Website owners and marketers have for long failed to agree on the one strategy or technique that increases user reach and conversion rates. In digital marketing, people tend to perceive SEO and content as two completely distinct elements that can be implemented on-site. However, this may not be entirely true. These two marketing elements are designed to work hand-in-hand to support the site’s organic successes.
Contents
What is SEO?
Basically, technical SEO is how your website has been set up in terms of helping search engines to not only read and interpret the content of your page but to also provide the reader with a memorable user experience. Without SEO, a website will not go very far in terms of Google rankings.
Technical SEO has a big, but indirect, impact on rankings and the ability of your site to get indexed. Without a robots.txt file or an XML sitemap, which are both SEO elements, Google’s bots will not successfully crawl your site. Devoid of structured data, your site’s Knowledge Panel is likely to appear quite weak. The goal of technical SEO is to give you some advantage with Google that you normally would be lacking.
What is Content Marketing?
This is basically a strategic marketing approach that emphasizes the creation and distribution of relevant, valuable, and consistent content designed to not just attract but also retain an audience that is clearly defined. Ultimately, this will prompt profitable customer action. That explains why the widely used phrase coined by Bill Gates in 1996, “content is king” is now the war cry accepted by all digital marketers.
In-depth content gives you the opportunity of consistently using your keywords in the places that promise the most high-yield such as URLs, HTML headers, and image alt text as well as at every level within the body of your content. How does good content marketing help in driving conversion rates? It assists in forming an emotional tie between a product and the audience.
In addition, content allows you to highlight, in a subtle way, the benefits associated with using your product in terms of improving life, which increases your brand’s visibility and overall recognition. Quality content also works as natural link bait because people love sharing authoritative and valuable content. Content also opens a channel of communication between your business and your customers, especially through comments and social media shares. It’s also important that you build the trust of your audience, and the obvious way of achieving that is through testimonials and product reviews, which are parts of your content. Content also allow your customers to go through the purchase decision faster. Put simply, content offers a lot of value with no strings attached.
So, SEO or Content?
By now, it’s important to realize that content marketing and SEO actually exist and work within the same environment. While SEO may be used in reference to several processes and tasks, content marketing forms an essential component of that. The apparent confusion is largely due to failure to appreciate the difference between these two terms. Once you sort that out, it becomes easy to understand that the two are indeed complimentary and none can survive without the support of the other.
For example, when you want to populate a site using certain keywords, SEO is used to find out the suitable keywords. Then, you use content marketing in order to meet those keywords needs. Failure to treat and handle content marketing and SEO as equals may often result in failure. While in most cases SEO and content marketing is good for business promotion, there are unique cases when it may be useful to also take into consideration other marketing strategies.
Final Verdict
Other things being equal, high-quality content will generate more search traffic compared to SEO. However, the content itself relies on several factors such as a solid SEO base, search rankings, and volume of search in relation to relevant keywords.
SEO Minneapolis Web Design believes that the “king” of marketing is actually neither content or SEO; it’s the context that matters. The two elements of digital marketing can actually overlap and even support each other, yet neither can suitably replace the other as they help your website achieve distinct yet equally important goals.