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Mention digital marketing and, within minutes, keywords like search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing will be mentioned. Both are more than keywords. They are an integral part of successful digital marketing for most brands today.
Chances are, if you run a business that uses digital marketing, you’re already using both. SEO will drive traffic to your website, when you use content marketing on your blog and on your social media channels. But here’s the question: do the two tactics work well together? Otherwise, you may be missing out on a great opportunity to help your brand grow.
Related: 7 Reasons Why SEO Is Important for Every Startup
Making sense of the buzz: SEO vs content marketing
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Before considering how SEO and content marketing can be combined in your marketing strategy, it’s worth clarifying the difference between the two tactics. As digital marketing terms become more widely used, they are also often used synonymously even though they describe different things.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing “focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a defined audience.” The overall goal is to drive customer action that benefits the brand, either through subscribing to a service or purchasing a product.
Unlike traditional marketing, content marketing works indirectly with the consumer and is meant to stimulate interest in his product or service, as opposed to a specific brand. Rather than talking to customers about a specific product or service, content marketing helps customers solve problems by providing information they may not have had before.
Brands that excel in content marketing and Search Engine Optimization build long term relationships with their audience. Customers rely on brands as a source of advice rather than just a business pushing products and services.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization is an important part of marketing for businesses that rely on website traffic. It organizes and optimizes content from search engines, such as Google, and helps your website rank high in search results. The Digital Marketing Institute defines SEO as the process that helps brands generate website traffic from “free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines.”
As a brand, you may pay an SEO expert to improve your rankings, but there is no payment to the company behind the search engines. This is what distinguishes SEO from Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which refers to paid listings. While SEO takes time to deliver results, SEM can increase product visibility in the short term.
Many brands use both approaches as part of their digital marketing strategy. But let’s just focus on SEO. SEO has become a non-negotiable part of any brand’s digital marketing strategy that relies on website traffic for its success. Without it, even the best-designed website may never be found by the relevant audience.
Based on this clarification, it is easy to identify the relationship between content marketing and search engine optimization.
Related: 7 Ways Small Businesses Can Use SEO to Improve Customer Service and Growth
Making content marketing and SEO work together
To reach its full potential to benefit your brand, content marketing and SEO need to work together. As a new brand, you should create content with search engine requirements in mind. As a brand with an existing content library, it’s a good idea to review your content to make sure it’s useful for your search engines.
Starting from scratch: how to develop SEO-friendly content
Just a few years ago, creating SEO friendly content meant putting keywords into articles that were supposed to be well written. As a result, many websites become unreadable and unhelpful to their users. Search engine operators realized this and started changing their algorithms. Today, search engines strive to provide users with the most relevant content.
So how can you tell Google that your content is relevant? The answer is simple: be clear about your content. Search engines investigate websites, and the easier it is to identify the focus of your content, the higher your content will rank on search engine results pages.
Staying focused is key to developing successful content. It may sound simple, but sometimes it is very difficult to implement. For example, if you offer separate online courses for language and personal finance, avoid placing both types of courses on the same page. Instead, create a separate language course page and another personal finance page. You may even want to divide the language course into individual languages.
The same goes for blog posts. It is possible to blog about the benefits of online courses in general. However, creating individual content for online language courses and personal finance courses will almost always push more content to relevant pages.
Creating content from scratch means starting by considering target keywords and matching content to those keywords.
Creating new content may give you an advantage with SEO, but it is a time-consuming approach. Most established businesses and brands already have content libraries and should update and optimize that content to benefit search engine rankings.
Again, it’s worth trying and thinking like a search engine. Websites that are constantly updated rank higher than websites with stagnant content. Updating existing content is the best way to meet those requirements while saving time.
Optimizing existing content will not be complete without reviewing internal and external links. Internal links tell search engines the structure of your website and reveal shared content. Orphaned content, pages not linking together, struggling to be found by search engines.
Related: Why SEO Is Much Easier Than You Think
Take advantage of synergies
SEO and content marketing should work together to attract the most users to your website and generate sales.
To create synergies, start developing content with SEO in mind. Delivering great content that is useful to users can easily become SEO-friendly, especially if it was developed that way from the start. Treating SEO as an afterthought marked at the end of content development does not deliver the best results.
