How to Combine SEO and Content for a Winning Digital Marketing
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - you use SEO to get impressive marketing results (keywords, on-page, and off-page optimization, backlinks). You take the red pill - you stay in content marketing and make use of texts, communication with the readers, and social media.
Though for many years the situation with any company promotion over the Internet may have looked like this episode from The Matrix, it’s far from the truth. The reality is the following:
There’s no content marketing without SEO. There’s no SEO without content marketing.
In this post, we’ll explain why it’s so, and what you can do for the integration of both.
Contents
- Content marketing & SEO are the Yin and Yang of digital marketing
- Learning to balance: combine content marketing and SEO efficiently
- SEO and content integration step-by-step
- How Adsy can help
Content marketing & SEO are the Yin and Yang of digital marketing
Instead of being two opposites, like the blue and red pills which are taking you to absolutely different places, content marketing and SEO are two parts of one thing - successful brand promotion.
As you may remember, content marketing is the means to engage the audience with the content you produce, build brand awareness through trusting relationships with the readers, and ensure brand visibility online through social shares.
SEO, on its part, focuses on more technical sides of online presence, such as building sitemaps, structuring the navigation, providing a good user experience, and taking care of inbound links.
At first glance, it does seem like they have nothing in common, but is it really so?
The first thing you learn when studying the topic of SEO is that keywords matter a lot. You always start an SEO campaign by searching for keywords your business could get optimized for, don't you? And what’s next? You create content based on them. Well, content is what content marketing is all about.
What's more, you already know that the number of pages indexed by Google on your site impacts its chances to rank higher. It’s not quantity over quality, of course, but if these pages contain really useful and relevant content, Google is not able to ignore this fact. And, once again, content and SEO, working side-by-side is the only way to get results here.
One more thing, quality content that you regularly post on your site eventually increases the authority of the latter one in the eyes of users and search engines.
Generally speaking, SEO does its best to bring new customers to your site from the search engines, while content marketing addresses potential customers directly, which results in better rankings in search engines. This is an endless chain of mutual support, and taking one link out of it breaks the whole system of brand promotion.
Learning to balance: combine content marketing and SEO efficiently
Now when we saw that it’s impossible to do one without the other one, it’s time to find out the ways to combine content marketing and SEO for the best results. At first, you may have a temptation to sacrifice one of them for the sake of the second one. While working with companies on their marketing issues, we’ve seen that it seldom works the way you want it to.
The best content in the world means nothing to Google if you fail to include at least one relevant keyword, or if you don’t get any backlinks to it.
A well-optimized site with hundreds of purchased backlinks doesn’t guarantee that visitors find some value there, and can’t make people buy from you.
After you admit you need to bind your SEO and content efforts together, the only question is in the proportions you’d want to keep.
- For example, if your business is rather small and tied to one place, your option would be to do more of local SEO optimization, targeted social media promotion, but not to focus too much on the content itself.
- Similarly, if the business is geographically independent and rather well established, then the 50/50 content marketing and SEO combination can bring you timely and scalable results.
SEO and content integration step-by-step
Successful journey starts with compelling content creation - catchy, creative, in-depth and professionally written. In fact, everything you write has to say something, be worth your efforts and your readers' time. From there, you have a couple of options.
1. Build your site’s authority
You can shoot for the stars, and work on making your site to be easily found in Google through optimizing it with keywords, on-page and off-page SEO, and other methods we’ve mentioned above. This option will not bring you overnight success and top rankings. Instead, you will have full control over the content appearing on your site, and be able to profit from brand awareness boost.
2. Publish your content on third-party authoritative websites
Another way to go is to publish your content on relevant sites, which will solve many of your troubles including the ones that have to do with SEO. Let’s take link building as the first example. If your content is worth sharing, it will be shared, and your article will inevitably rank well. Moreover, it’s a guaranteed way to get traffic to your own site by leaving your contact details and short info about you.
How Adsy can help
It’s understandable that you may not know all the sites relevant to your niche where you could place your content. That’s why Adsy has this service of content placement, where we do all the job of finding the appropriate platforms - highly targeted, with regular active visitors. This way, you don’t need to worry about anything. You can search for publishing platforms by yourself or choose the Packages option (you’ll need to log in first), and we’ll find them for you.
Later on, we’ll be talking about more of the practical changes you’d want to make to your marketing strategy taking into consideration SEO and content. We’ll see once again why relevant and data-driven content needs to be your top priority, and how to provide your readers with the best content experiences.
At the moment, however, we are curious about your position on the matter. How do you reconcile content and SEO? Is one more dominant than the other one in your strategy? Let us know by writing a comment!
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