Just imagine, a mere 40 years ago there was no, “Google, what’s the meaning of content marketing?”
It’s nearly impossible to recall a time before the Internet (but, thankfully, also dial-up Internet). But, as the Internet expanded, so did the use of search engines and the implementation of SEO.
Like peanut butter and jelly, content marketing and Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, are just meant to be together.
Often we see the terms overlap or create a sense of confusion, but each are two separate techniques that complement each other perfectly.
So without further ado, let’s break each tactic down and see how SEO can help you get the most oomph out of your content marketing.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is how you ensure that your content and web pages are visible to your desired audience.
SEO has three main objectives:
- to improve and increase the quality of traffic
- to improve and increase the quantity of traffic
- to improve and increase your organic ranking
Organic traffic is free traffic, or when a search engine shows your content on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) without paying for the ranking.
Organic traffic is critical to content marketing success. 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic searches and SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media, according to Brightedge,
With stats like those, it’s pretty safe to say that good SEO practices are a critical component to making sure your content shows up and reaches your targeted audience.
In fact, through optimizing your content and regular upkeep, you can drive more traffic to your content through organic sources for a long time. That’s probably why the average page in the top 10 rankings is 2+ years old.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is what makes the marketing world go round!
Or, as the Content Marketing Institute defines it: “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Content marketing is the basis of all digital marketing efforts, including social media campaigns and paid advertising.
But, whether it’s blog posts or videos, product descriptions or landing pages, content needs to reach its targeted audience in order to be effective.
A huge factor is having a successful piece of content? SEO. However, SEO cannot work on its own.
Instead, SEO depends on good content to match search queries and specific keywords.
SEO and Content Marketing Join Forces
Content marketing without SEO is suboptimal, as it’s essentially content creation without the marketing. In a similar vein, SEO without good quality content fails.
The solution? Creating and combining both a content marketing strategy and an SEO strategy is the best way to ensure you’re getting the best results possible.
Use SEO to increase visibility and find the best audience for your gorgeous content. According to Hubspot, in 2020 about 64% of marketers actively invest time in search engine optimization (SEO).
A delicious combination
When crafting your content marketing and SEO sandwich, remember to keep a few best practices in mind.
Know that keyword stuffing is a thing of the past. As search engines have evolved, they’ve become more intelligent at crawling web pages, analyzing the relevance and quality of your content, and cataloging it accordingly. So forget about tricking the algorithm with keyword littering. That tactic is lone gone.
Instead, focus on writing a quality piece of content.
Quality, SEO-friendly content always includes:
- rich keywords
- headline optimization
- including internal links that are relevant to your reader
Remember, the better quality your content is, the more likely it is for other websites to link to it and thus improve your ranking. After all, according to SEMrush in 2019, search is the number one traffic source to blogs across all industries.
Subscribe to our newsletter