Creating content with your audience in mind and a clear understanding of your topic will make it easier to optimize content for rankings. Regardless of the time investment, traffic optimization is beneficial for your business.
What makes a good marketing strategy? Knowing your target customers, taking an integrated approach to your campaigns, knowing and communicating your USP, focusing on your customer concerns and most importantly, being committed.
What are the three types of SEO?
There are three main types of SEO:
- Internal (On-Page SEO)
- External (Off-Page SEO)
- Technical SEO.
How many types of SEO are there? The three types of SEO are: On-page SEO – Anything on your web page – Blog, product copy, web copy. Off-page SEO – Anything that happens away from your website that helps your SEO Strategy- Backlinks. SEO Technical – Anything technical to do to improve Search Ranking – indexing of sites to help bot crawling.
How does content marketing help digital marketing?
Content marketing builds customer awareness, generates leads, and increases conversions. With the advancement of the digital age, content has become an important part of every marketing strategy.
What is content marketing in the digital marketing example? Content marketing includes things like educational articles, e-books, videos, entertainment, and webinars that answer specific questions people have and give them something they can’t get anywhere else. This is the best way to turn your product, no matter how common, into something that is unlike anyone else’s.
Is content marketing is a type of digital marketing?
Digital marketing can be broadly divided into 8 main categories including: Search Engine Optimization, Pay per Click, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Marketing Analytics, and Affiliate Marketing.
Is content marketing digital marketing?
The difference between content marketing and digital marketing is that content marketing is a specific technique for using content, whereas digital marketing is an umbrella term for any type of online promotion. Content marketing works by providing information and building trust.
What is considered as digital marketing?
Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messaging as marketing channels.
What type of marketing is content marketing?
Content Marketing develops and distributes – usually via the web – content that is relevant and useful to your audience. That content can be blog posts, newsletters, white papers, social media posts, and more. Understanding these content formats will help improve long-term decision making for your brand.
How does content help in marketing?
Content marketing is important because it answers your audience’s questions and helps you build trust, develop relationships, increase conversions, and generate leads. In this day and age, customers expect consistent, high-quality content from their favorite brands.
How does content help?
Content can help you build trust with your target audience. The more you educate and provide value to your target audience, the more trust you can build over time. By educating and informing your target audience about their biggest challenges and pain points through blog posts and other types of content.
How effective is content marketing?
74% of companies find that content marketing increases lead generation, both in quality and quantity (Curata, 2017). Businesses with a content marketing strategy achieved a 27.1% higher win rate and an 18.1% higher quota achievement than businesses without a content strategy (CSO Insights, 2019).
What does content do in marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts and other media. This approach builds expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business on the top of mind when it comes time to buy what you’re selling.
Is content part of digital marketing?
Content marketing is one of the possible digital marketing strategies that offers you techniques to create and distribute content. This means content marketers are narrowly focused on one way of promoting a brand.
What is included under digital marketing?
Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messaging as marketing channels.
Do digital marketers create content?
Content marketing: Producing written and audiovisual content to attract customers to a business website is one of the main ways digital marketers build an online presence.
Does content fall under marketing?
Quality content is part of all forms of marketing: Social media marketing: A content marketing strategy comes before your social media strategy.
What is content marketing in simple words?
Content marketing is a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts and other media. This approach builds expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business on the top of mind when it comes time to buy what you’re selling.
What is an example of the content? Content is defined as what is in or included in something. An example of its contents is peanuts in a jar. Examples of content are words in a book. Individual items or topics covered in a publication or document.
Can good content improve my SEO score?
Quality, authoritative content is the number one driver of your search engine rankings and there is no substitute for great content—this is especially true when doing SEO marketing. Quality content tailor-made for your intended users increases site traffic, which increases the authority and relevance of your site.
Does updating content improve SEO? If you want to improve your SEO, look no further than updating your old content. It’s the perfect way to increase the traffic your website gets from search engines, and it’s guaranteed to make a huge improvement in how well your content ranks. To get started, create exciting new content to add on top of your old articles.
Does content marketing help with SEO?
This is beneficial for your SEO In addition to creating trust and building relationships with your audience, content marketing helps you with search engine optimization (SEO). An important part of SEO is writing quality content, which focuses on your users.
