Why Content Marketing And SEO Need One Another To Thrive

Old school content marketers may balk at the idea that SEO is something they need to account for. After all, for generations, marketing was led by creative teams – not by technologists. These days, however, SEO and content marketing are inextricably linked in terms of how customers access brands – though they are rarely integrated within businesses.

While the focus of SEO is to make web content available to the right person at the right time, content marketing is content that helps a company meet a marketing goal while providing value to a potential customer. Behind the scenes, SEO fuels content marketing’s ability to elevate a brand’s website and direct more online traffic. 

How can brands fix the integration problem between content marketing and SEO? The first step is to add a layer of consideration around how search engines function every time you publish content to the web. On the user’s end, content marketing is the answer to a question they’re asking – though they’re only likely to find the answer if good SEO practices are applied. Here are a few key areas to watch out for the overlap between SEO and content marketing: 

• Keyword efficacy. Use specific keywords that have known power in the search engine results page when you create an article, blog post, or product page. 
• Master the backend. A technical SEO audit will ensure that your bases are covered from a user experience and interface perspective and that your site is crawlable by the algorithm. 
• Publish continuously. Consistent and ongoing content development is critical, as Google’s algorithm responds best to fresh, new content.
• Get cited. Another way to gain SEO traction is through backlinks in which other companies or organizations link to your website. Backlinks signal to the search engine algorithms that you are an authority on a given topic and that your content is vetted and trusted by others.