and content marketing are both popular options for those looking into digital marketing services. Digital marketers often suggest content marketing to clients who are interested in SEO services as part of a full-service package. You’d be hard-pressed to find a digital marketer or SEO expert that doesn’t include content marketing in with their other SEO services. Let’s take a look at each marketing practice and their unique relationship.
What Are SEO and Content Marketing?
Often used together, SEO and content marketing are not the same things. Search engine optimization is the technical process used to increase both the quantity and quality of the traffic coming to a website via organic search results.
Content marketing involves creating and using high-quality, relevant content to bring people to your website and increase user engagement and action.
What Is the Relationship Between SEO and Content Marketing?
Many SEO newbies tend to think that content marketing and SEO are basically the same. However, that isn’t the case. Search engine optimization is a much more technical practice that involves metadata, internal linking, and much more. Content marketing is focused strictly on creating all web content needs. In essence, SEO is strategized around content marketing.
While these are two different concepts, they overlap a bit. SEO practices require quality, engaging content, and content marketing is more successful when SEO techniques are applied. There are a few main components that tie SEO and content marketing together. Let’s take a look at these elements.
Content
It is undeniable how important content is to content marketing (it’s literally in the name!). However, you might not realize the importance of content for SEO purposes. While some people take the quantity approach, others are finding much more success in creating quality content instead. Content is the easiest way to incorporate keywords into your website and increase domain authority (DA).
Keywords
Keywords have considerable overlap in the realms of both SEO and content marketing. Keywords are critical in content to help search engine bots determine what your content is about, which is also crucial for SEO. It is essential to make sure that your keywords are adequately utilized but not overused, which can lead to penalties from Google.
Backlinking
One of the primary purposes of content is to earn backlinks. When other websites link to yours, your domain authority starts to rise, especially if the other site already has a high DA score. The easiest way to earn backlinks is to create high-quality content. When you produce content that others deem valuable, they are more likely to link to it from their websites or share it on social media.
Guest posting is another way to earn backlinks, and these posts can send a lot of relevant traffic to your website. It is important that you only guest post on relevant sites and avoid using rich anchor text. You also only want to link to your website when it is beneficial to the readers.
User Experience
User Experience (UX) is the reason that on-site optimization is so important. By enhancing the UX of your website, you are better able to keep people on your website. One aspect of this is having a good sitemap that is easy to navigate. This looks good to search engines. Additionally, when you make sure your website is free of broken links and that your metadata is optimized, Google notices that you are focused on UX.
Interlinking
When you add content to your website, you must consider the other content on your website. Older pages and blogs should be linked to newer pages of your website. This is called interlinking or cross-linking. When you interlink to other pages of your website, you are directing people to see additional pages on the site.
Interlinking also helps to index your website, because there are pages that are bound not to be indexed when you have thousands of pages on your website.
As for the future, Google isn’t just going to stop valuing these aspects of both SEO and content marketing, so it is a good idea to start focusing on these areas now. In 2020, we expect to see these parts of both SEO and content marketing continue to grow and gain importance.
It is clear that both content marketing and SEO are important to one another, and they are both invaluable to increasing traffic on your website. As with all good strategies, it is essential to include all of the things that will help boost website traffic, which is why we recommend that all of our clients take part in both SEO and content marketing at Rank Fuse Digital Marketing. If you are looking for a full-service digital marketing company to help you, we would be happy to speak with you. For more information contact Rank Fuse today at 913-703-7265.
