SEO and Content Marketing: What Is the Difference?

Table of Contents 

• Introduction 
• What is SEO? 
• What is Content Marketing? 
• SEO vs Content Marketing 
• What Is the Difference? 
• Key Takeaways 
• Conclusion 
• FAQs

­­­­­­Business strategies like SEO and content marketing are frequently used to fuel digital marketing initiatives. When used correctly, they complement one another. But often, marketers have trouble differentiating them, as they are used in combination for most marketing strategies. It is important to understand how they differ as they cannot be applied interchangeably in all situations. Moreover, in some cases, you may only have enough budget to focus on one at a time.

So, let’s break them down to understand their roles, how they’re different and how they affect digital marketing initiatives.

What is SEO?

Source

What is Search Engine Optimization? SEO is a set of expertly laid out tactics to optimize your website content and help it rank higher in Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP) results. These tactics help search engine crawlers ‘read’ and understand your site better. In this way, your content can be included in a search engine’s index, which in turn helps you match your specific web page/content with the search query of your target audience. 

Search engines will rank your site better in search results when you optimize your website for users. Thereby, you directly improve the user experience, which in turn makes your readers stick around your website for a longer time. The longer a user stays on your site, the more likely they are to become leads for your company.

Important SEO factors that you should be looking into:

• Keyword research and their integration based on search volume and ranking
• Link building to show endorsements from other websites
• Improving page upload speed for quick access to users
• Responsive page design that attracts more eyes, no matter the device

When your website becomes more SEO friendly, search engines will automatically rank it higher on search results. Your website will then get higher visibility and receive more organic traffic and conversions.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is merely marketing using content! It’s a type of online promotion which includes creating valuable content for a target audience. It forms the base of all digital marketing strategies and campaigns. 

Content marketing deals with creating content that satisfies a target audience’s interests, pain points, emotions, habits, or any other criteria you wish to track. Blog pieces and white papers, as well as podcasts and video series, might all be a part of content marketing.

Quality is one of several factors that search engines value when assessing content. If your content is filled with errors, inconsistencies, or is poorly written, there aren’t enough SEO experts in the world to help you correct it.

You must create content that appeals to your unique target audience and delivers a solution or intrigues the user to attract and retain traffic to your website.

SEO vs Content Marketing

Source

Now try to understand how both these components work together. 

Let’s say you’ve been asked to write a blog about ‘Merits of Exercising Daily’. You’d start with researching the topic, looking at other blog posts, understanding the different points, and then preparing the draft. Now, from an SEO standpoint, an SEO professional (or yourself) will prepare a list of the most ranked keywords under this topic, such as ‘daily exercise’, ‘morning workout’, etc. These keywords are part of the search queries that your target audience will look for. To cater to them and grab their interest, you would need to optimize your draft and integrate them with these keywords wherever necessary.

Once you publish this post, you might use your social media platforms to promote it among groups with similar interests. In this case, it could be health or fitness groups and pages. Similarly, on the SEO front, adding meta tags, optimizing headlines, descriptions, and interlinking, can help rank this post on search results. 

While creating good content will help you to have a high-quality and valuable website; including ranking keywords in that content allows the website to rank higher in search engines and attract more traffic. This in turn will help you get closer to your content marketing goals as soon as possible.

SEO and content marketing are nothing but two pieces of the same puzzle. Together, they can help your website gain more traction from a targeted audience. 

What is the Difference?

To put it in simple words, SEO deals with more technical elements like website design and structure, while content marketing is more about getting exposure to online content. 

The ultimate goal of SEO is to rank higher on search results; whereas, content marketing requires creating more quality content that keeps the users interested and engaged. 

Having good SEO does not imply that your content can be bland. Marketers often think of SEO as some magic solution to repair terrible blogs and websites. It is not a matter of choosing between SEO and content marketing. It’s about how you want to increase the visibility of your existing content with effective SEO.

Key Takeaways

• SEO and content marketing are two important factors that assist digital marketing initiatives
• SEO optimizes website content to help it rank higher in SERP results. 
• Content marketing involves the creation of content to satisfy a target audience’s interests.
• Align content marketing to your SEO plan to create new and informative pieces that make use of high-ranked keywords.
• Together SEO and content marketing can help your website gain more traction from a targeted audience. 
• SEO deals with more technical stuff like website design and structure.
• Content marketing is more about getting exposure to online content. 

Conclusion

SEO and content marketing have a certain synergy, especially when both are done correctly. To provide users with relevant, attention-grabbing content, there must be a collaboration between the two.

SEO should be a significant component of the planning that goes into building a proper content marketing strategy. It should not be an afterthought or an option. But at the same time, it shouldn’t be seen as a means of producing value-added content. 

FAQs