4 FAQs on Content Marketing and SEO: How Are They Related?
Content marketing and SEO (search engine optimization) are two foundational pillars of an effective digital marketing strategy. They are distinct yet related practices, and understanding the basics of each concept is crucial to building your business's online presence and attracting quality leads.
In this article, we'll discuss:
- What is content marketing?
- What is SEO?
- What is the relationship between content marketing and SEO?
- Which comes first; SEO or content marketing?
So, let's answer the most frequently asked questions regarding content marketing and SEO!
1. What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is, as the name implies, a form of marketing that involves creating and sharing online material to stimulate interest in your products or services. It includes blog posts, videos, podcasts, social media posts, and more.
Content marketing is not advertising in that it doesn't explicitly promote a brand but instead helps to convey a brand's personality and expertise to its desired customer base. This type of marketing is meant to generate interest in a brand and its products by creating relevant and engaging content for a target audience.
2. What is SEO?
Search engine optimization involves optimizing a website to gain traffic from search engines toward a website or specific web page. In short, it's a process designed to improve a website or webpage's ranking within search results so that that page is one of the first results shown when an interested user searches particular terms.
Unlike advertisements, SEO targets organic search results and unpaid traffic. It's an essential practice to ensure that your business's website shows up on the first page of results when potential consumers search terms related to your business or products.
3. What Is the Relationship Between Content Marketing and SEO?
While distinct, SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand. SEO without content marketing is like a skeleton without the meat and muscles, and content marketing without SEO is akin to shouting into an abyss where no one can hear you.
Content marketing involves posting and sharing relevant information to your audience in an interesting and engaging way. However, without utilizing SEO techniques, that content may never reach your desired audience.
SEO is the act of ensuring that your content reaches your audience by targeting search engines. Though, you must keep in mind that without quality content to click on, your viewers won't stay for long.
4. Which Comes First: SEO or Content Marketing?
The short answer is that it depends on your goals. Since SEO and content marketing are so deeply entwined, there is no case in which should you have one entirely independent of the other. However, you can prioritize one over the other depending on what types of conversions you're targeting.
When to Focus on SEO
Let's say you're trying to increase your page views from organic search as much as possible. Maybe, you already have a fair amount of blog posts, but they're not reaching enough people. In this case, you'll likely be better off focusing your efforts primarily on developing a strong SEO strategy.
When to Focus on Content
On the other hand, maybe you have an idea for content that would be relevant and interesting to your audience, and you want to create posts centred around that idea. You might have it in mind to create a series of blog posts, a short podcast series, or maybe a video series on the topic to engage your viewers and increase awareness of your brand. In this case, content marketing should likely be the focus of your efforts. But as always, you should keep SEO in mind to ensure the content you're creating is actually reaching your desired audience.
Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategies Today
WEB ROI is a digital marketing agency with an abundance of experience in the world of SEO and content marketing. Contact our team today for more information on these topics or to discuss how we can help your business reach a wider audience.