Which is the best strategy SEO or content marketing?
SEO helps people find your content, while content helps drive traffic to your site and improve your rankings. A successful content marketing strategy requires SEO and vice versa. To get the best results with your campaign, focus on building a strategy that combines these strategies together.
How does content boost SEO?
The more quality content your site has, the more likely it is that search engines will place it at the top of their lists when users start searching. Given how important user clicks are, today’s websites rely on SEO (and even hire SEO companies) to keep their sites search-friendly.
How much content is good for SEO rankings?
Forbes points out that an average of 600-700 words per page is optimal for SEO. Forbes also states that websites with less than 300 words per page are considered “thin” by Google standards and, in all likelihood, will not rank highly in search.
Is more content better for SEO?
SEO Benefits of Long Form Content. Longer Content Leads to Higher Search Ranks. Simply put, research shows that longer content dominates page one search rankings. SerpIQ ran a study that mapped the top 10 results in search queries by content length.
How many words are best for SEO?
There is no overall best word count for SEO. However, we recommend targeting at least 1,000 words for standard blog posts, 2,000 for long-form content, and 300-500 for news posts or product pages. Ultimately, you should try to cover the topic in a meaningful and thorough way without resorting to fluff or repetition.
What is a good SEO ranking score?
What is a Good SEO Score? A good SEO score is between 80 – 100. An SEO score in this range indicates that your website meets the highest quality standards for search engine optimization in the areas of technical SEO, content, user experience and mobile usability.
Does more content increase SEO?
Adding more content to your website can improve your SEO, but only if you take it seriously. Don’t make the mistake of adding a lot of low-quality content unless you want negative results.
Does More content Mean Better SEO?
SEO Benefits of Long Form Content. Longer Content Leads to Higher Search Ranks. Simply put, research shows that longer content dominates page one search rankings. SerpIQ ran a study that mapped the top 10 results in search queries by content length.
How does content boost SEO?
The more quality content your site has, the more likely it is that search engines will place it at the top of their lists when users start searching. Given how important user clicks are, today’s websites rely on SEO (and even hire SEO companies) to keep their sites search-friendly.
Is having more pages good for SEO?
Having more pages also gives your website the possibility of higher rankings which ultimately determines the ranking parameters for your website. The most important advice for ranking well is to keep producing great quality content rather than just publishing a large amount of content every week or month.
Why is content so important?
Content not only helps you build trust and connect with your target audience, but it also acts as fuel for your other marketing techniques. This is the basis on which you promote your business online, so it is important to give it the attention it deserves.
Why is digital content so important? Digital content is important because it is a way to reach and engage with your target audience in a way that traditional media cannot. With so much information available online, it is increasingly important to have high-quality content that will grab people’s attention and keep them coming back for more.
Why is good quality content important?
Quality content helps attract the right audience to your website, engage them, and work to get users to take action on your website. If users find the content valuable, then they are more likely to share it.
Effective content will help you build long-term relationships with your audience, ultimately leading to increased revenue for your organization.
What is good quality content?
High quality: Your site’s content should be unique, specific, and of high quality. It should not be mass produced or outsourced on a large number of other sites. Remember that your content should be created primarily to provide a good user experience to visitors, not to rank well in search engines.
Why is content important in media?
Content plays an important role in achieving business and social media goals such as brand recognition, thought leadership, audience engagement and lead generation. This allows you to strengthen your position as the primary destination for your customers, whether for entertainment, education or inspiration.
What is content writing and why is it important for branding?
Content writing is a guaranteed way in which businesses can increase their brand equity and reputation. They can achieve their desired goals and objectives by providing their existing and potential customers with engaging, focused and relevant content.
Why is the content writing important?
Writing consistent, high-quality content is an invaluable way to connect brands with their consumers. Content also increases audience engagement and retention. Encouraging your audience to participate in your brand and providing useful information will ensure your customers keep coming back for more.
What are the uses of content writing?
Content writing is a form of online writing that blogs and businesses use as a marketing strategy to grow their business. Bloggers use content writing to increase their website traffic, increase sales from affiliate marketing, and grow their email lists as a way of nurturing leads into their products and services.