Content Marketing Vs. SEO: What is Content Marketing? What is SEO?

Content marketing and SEO are more often than not thought as strategies used to attract more customers centered on search influx. This is true but there is more to each strategy than just leveraging the power of search engines.

Knowing what is SEO and what is content marketing allows you to use these strategies to complement each other rather than as mutually exclusive.

Let’s get the details.

Content Marketing VS. SEO

What is content marketing? What is SEO? I will explain briefly.

Content marketing aims at building relationships with customers on an ongoing basis, not necessarily just to attract customers.

In some cases, we use social media, and in other cases we distribute written content (blogs, articles, guides, reports) filled with meaningful information. Basically it involves targeted and value-adding digital content.

However, the ultimate goal of content marketing varies from company to company, and it covers a wide range of areas such as conversion, attracting customers, and branding amongst others.

On the other hand, SEO aims to display owned media at the top of search results in order to attract customers via search. The foundation is getting the search engines to rank it high by applying various optimization methods; sometimes through trial and error.

Therefore, SEO is a way of ensuring content reaches the customers (users) on the Web.?Therefore, it is an indispensable measure to maximize the effect of content marketing.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is heavily dependent on sharing high-quality and valuable information with potential customers and building relationships with them.

Effective content marketing involves?sharing information requested by the customer or one that solves a problem for them at the right time.

Content marketing is producing, publishing, distributing and promoting high quality content to targeted audience

It can be applied on all online platforms such as websites, blogs, social media, e-mail newsletters, forums, and even online communities.

By consistently sharing high quality content to existing customers and potential customers about their challenges and problems, you can be guaranteed of generating consistent leads and sales.

The key tip to note here is;?high quality consistent content that adds value.

With technology and innovation, content marketing has been simplified. Thank to content marketing tools, you do not have to spend hours and days creating, publishing and distributing content.

What is SEO

Search Engine Optimization(SEO), is the process of optimizing your content to gain more visibility by ranking top in search engines.

Search keywords?are the juice of SEO.

Its simple. Find a suitable keyword that your target customers is searching for – preferably one with less competition (to increase your chances of ranking)

When a individual searches the corresponding keyword via a search engine, the search algorithm brings up the best content that matches this query; and it is displayed at the top of the search results.

Now you understand why you need high quality content on the right search keywords – your content need to be part of the top search results.

There are a number of factors and variables that contribute to excellent SEO. This we will cover separately on another article.

In the past, Google’s algorithm was simple, so sites with a lot of keywords and backlinks (regardless of quality) were displayed at the top. Things have changed, Google has updated its search algorithm to make it harder for users to rank high unless it’s?valuable content.

Note that the future of SEO will be based on user-first content creation.

As mentioned above search engines keep on updating their algorithms make sure the users get the best value and to keep off those who may succeed in manipulating their system to rank high, anyway.

Let’s look at some key Google algorithm updates.

Google’s Key Search Algorithm Updates

As mentioned above, Google does a lot of complicated calculations to rank the web pages that appear on search engines. The mechanism of this algorithm and calculation is updated from time to time.

Below are some of the most popular updates that have affected the search rankings and they should be kept in mind when it comes to content marketing and SEO.

The Penguins Update

Introduced in April, 2012, this update makes it difficult for low-quality content to be displayed at the top.

Sites such as copies of other sites, low originality, low expertise, poor content, and thinness fall in the ranking.

It is paramount to note that if you receive a link collection page that is useless to the user or a backlink from a site such as spam, you may receive a low rating.

The Panda Update

The Panda update?was first introduced in February 2011. It aimed at eliminating web spam and black hat SEO gimmicks.

With this update, the algorithm would assign quality classifications to pages. These classifications?particularly modelled ratings by human, and was applied as one of the search ranking factors.

The Mobile Friendly Update

Introduced in April 2015, this update enabled websites that support mobile devices to rank higher.

Therefore, websites that are relatively not mobile-friendly fell in rank. This called for mobile responsiveness update for websites and blogs.

The Mobile First Index

Introduced in March 2018, this update shifted the evaluation criteria from PC sites to mobile sites. As a result, the evaluation of mobile sites became the center, and the search ranking was decided.

The Speed Update

Introduced in July 2018, this update incorporates the display speed of web pages into the factors that determine the search ranking (ranking factors).

It’s important to keep in mind that fast website loading speed have a positive effect, and users will get a low rating if the display speed is too slow.

However, note that even if the page load speed is slow, but the content is valuable to the user, it may be displayed at the top.

What is Content SEO?

Content SEO is a different strategy for attracting customers, although it has a similar concept to content marketing and SEO.

It is one of the SEOs aiming to increase the number of customers from natural or organic search by continuously producing and sharing high quality content in line with the user’s search intention on owned media.

It analyzes the user’s search intention, selects keywords and co-occurrence words, etc., and creates content that matches the user’s intention.

After publishing the content, always measure the effect and improve the content according.

The Importance of SEO in Content Marketing

So, how does SEO complement content marketing??

In summary, SEO makes content marketing effective?– makes sure the content reaches the right people at the right time.

SEO enables your website and web pages rank higher in search engines resulting in more traffic = more leads. This leads to a higher chance of these visitors purchasing your products/ services.

1. Maximize Visibility with SEO

Content marketing needs to deliver the information customers are looking for at the right time.

Words (search queries) that are typed into search engines are clues to the information that customers want. Understand what your customers want, their search intent, and make sure you are consistently creating quality content. This is the sure way of making your content consistently visible to the right people.

3. Create the Right and Relevant Content?

Google evaluates the relevance of your content to the search queries. The higher the degree of relevance, the more meaningful the information is to the user; displays it at the top of the search results.

Keyword selection is emphasized in SEO and it is necessary to collect quantitative data, scrutinize and thoroughly select it.

It is important to understand the user’s search intent and create content that directly and extensively answers this query.

Let’s see how to achieve this.

For example, what search intention could a user who searches for “Kyoto sightseeing” have?

What comes to mind suddenly is; “recommended sightseeing spots,” “hotels and inns,” “events,” and “autumn leaves.” Of course, these would have been actually searched directly.?However, there is a limit to how many search intents can be manually devised in this way.

To make your work easier and more accurate, I recommend using a keyword selection tool or keyword research tool.

3. Optimize Web Page Crawlability

Selecting the right keywords and creating content that meets the user’s search intent is the most important thing in content marketing.

But creating content not only for users but also for search engines is also very important in SEO.

Google is constantly indexing every web page that exists on the internet in its database. It’s sole goal is to give the users the best value; hence showing only content that meets this need adequately.

Google’s bots or the Google crawlers, visits/crawls each web page or website, when are then indexed based on their quality.

This is where technical SEO comes in. Your website and web pages need to be well structured and crawlable to ensure they are indexed properly.?

To ensure Google crawls your website effectively, the use of a site map, and submitting it to Google Search Console, will go a long way. Luckily, there are site map generation tools to make your work super easy.

Summary

SEO is a necessity id you want to maximize the effectiveness of content marketing.

However, don’t lose sight of the the different roles played by content marketing versus SEO.?