SEO and content marketing may be very different but they are inseparable and necessary if you want traffic to your website. Google values high-quality content over most other ranking factors. An SEO professional can advise you on how to produce such content.
Therefore, when people need to find your high-quality content, SEO comes in. Your best content won’t add to your bottom line unless Google views your whole website as offering value to users and following best practices.
Finding the balance
An SEO professional will tell you that SEO is a technical process that drives people to your website to appreciate your excellent content. Content marketing is less technical and broader.
SEO helps you to rank higher in search indexes but this can’t happen unless you keep creating new content. Content on its own without SEO will not reach the intended audience. SEO on its own is useless without being able to drive visitors to great content.
If you post blog posts every day but neglect to use the right SEO practices, you’re unlikely to achieve the rankings you want to see.
If you become fixated on building links and neglect writing content, it could have the same result. Some people think that content marketing eliminates the need for SEO and others believe SEO is much more important. The truth is that they overlap and cohere.
Applying SEO to the same pages over and over again is not as effective as continuously writing new optimized content. Google loves quality, fresh content and it is more likely to rank it and direct people to your website. If visitors find high-quality content once they arrive on your site, you have a higher chance of conversions.
Keywords need context
SEO demands content because there is no SEO without it. SEO needs keywords and those keywords have to be used naturally within the content. Content marketing consists of quality content written for an audience and keywords need to be used if that audience is to find it. This doesn’t mean stuffing your content with keywords but using them appropriately and in context.
SEO needs backlinks and they are used in content
SEOs may dream about a powerful .edu linking to a blog article and providing link juice to a website. This is only possible if you’re creating stellar content. The best way to get good backlinks is to create the type of content worth linking to.
SEO contributes to user experience
SEO is technical in that it includes enhancing metadata, optimizing robots.txt, constructing a strategic sitemap and using proper tags. These technical aspects need to be present to serve users and promote content. If you don’t have a good sitemap, for example, it may be difficult for users to find the content they need.
Optimizing robots.txt helps search engines to crawl your site better so readers can find your content. Using the right tags in the right places helps your content to get indexed so that more readers can find it. An SEO professional will tell you that SEO and content marketing work in synergy.