If you are in the digital marketing industry, you might have read or heard that “content marketing has overtaken search engine optimization (SEO)” or something along the lines of “content marketing will eventually kill SEO in future”. Well… have you ever stopped and analyzed why people are pitting the two against each other?
In this article, our think tanks from Orange County SEO services will get to the root of this ongoing debate and explain why both of these factors–SEO and content marketing–are equally important.
So let us begin with what our professionals have to say about SEO.
What SEO Really Is?
In layman’s terms, SEO is an essential strategy to optimize your website so that search engines can easily find it. A greatly optimized website is easily read and understood by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. The primary task of SEO is to boost your website ranking and get it on the top of Google.
SEO Is Not Just One Entity
SEO has several types, and each type works differently for boosting your website ranking. Google frequently changes the algorithm, and SEO has been evolving according to it. To this date, approximately more than 200 factors impact your website ranking on Google.
Let us take a look at each one of them one by one.
Technical SEO
One of the most fundamental types of SEO, technical search engine optimization improves the performance of your website by eliminating poor practices usage. This step involves title tags optimization, backlinking, site load speed, keyword incorporation & optimization, and much more.
Our SEO gurus from orange county SEO services suggest that you should never ignore this step. Even if your content is incredibly generous, a page cannot be ranked if you do not work on technical SEO.
Semantic SEO
Users come to Google to get answers to their queries. Your website should be sufficient enough to make Google believe that it can be an excellent answer for a user’s question. Semantic SEO provides value to your audience with the help of high-quality content uploaded on your website.
Without much of technicality, this type is primarily focused on the content part. You have to make sure your content has all the information to satisfy the user query. Poor content provokes the user to go away and never come back. Google takes this as a negative sign, and that impacts your ranking, Google believes that your content is not satisfying the user intent and the other website (where the user goes from your site), is better than yours.
A Bit About Content Marketing
Content marketing is a practice of writing high-quality content that builds your brand and increases organic traffic to your website with time. This involves more significant ROI with the help of paid campaigns.
If implemented effectively, the content marketing strategy can take your business to places. No matter what your industry is, your audience tends to know the product or service before they purchase it. Here, the following factors of content marketing come to the rescue:
- Email newsletters
- White papers
- Case studies
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Blogs
- Ebooks
- Videos
In simple words, content marketing is a concept of marketing your brand by using content. This content can be anything. It might be a slogan written on your banner, a tag line, or a complete blog. The marketing part of this practice is all about how you can catch the user’s attention with great content and reach your digital marketing goals. There are endless ways to do this; however, the most popular are infographics, videos, images and blogs.
SEO Vs Content Marketing
From where our SEO expert in Orange County sits, comparing the abilities of SEO and content marketing is as same as the chicken and egg debate. In reality, while most people are trying to put these two practices against each other, you do not really have to take only one’s side.
By now, you understand that SEO is a bit of technical part that involves website structure, design, and appearance while content marketing is about improving your website’s authenticity by providing top-class content.
With SEO, your websites, meta tags, descriptions, load time, title tags and other things are improved. Content marketing decides how to present and promote your content in order to impress your audience and fulfil their needs.
Being the dedicated digital marketing experts, our Orange County SEO services believe that both content marketing and SEO are the key players of any successful marketing strategy. If your website lacks in any one of them, you have to fix it – end of the debate.
Content Marketing And SEO Work The Best With Each Other
We develop content that works for fulfilling our marketing objectives. Now, this can be done in the best way if an adequate audience reaches your content. But what can make people reach your content? Of course, SEO.
When utilized correctly, SEO and content marketing strategies can create wonders together.
How? Let’s take a look!
SEO builds your website’s rapport with the search engine and makes it believe that your website is informative, authentic and capable of answering customer queries. As a result, it uses your content in the index, and this generates more organic traffic to your website. You can utilize this content more and more times to convert visitors into new customers and increase overall ROI. Content of this level can also be shared on social media, which will give you more exposure and drag more organic traffic to your website. Plus, high-quality content works in favor of your off-page SEO strategies. It attracts other websites and links and leaves a positive impact on your website’s ranking.
SEO And Content Marketing Are Not Competitors
Many claim that SEO will be no longer in the business with the development of content marketing. However, as our digital marketing professionals from Orange County SEO services say, comparing SEO and content marketing is just a ridiculous stunt and does not really make sense.
Get this one thing clear; content marketing is not overtaking SEO in any way. However, it can be a part of SEO if you are looking for the best outcomes through digital marketing. These are the two different entities that work for your business’ growth. SEO generates the right keywords that have the power to boost your rankings, and content marketing can use them to develop the best content that keeps the users floating on your website. SEO then optimizes the content and publishes it online while content marketing spreads it across all the platforms to maintain a desired flow of users.
Final Words
If your goal is to achieve the best results through marketing practices, you must embrace both SEO and content marketing. SEO is necessary to optimize your content as per the requirements of different search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. In contrast, content marketing is needed to present your website to make your customers in the best way possible. When you take a closer look at any online marketing success story, you will realize that no story is complete without the proper usage of both SEO and content marketing.