Combining SEO and Content Marketing To Achieve Excellent Organic Results

There seems to be a lot of confusion in the marketing world about two vital but distinct methods of digital marketing: SEO and content marketing.

It’s easy to see how someone might be confused as they often appear in articles and blogs as separate entities and many marketing professionals draw a line in the sand somewhere between the two.

In reality, it’s much more complicated than that. Content marketing and SEO are natural complements of each other. They both feed off each other and act as essential mechanisms for any successful digital marketing campaign.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques that ensure that content and web pages are seen by the specific audience that a marketer wishes to target. Simply put, it is what helps match your specific web page with the search query of your target demographic.

The goal of SEO is to draw attention to the right piece of content every time whether that is blog posts, e-books, or even online courses. Through targeted optimisation, technical tweaks, and regular adjustment, an SEO expert helps drive traffic through more organic sources like search engines.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is exactly what it implies: marketing using content. It’s the foundation of all kinds of digital marketing campaigns. That blog post from last week can be used on social media to get more attention, but the real rocket fuel for most content marketing is the SEO work done in the background.

However, having good SEO doesn’t mean your content can be lackluster. SEO is not a tool that fixes bad blogs and websites and makes them magically appear on the first page of search results.

One of the many factors that search engines take into account when reviewing content is quality. If your content marketing is full of errors, inconsistencies, or poorly written, there isn’t enough SEO in the world to fix it.

You need to produce content that will appeal to your specific target audience, content that will provide a solution or entertainment for the searcher while helping you establish brand awareness.. 

Yes, your professional marketing logo design can help to make your brand recognisable and memorable, but well-written content will be the catalyst of educating potential customers about your products or services and establish your brand as an authority in its field. Also, it builds trust with potential customers and establishes your brand as a reliable source of information.
You can use a mockup generator to preview your content and ensure everything is in order.

Combining SEO and content marketing

It’s not a question of SEO and content marketing. The question is how you’re going to improve the visibility of your already great content with strong SEO. If you’re just getting started with either, here are a few ways to use content marketing and SEO together for better results:

Publishing content for search engines

SEO content publishing tells search engines what your content is about, making it easier for them to understand and categorize it. As a result, your SEO content is more likely to appear at the top of search results for relevant keywords and long-tail keywords, making it accessible to potential customers.

According to Up Inc., the first organic search result is 10 times more likely to get a click with an average CTR of 27.6%, while the #1 result on Google receives 34% of organic traffic.

Assess the value of your links

You’ve probably read elsewhere that when you get backlinks from “bad neighborhoods,” it does very little for your SEO and can even be detrimental in some circumstances.

SEO can help you figure out which neighborhoods are most desirable for your purposes, and which ones you’d rather not get hit by. It’s not just about monitoring links, but an integral part of the process. After all, a link from a transmission repair website is unlikely to be seen as highly relevant (read: valuable) to your recipe blog.

In turn, good content marketing with the right SEO can get you to a better neighborhood – and fast!

When high-quality content writing takes a front seat in your marketing strategy, you’ll start appearing higher in the search engine. That means more people (including content writers) will find your information valuable, and, in return, you’ll see an increase in your overall backlinks. As more important and authoritative sites begin to link to you, search engine algorithms will recognize this and reward your page rankings accordingly.

SEO vs. content marketing: can you have one and not the other?

Content and SEO need to work together to provide users with relevant, attention-grabbing content. No matter your business, be it an e-commerce store, laptop recycling center, financial institution, or something entirely different, you need to write content that engages users. This requires a solid SEO strategy. SEO should be an essential part of planning to develop a proper content marketing plan; it shouldn’t be an afterthought or an option. If no one sees your content, is it content marketing?

There is a definite synergy between SEO and content marketing, especially when both are done well and coordinated. That’s why top-notch content marketing companies maintain relationships with SEO experts; they know they need SEO to make content work.

If you do your own marketing, you need to approach it the same way you would approach professional content marketing, especially when it comes to SEO. This means you need to know your audience, understand your topic, have an idea of your overall strategy, and optimize your content for search at the same time.

It sounds like a lot of work, but your analytics data will show you how big the payoff is in the future.