Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? The terms SEO and content marketing present themselves once a company is exposed to the possibility of driving traffic to their website through organic search. At this point the company asks what comes first, the SEO or the Content Marketing? This article unpacks why some bleieve it is SEO VS Content Marketing.
What is SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization, but you know that right? Search engine optimization are the methods required to ensure that a website has the framework for visibility in the search engines. Without SEO, your company is left to offline marketing or paid advertising as ways to drive traffic to your website.
Let’s be honest, SEO has been given a bad name. One of the most spammy conversations that businesses have with marketing agencies is around the subject of SEO. Rarely do these scam artists call in and offer their content marketing services. Why? Because content marketing requires a company to show their work. The same cannot be said about all aspects of SEO.
Let’s look at what the scammers say they do but only the trusted agencies do correctly.
Technical SEO To Prevent SEO Mishaps
Your website needs a strong foundation and technical SEO is the initial frame and on-going maintenance required to make sure your website doesn’t plummet in the search engines. Technical aspects of SEO include proper URL structures, internal linking, page speed, website security, sitemaps, mobile friendly readiness, among other things.
Basically, technical SEO is good business practices that every website should follow. Once your website becomes more complex with numerous pages, technical work becomes more intricate and detailed. We will save that conversation for a future article.
Keyword Research To Understand Your Customers
The lines get a little blurry here but since every website has at least a single page, some keyword research is necessary even without content marketing. Understanding the main topics that your business is known for need to be placed within the home page, service pages, and other company information pages on your website.
This may seem obvious but more often than not, websites forgo the process of keyword research and have service and product pages written by the owner or employee who just wants to hurry up and get the job done. Or, it was built by a website developer who has no real understanding of what that business does.
Therefore, an SEO will do keyword research to make sure these pages are not considered thin content and include the relevant phrases that Google needs to know from your business.
Building Backlinks That Boost Search Rankings
Beware! This is a scammer’s favorite word. It makes them sound intelligent and lets them offer a service that is easy to do a horrible job for. Link building is mentioned on other websites that link back to your website. Google sees it as an important factor for how important your website is.
Unfortunately for these scammers, there is a huge difference between the impact a backlink from a worthless website has and that of a quality and relevant website.
A true SEO looks to position your backlinks on websites that are white hat, relevant to your industry, and have a significant amount of traffic going to their website. This process is manual and takes a lot of work. Therefore, you are not going to get the results you hope for if you are not willing to cough up enough cash for quality work.
Quality backlinks range in price depending on the DA of the website and page. DA stands for domain authority and is determined by the content on the website, website traffic, and quality backlinks pointing to that particular site. But the site isn’t the whole story, a high domain authority site may put your backlink on a low DA page which doesn’t make it nearly as valuable.
Backlinks are an important conversation and are a part of every good SEO strategy.
What is Content Marketing?
The short answer. Content marketing begins with a blog post and continues on from there. But that isn’t the real definition about content marketing in the sense of how you show up in the search engines. Content marketing is really an ever growing book on your website that shows you as the subject matter expert in your field of expertise.
This website content is created in such a way that it signals to the world wide web that this information is important and needs to be considered for positioning in the search results. Admittedly, this process takes time but with the right strategy, it is like index fund investing where it compounds every time.
Eventually, you look up and say “wow” where did all this organic traffic come from.
Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
The strategy is what makes the difference in the pace at which you see results from a content marketing plan. Deciding at the moment as to what you want to publish on today’s blog is a strategy that will take forever. Effective content marketing creates content ideas based on what your existing audience needs to know (even if it doesn’t rank well) and what your current domain authority can rank for giving you the chance to engage with a potential customer.
An expert content marketer will look at your website and determine the pillar content and then start picking away at the most opportunistic sub content that you have the ability to rank for. Once complete, you will have a book on that particular subject that will need to be curated over time.
Building Backlinks Through Content Marketing
Once a blog article on a website reaches the first page of Google, it has the ability to generate backlinks. Truly valuable content will be recognized by other blogs and when the timing is right, they will suggest to their readers that they check out your expertise on that subject.
This is a big deal because it gives you a greater ability to hold that spot or increase your ranking in Google search.
How SEO and Content Marketing Overlap
Here is the truth, you can’t really win without both a solid SEO strategy and content marketing strategy. What we call SEO content creation is when each page of the website built with good content is also built with good technical structure. But even then, if the website does not have the proper SEO setup, you can bet money that it won’t position well in search.
Here is more truth, not every SEO understands content marketing and not every content marketer understands SEO. This is why large companies have several members on their SEO team that work together to make for certain that any SEO and content marketing efforts have a strong enough ROI (return on investment) to warrant their worth.
As a local business, your company may not have the luxury of bringing on numerous employees to handle these tasks. The good news is that companies such as ours, do this job for you. In fact, even many billion dollar enterprise organizations leave most of the SEO and content marketing work to an outside agency.
Sometimes, it is just better to let the pros do what they do so that you can focus on the business you are building.
The Power of a Solid Content Strategy
Where content marketing really stands out is that it is the raw materials you need for your digital marketing strategy. Not all social media content makes for great articles but all in-depth articles make for great social media content. A big mis by most companies is that they do not leverage their content efforts with their online marketing strategy.
Creating fresh content either weekly gives you dozens of opportunities to engage in social media marketing on the major long form and short form platforms. Creating great content on your website is one of the most important aspects of your entire marketing plan.
Why You Need Both SEO and Content Marketing
In case you need more convincing, there is no shortage of websites that miss the mark on both SEO and content marketing. You might only have one or two competitors doing this type of marketing and if so, that is good news for you! The field is wide open and with more people searching online with each day that passes, there is plenty of organic search market share to be had.
With an SEO content marketing strategy, you can build a permanent presence in the search engines that will serve you for many years to come.
Your Local SEO & Content Marketing Agency
We hope you enjoyed our SEO VS Content Marketing article. If you are a local business, we would love to handle your SEO Marketing Strategy and fill your website with quality content. Our team of search marketers handles every aspect of your website SEO.
Our SEO agency offers premium SEO content writing services making you the subject matter expert for your industry. Trust our SEO agency to be your go-to-solution for all things organic search. Fill out the form for a free website analysis and strategy call.