Content marketing and SEO share the common goal of attracting visitors to a website delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.
Content marketing works through the creation and sharing of interesting materials (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that not explicitly promote your brand but stimulate interest in its products or services.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) increases the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through using relevant keywords, links, titles and meta descriptions that achieve high rankings in search results.
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3X the number of leads. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) increases the quantity and quality of traffic to your website using relevant keywords, links, titles and meta descriptions that achieve high rankings in search results. 51% of all website traffic comes from organic search.
While one seems more creative and the other seems more technical, they have a lot in common and work best together.
Here are 15 content marketing and SEO similarities simply explained.
- KEYWORDS: SEO is about researching and finding relevant keywords that can achieve a high rank on a search engine results page. Content marketing is turning those keywords into compelling communication that creates interest, motivate action and achieves results. For example, a Drupal development company would use specific keywords related to their services to enhance visibility and attract the right audience.
- CONTENT: SEO demands content in the form of articles, copy, words, and keywords. Since content marketing involves the development of useful and relevant content, it can be defined as the practical application of SEO. Strong content truly reigns supreme in SEO.
- LINKS (OUTBOUND LINKS): Links connect your website to another website. And that website to the next website. This expands the relevance of your content and helps search engines connect the dots.
- BACKLINKS (INBOUND LINKS): Backlinks, from another site to your site, have been the number one ranking signal for a long time and they’re not going away anytime soon. That’s because they demonstrate your authority. This is something that matters the the search engines and your audience. Getting quality backlinks to your website is essential.
- INTERNAL LINKS: Internal links connect one page of your website to another. They should also be used for content marketing and SEO because they help lead the consumer on the consumer journey you want. And they give the search engine a better idea what your site is about.
- EARNED MEDIA: Content marketing and SEO are free, natural, organic way to drive traffic. You can’t buy your way into this position.
- DURATION: Unlike paid efforts and ads that provide visibility only as long as you spend money on them, the benefit of content marketing and SEO, when pursued with the right strategy and purpose, don’t go away and continue to reap rewards.
- CONSISTENCY: Content marketing and SEO require consistency. Fresh, unique and creative content gets rapidly indexed and ranks higher than low-value and repetitive content.
- INDEXING: An important component of SEO planning is to know how many search engine pages your website are found or “indexed” on. Obviously, content creation leads to a greater number of web pages.
- COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS: When undertaking content marketing and SEO, competitive analysis should occur at the beginning. By understanding what your competitors do, say, offer and rank, you will do a much better job of developing the strongest keywords for your business, unique content, differentiation and your own voice and brand position.
- TITLES: Content marketing and SEO rely on good titles ensures a great user experience so the visitor can recognize the information from the page before they actually click on it.
- LENGTH: According to SEMRUSH, pages that rank the highest in Google’s search engine results pages (or SERPs) tend to also have the highest amount of content. The average content length for these top 3 rankings was around 750 words; only 250 words longer than the content down in 20th position.
- PAGE LOADING SPEED: A survey by Kissmetrics revealed 40% of shoppers will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load; so, if your website doesn’t load quickly enough, you’re simply driving these potential customers straight to your competitors.
- DYNAMISM: Activity and progress attract both people and search engines. They are signals to both that something interesting is going on that deserves notice. By publishing content on a regular basis, you are also helping you SEO and visa-versa.
- INTEGRATION: Your SEO campaign won’t have the desired effect unless you integrate a proper content marketing strategy into it. Similarly, your content marketing strategy will not yield the desired results if you don’t incorporate an effective SEO plan.
Do these similarities of content marketing and SEO make sense to you? Are you integrating them into your marketing efforts
