How SEO and Content Marketing are Linked

So you want to know how SEO and Content Marketing are linked? 

How did you stumble upon this article ?

You conducted a search, right?

And this article appeared in your search results…

That’s the finished product, but what’s more important is all the work and efforts in optimizing a keyword, creating backlinks, improving user experience and overall quality.

Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are both vital parts of Digital marketing. SEO without Content Marketing is like a body without a heart. They both go hand in hand, together and can be interchangeable.

 It would be a huge mistake to consider them as a separate part because the two are so closely related. Relevant content is considered to be the most effective SEO rankings.

Now before I tell you how content marketing and SEO are interlinked, let me quickly brief you the meaning of the term SEO and Content Marketing:

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, prominently called SEO, involves increasing the number of visitors by making a website or a page more visible when a user voluntarily conducts any search on the web search engine. 

To get higher Search rankings you must understand the search engine. Evaluate and Analyze what is the most searches made, and trending topics, and which site is most visited. With many techniques in SEO, but at the end the day your goal is to make your site more visible.

There were times where SEO used to be as simple as pouring keywords in the meta description to rank for anything regardless of the context and content on your website. But Google has evolved and changed it’s search engine Algorithm , it has discovered the importance of user experience and the relevancy of a content.

Google search engine uses different tactics and algorithms to rank websites higher, making your page more accessible and appealing to the masses. In the simplest terms, search engines look for quality and relevancy of your content.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a type of Marketing that involves creating relevant and high-quality online material in the form of Blogs, Videos, Social Media, eBooks and more, intended to get visitor’s attention and is not directly intended to make a sale.

 For instance, say you drive customers to your landing page to download your eBook or you build rapport with your audience through Blogs as a way to create a pipeline of customers who may potentially convert into paying customers.

It’s a continuous approach to maintain a targeted audience to enhance a customer base. It helps websites in higher leads and conversions. Internet Marketing can be made easy, if you provide what people want, instead of stuffing with irrelevant keywords, but provide meaningful, relevant and high-quality content.

For a better understanding, I am sharing a visual presentation of an ideal content marketing funnel:

Image Credit

Both SEO and Content Marketing share technical similarities and differences. Firstly SEO makes sure that the content you are promoting will find the right consumers at the right time. It’s a partnership between SEO and Content marketing that delivers great results online.

Now, Let me further elaborate on how SEO and Content Marketing are linked with few points;

Keywords:

The Only way you can rank higher in any search results pages (SERPs) is with relevant keywords.The imperative element about the both is finding relevant keywords and incorporating them in your content, so that when a user searches for that specific keyword your content will show-up.

While Keywords are the fundamentals of SEO, over stuffing your keywords without relevant content will attract Google Penalties ( Google Panda ). So strategically insert your High-search keywords (also referred as the Money-Keywords). In short maintain a balance with SEO and Content.

So if you want to rank higher in search results, hunt for the most search keywords, research your competitor’s keywords and optimize your content with those keywords.

Of course, it takes a lot of time and energy when you do it all manually. Instead many people follow a logical and time-saving approach by using keyword planner tools to analyze the most popular keyword, volume and competition (High, medium and low).

And I reckon, SEMrush is the best tool for that task. They offer a 7 days Free Trial for you to get started that includes 3 projects and 500 Keywords to track, and you can cancel anytime. It saves you tons of hours that you could have spent otherwise crawling and searching for keywords. And if you have a lot of experience on GoogleAds, you can also use that Database to enhance your SEO results.

The Quality of Content:

Search engines are constantly evolving their algorithms to ensure that the highest-quality content is created in response to user’s searches. And as far as search engines are concerned, producing Fresh, unique and High quality content on a consistent basis suggests that your content is more trustworthy and relevant.

Content Marketing is all about alluring visitors as well as educating and entertaining your audience. To achieve that, create great content by incorporating high-searched keywords. And Google webcrawlers will determine the relevancy  and ranks your page accordingly.

“ Web crawling is a process used by search engine bots to click, visit and download a page and extract its links in order to discover additional pages”

There’s a direct co-relationship between quality of Content and SEO. When the quality of Content is high, you’ll more likely be having better SEO score. 

So analyze, plan, strategize and produce high-quality content that helps google bots to crawl your content and determine the kind of searches your website should rank and whether it’s relevant to user’s searches.

And here’s a great tool for that, Content Studio. It’s a Social Media and Content marketing tool for businesses who publish their content regularly. They offer 14 days no commitment free, so give it a try!. It will definitely save a lot of time.

User Experience:

Many people go wrong here, because they believe SEO is just about high-quality blogs, Keyword optimization and Link building. But there’s a lot more to it.

That is User’s Experience (UX). The Element of user experience is taken into consideration for healthy SEO practices. So ask yourself these questions: Is your website fast enough? Do you have relevant and high-quality content that engages and encourages users to stick around for a longer period on your website? Is your site difficult to navigate?

These are the elements taken into account by Google (or other Search engines) while determining the rank of your website. 

So, if  a visitor finds any difficulties accessing your page or your page load time is too long or irrelevant content has been found, then your SEO will take a giant hit

So does user experience have to do with Content Marketing?

Simple, If a user visits your page again and again, spends a lot of time in reading your Content, and shares your content because it is more relevant, it tells Google that your website provides a good UX. On the other hand if a user leaves your website in a short span and visits the other search results, it indicates that your content is not high-value and irrelevant.These technical elements benefit UX and so it publicizes the content.

So make sure the load time of your site is fast, and make it mobile-friendly, Use appropriate image tags and heading tags, simplify the navigation and most importantly focus on the quality of your content.

Link-building:

One of the Fundamental parts of SEO is inbound links or back links. So if you have written content and also succeeded in Content marketing campaigns, it will get a lot of eye-balls and attract highly sought inbound links across the web.

High-quality contents are very vital for SEO and link building. The reason for that is simply because it’s easier to build more links to top-quality content because they are worth sharing.

Businesses and Link building agencies are constantly in search of high quality content that offers websites with high-domain authority through backlinks which can  drastically increase traffic and rankings in search results.

Of course, the quality and relevancy of the content matters a lot. Just creating a content that is stuffed with keywords will not bring the results. Thus, focus on creating top-notch blogs, articles and videos that can assist you in building authoritative links to your websites.

Social Signals:

Firstly, Social Media is not a direct SEO rank factor. But google uses Social Signals as a metric to measure Shares, Likes, Comments and clicks, in return your page gets ranked higher.

So if your content is something New, Unique and Expert level, people will read it and start sharing with others. So strategically planned content marketing will lure more eye-balls on social media and in return boosts in rankings.

Social signals, which can include shares, likes, comments and clicks, can impact where your page ranks in organic search results. A well thought out, strategically planned content marketing strategy that performs well on social media opens the opportunity for a boost in rankings.

Final Thoughts:

It’s a huge mistake to think that SEO and Content marketing are different. SEO without content strategy and marketing is null. Because a website needs words, articles, blogs and keywords to get high rankings. They both go hand in hand. 

And the key traits mentioned above is something to be understood and implemented immediately. Many people start online blogs and websites, but burn their fingers after initial discouragements and failures. So play for the long run. Initially you need to spend a lot of effort, energy and money into creating High-quality content and enhancing User experience. And then you’ll reach a tipping point where all the hard work in the past will be compensated.