEO and content marketing teams:
- Expanding your site’s core pages to target specific product keywords, product category keywords, or geographic keywords for different parts of your service area.
- Using SEO research to discover what kinds of questions customers ask before they start searching for your product category, then building optimized content to answer these queries.
- Researching which types of search queries your customers perform before purchasing, then harnessing this data to build more persuasive content.
- Creating content that’s specifically designed to generate backlinks to your website, helping you boost SEO signals sitewide.
Whatever your SEO or content marketing goals, a coordinated strategy will almost always give you the best chance of success.
