We have been hearing a lot about the rise of content marketing lately and how it could eventually replace SEO in the near future. Although these two disciplines share some similarities, they are two distinct things that are necessary to the growth of your business. Today, we are going to focus on the different ways that you can combine SEO with content marketing to increase the well-being of your business.
Current situation with SEO and content marketing
SEO and content marketing can sometimes overlap which is why it can be confusing when setting up both of your strategies. The main thing being obviously content. When writing an article for your company blog for example, what should prevail? Trying to get search engine traffic or content marketing techniques? Actually, using both is the way to go. And SEO professionals and marketers are well aware of this phenomenon. Indeed, according to a research done by Conductor, 79% of SEOs say they should be working more closely with content creators and marketers.
However, and this is where the two disciplines differ, technical SEO has not much to do with content marketing as it only focuses on the search engines’ behaviour on your website. This is why SEO has still a bright future ahead of it and there is no need to dwell on the ‘death’ of SEO.
How to Combine SEO with Content Marketing effectively?
Qualitative Content
The best way to combine the two disciplines effectively is to incorporate your SEO keywords into your content to make it look as natural as possible. If you follow Google’s quality guidelines, you know you have to create content that will please both the search engine and your users. You can ask yourself these two questions every time you’re writting some piece of content: “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”. There is no need to try tricking the search engine with keyword stuffing strategies as it would only penalise your rankings in the long-term. It obviously also works for onpages SEO elements such as headlines and titles.
With qualitative content that combines both content marketing and SEO techniques, your website will turn out to be unique, valuable and engaging because your content might end up attracting users with keywords that you didn’t create on purpose. If Google is pleased with in depth and qualitative articles, you should definitely use both techniques when creating content.
Social media
Users behaviour on social media has changed a lot during the past few years. Nowadays, they use social media a lot more before taking a decision. For example, with the rise of different platforms like Youtube and Pinterest, users reviews are becoming more and more important. As a matter of fact, more than 88% of users are trusting reviews to shop online which is an essential figure to take into account for ecommerce websites. Optimising your social media for your SEO is then crucial but not only for organic SEO. Different and separate SEO strategies need to be implemented for search engine and social media, as they will respect the standards of both, so that your prospects will easily find you. Moreover, it will definitely help to increase the global traffic of your website.
Link building
Link building is another way that you can make SEO and content marketing work together. Even if it is considered as a pretty straight forward SEO strategy, link building is beneficial to the effectiveness of your content. Thus, it can be done through guest post links and contextual ones (links are naturally part of a sentence). If you focus on guest-posting on websites that have a high authority and a good amount of traffic, you will attract new visitors to your website and eventually improve your rankings. As you improve your content marketing over time, you will eventually get more of these types of links, which will not only increase your website’s traffic but also improve search traffic in the long-term. You can have a look at what makes a link qualitative with this article.
Overall, SEO and content marketing teams should definitely work hand in hand on producing content for a company. Onpage SEO basics, such as the use of keywords, optimised headlines and meta tags, internal linking, need to be covered so that you deliver content that will please both search engines and your readers.
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