Is Content Marketing the New SEO?

Yes and No..........

I saw this question about content marketing and SEO in an online forum recently. My answer was a very helpful “Yes and No.”  

SEO gets a big boost from fresh, relevant content but that isn't enough without all the SEO tech stuff as well - tags, load speed, mobile, redirects etc.

Welcome Human Visitors and the Google Bot 

Put out the welcome mat for human visitors but also roll out the red carpet for the Google bot - It's only a dumb robot, so we have to help it along and give it a guided tour of our website and offer a bot-friendly environment.

Content is more important than ever. Why? It's because of shifts in what people expect from a website - relevant info and relevant landing pages - and also because of what Google is looking for.

Think Like Google

Google's aim in a SERP is to deliver exactly what you're looking for when you search for something. A difficult job. As the Google algorithm gets smarter, Google's assessment of a website should get closer to the assessment of the typical user of that site. That's happening. Earlier iterations of the Google algorithm, pre Penguin etc etc were crude and were easily fooled by keyword stuffing, meta keyword lists and black-hat techniques. Not now. A key signal from Google was when they removed access to organic search results in the keyword tool and replaced it with paid results. They claimed privacy concerns. Right. They realized that people used that tool to grab the best keywords even if they weren't all that relevant to their site - with the aim of being a star in search results rather than in relevance. At the time I was annoyed but then I realised that people would now tend to optimise for their real keywords, the core search terms that they need to be found for. Not a blanket approach to nab search results.

So to succeed in search you need to have good, relevant content with important keywords for which you want to be found in search, and you need all the tech elements referred to above in this thread - tags, redirects, speed, mobile etc etc. Every part of a page has to be telling the same story to Google whether it's the content, the ease of use or the tech elements such as tags. Don't forget that meta descriptions in particular but also meta titles and even URLs are very important in conversion - getting people to click once they see your page in a search engine result page, aka a SERP.

What Is Google really Looking For? 

Put yourself in Google’s virtual shoes. What are they looking for?

Google wants to know:

• What's the page actually about - for real?
• Is this site credible and does it work well?
• And will my customers be pleased when I send them to this page?

So, keep writing and updating content and make sure your most important keywords are in there. And don't forget the tags.