SEO VS CONTENT MARKETING

UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLICATED RELATION BETWEEN TWO DIGITAL MARKETING TECHNIQUES

Search engine optimization and content marketing, well, there’s a heck of confusion with these two terms. People are often puzzled to figure out the relation between these two marketing strategies. Are they in a relationship? Are they opposed to each other? Do they somehow collaborate with each other? If not, then if it is possible to somehow force them into a love affair?

Well, the answer is a positive one. SEO and content marketing do share lots of relationship bonds. They aren’t really married, but they do have good terms with each other and they work perfectly fine together.

But do you know why and how search engine optimization and content marketing collaborate with each other?

Well, below I will be addressing how two services need each other to come up with a robust and strategic digital marketing campaign.

Again, let’s make this clear that SEO and content marketing do collaborate together, but are not integrated in a manner that one eliminates the necessity of the other.

There is a hype that you might have noticed about the efficiency of content marketing and how content marketing eliminates the need for SEO.

Well, truly that’s bizarre thinking!

For a minute let’s just put our preferences aside and think logically that how does content marketing eliminate the necessity of content marketing when it actually requires SEO to be effective?  See, you just can’t neglect the efficiency of a service over which you are entirely dependent.

The fact is, SEO and content marketing are dependent on each other and no one strategy has the capacity to nullify the need for the other.

Yes, there are differences between each of these services as,

Technically, search engine optimization is much more complicated and narrower, while content marketing takes a much broader and holistic approach.

But still, the two techniques overlap largely.

Here’s how these two fields overlap with each other and add value to the overall digital marketing strategy for a business:

– Search engine Optimization identifies the requirement, while content marketing comes up with the solution

Now, below I will be showing you just how these two techniques complement each other at various levels, where one identifies the requirement, while others come up with the solution.

– SEO defines the need for content – Content marketing creates the content

Clearly, SEO needs something to be ranked, and that something is content. Without content, there would be nothing to rank. That’s the reason we say “Content is king”

SEO is all about content. But what type of content? That’s where SEO comes into play. Not every content has the capacity to be ranked, it needs to follow certain rules and guidelines to be able to position higher in search engines. And those rules and guidelines are defined by search engine optimization.

– Search engine optimization needs keywords to play with – Content marketing provides those keywords

Now, as we said earlier, without content there is nothing to rank. But what exactly search engines are looking for to rank?

Yup- It’s the keywords!

There won’t be a single professional in the search engine optimization industry who can negate the efficiency and importance of keywords to SEO – well at least I don’t know one in the search engine optimization industry. It’s the strategic use of keywords that enable web pages, blogs, articles, and all other sorts of marketing content to rank in search engines.

Now, here SEO comes up with the right selection of keywords (the technical aspect). It’s the inherent responsibility of SEO to provide strategic keywords for a particular business that can be ranked higher.

And well, as expected, content marketing comes to the rescue. It’s none other than content marketing that is able to funnel down the strategic use of keywords in the content. The technicality here is enormous. The content doesn’t only have to follow the chalked-out rules and guidelines by search engines, rather it has to be written for real humans. Because at the end of the day, it’s humans that you want to interact with and it is humans that will take the actions you want.

Overdoing or stuffing the keywords isn’t an option, because if you do cross the red-line, Google is waiting anxiously to push you down its pages with costly penalties. So, while SEO provides the keywords, it’s up to the content marketing to strategically use those keywords and come up with travel the fine line and produce brilliant content that satiates the needs of humans as well as search engines.

– SEO needs Fat Backlinks – Content Marketing provides it!

Some people might think that the days of backlinks are numbered. However, that isn’t the case. In fact, backlinks are more important today, than ever before. What’s changed is the quality of backlinks. While back in the days, SEO tends to rely on creating thousands and thousands of backlinks (without any regard to quality and relevance), today it is more about quality.

SEO desperately longs for big fat links that can do the magic for the website and its longing can only be matched by content marketing.

Only the marvelously written content can deliver a rich fat backlink. And while some may argue that they can simply gain a link by contracting with some agencies (which obviously they can), still the best and surest way to gain quality backlinks that carry fat value is through content marketing.

– SEO needs On-site Optimization – Content Marketing makes its wish true!

This might be a little technical for laymen or many business owners who aren’t into the technicalities of search engine optimization. However, the point is, SEO isn’t just about blog publishing, article writing, press releases, and other off-page stuff that we heard every day. Rather, there is another important aspect as well, The ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION.

Yes, it’s the Meta-Tags, Meta-Titles, Headers, and other technical stuff that you might have heard about.

These might seem too little to be of any importance, by the fact is, these are directly linked to overall SEO progress, And as expected are taken care by content marketing.

Final Words:

Well, the discussion can go on for much longer, but I feel that the point has been made and most of you by now would have understood the indispensable relation between SEO and content marketing.