SEO or Content Marketing, What’s Better – See Why Traditional SEO Has Expired!
You may be looking at the terms ‘content marketing’ and ‘SEO’ side by side, and be thinking, “Aren’t they the same thing?” The answer is that though they are very similar, they’re actually quite different as well.
SEO’s as important as ever in generating organic reach for a new or existing website. The truth however is that content marketing’s a stronger investment long-term for any brand. With SEO algorithms always at risk of changing, a traditional approach to search engine optimization is outdated and dangerous to spend a lot of time on. Here’s why your long-term digital strategy should center on content over search optimization.
What is the purpose of SEO?
SEO, aka search engine optimization, is a set of strategies that involve getting your website or content to rank at the top of search engines. Though SEO involves content marketing strategies, it’s primarily technical in the sense that it’s about getting the technical specifications right i.e. descriptions, keywords, meta data, headers, and general coding.
What is the purpose of content marketing?
Content marketing is more advanced than SEO and goes beyond your website to brand reputation management. Content marketing can have many different objectives, ranging from awareness to relationship building – all depending on what a brand is looking to achieve. ‘Content’ is not just text and can comprise of videos, images, eBooks, podcasts, and more.
What your Analytics will tell you
If you have a website with either SEO or content marketing dominating its design, look to your Analytics. If you’ve installed analytics software on your website, there’s a lot of data it can produce, demonstrating whether a given strategy is succeeding or falling short.
As we move further into this discussion on SEO and content marketing, it’s important to let your Analytics guide you on developing new content, revising old content, and posting content already proven to resonate with your audience. The majority of content marketing does not receive a whole lot of attention. This is because there’s just too much of it! To be successful in content creation and SEO, it’s crucial to rely on Analytics to determine where the most value is.
Why content marketing is better than SEO
It’s not necessarily that content marketing is better than SEO, as SEO actually comprises a component of content marketing. This is to say however content marketing is superior to SEO, tagging in more advanced strategies that go beyond targeting search engines, coding, and conducting keyword research. This isn’t 2004, anymore. There are plenty of ways to reach new and existing customers, far outside of search engines. Content marketing provides some key strategies to maximize channels like email and social media as well.
Why SEO has failed
Traditional SEO fails to generate returns at times because competition is high and users are on other platforms. To cut through the noise of every other brand vying for your customer, to contribute a piece of unique, meaningful content is more valuable than writing a blog or producing web design around a keyword.
Content marketing succeeds because it is so adaptable to all kinds of platforms, current and future alike. It involves being creative, one-of-a-kind, telling a story, and to do so across friendly medias.
The impact of social media on SEO
Social media can prove to be a far more attractive, easy, and more investment-friendly way to reach customers. With social media, you can adapt an SEO approach and build around descriptions, keyword clusters, and meta descriptions with your posts.
It’s content marketing however that ties more closely to social media. Content’s easy to share, like, and engage with, contrary to how traditional SEO can work at times. This isn’t to downgrade SEO in any way. A lot of marketers, to this day, consider the ultimate awareness-building digital marketing strategy to involve SEO, content marketing, and social media working together as one.
Put your SEO under the influence of content marketing
A smart move to make is to incorporate content marketing-led strategies in your SEO. This is because the unfortunate truth of SEO is every brand’s at the mercy of Google’s ever-changing algorithms. What Google will prioritize in its algorithm is beyond your control – your content comparatively is fully in your control. If your content marketing game is on point, that works wonders for SEO and on its own merits can help get you ranked higher than you may think.
What’s the best SEO strategy to base my content around?
High quality SEO marketing strategies include to use the right keywords, use keyword-rich descriptions and tags in your content marketing, and to have a mobile-friendly, visually-appealing website ready for clicking. Every piece of content you put out should be optimized with SEO keywords guiding the publishing of these pieces. Quality of content is priority, of course. Don’t sacrifice quality to get the technical elements right. If you need to use less keywords to write amazing content, absolutely, do so.
You may think this will penalize your SEO but in all actuality, with each passing year, Google’s algorithms continue to move more towards prioritizing high quality content over SEO technical expertise. This is great news for a lot of starting brands who have a message with something meaningful to say. This means you don’t necessarily have to be an expert to succeed in generating organic SEO rankings.
If you know you audience, you’re halfway there!
The best content marketing is that which pleases its audience. This involves knowing user intent, what they’re thinking, what they need, their interests, and what their buyer persona is. No brand can intentionally sell to an audience they don’t know about. After all, how can you create engaging content when you don’t know what ‘engaging content’ is to your target audience?
Look at the competition. Do some studying into your existing user base and the audience you might be trying to target. Research is a marketer’s best friend. The information is out there, oftentimes already in your Analytics.
Content marketing statistics to help you build a strategy
Video marketing is incredibly popular with adults, with videos seen by all ages every day across platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
There are more users on mobile devices than desktop platforms, meaning content and media should be optimized to these users – just like your SEO!
Almost half of all online searches in 2020 will be done by voice search. This means how content’s structured should be voice search-friendly, using a mix of SEO voice search strategies to optimize.
Approximately 96 percent of all mobile search traffic comes from Google. As you can assume, SEO is far from dead! Blend in what works in contemporary SEO with your quality-driven content.
The balance between SEO and content marketing
As digital marketing and consumer behaviour continues to slowly abandon old school SEO, moving to content marketing, the balance between them is important to remember. SEO is technical, organic, keyword-driven, and web design efficient. Content is creative storytelling, engagement-driven, and will reach more people than any SEO keyword can. As a brand, a balance must be found between doing strategy and quality.
Strategy is to get the technical, paint-by-numbers aspects right.
Quality is to give your customers content that engages them.
It will be your success at balancing these two priorities that determines content marketing performance on social media, email, and more. There is a lot of overlap between SEO and content marketing, thankfully, so any website leaning more towards the technical SEO aspects doesn’t necessarily have to move mountains to switch to a content marketing-first digital strategy.
Are you ready for a results-driven, high-performance digital marketing strategy? Contact Unlimited Exposure today. Align SEO, social media, email, content marketing, video, brand building, and sales-ready strategies all in one. Reach thousands of people across numerous channels and generate the results your business deserves!
