Content Marketing and SEO Defined
Content Marketing is any marketing technique that involves creating and distributing high quality and valuable content with the purpose to attract, interact with and acquire new prospects and customers.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all things marketing with the purpose to drive more traffic to one’s website or page in conjunction with grabbing a higher page ranking in the search results.
Is Content Marketing The Next SEO?
In this piece, I will be discussing whether or not Content Marketing really is the next SEO, or if it indeed is just an integral part of the big picture. Today, there are many new ways to look at the online marketing world because of social media, content marketing and all other SEO techniques.
New Rules of SEO
- Create content with the end goal of people wanting to share it. Keep it fresh, current and of the highest quality. The days of writing for search engines are long gone. We are writing for people now.
- Take time to research keywords that will work. It is essential to research keywords that take into account your other pages, industry, theme and overall content marketing campaign. Even though we are writing for people now, there still needs to be enough keywords to be found more efficiently and more often.
- Stand behind what you are selling and write passionately about it. If you don’t believe it yourself, how do you expect others to feel the same way?
- Align your content with your brand. It’s crucial that your brand and content are one in the same. A company that sells baby products and talks about gambling doesn’t make sense and wouldn’t do well for many reasons. They especially wouldn’t rank well for industry search terms.
Out With the Old, In With the New
For a long time, SEO was a way to manipulate search engine rankings to get more visitors to a particular website or page. Many marketers would attempt to anticipate algorithms in order to benefit from them. A lot of those marketers and their websites dropped heavily in search engine placements when Google released the panda and Penguin updates.
Just like journalism, content marketers should never aim to betray or deceive their readers. Anything that is on the sneaky side or borderline black hat will eventually get filtered out by Google’s constant algorithm updates. Concentrate on a visitor-focused style of content marketing in today’s SEO. Keep your content current, up-to-date, clear and concise. Anything you write should entice people to share it on social networks and other online properties, like blogs.
Content Is King
In 2014, Google is aiming to support companies that have robust content and strong content marketing strategies. Semantic search and entity search are expected to improve with the Hummingbird algorithm update. Entity search is a more precise way for search engines to uncover, map and crawl in order to find the content that applies best to the search term (TheContentStandard.com).
What worked for 2013 will still work in 2014 – you just need to do it even better. Take the time to invest in your content marketing strategy, because it is the new way of doing SEO. The more content-rich site you have, the better chance your site has to rank higher in the search engines.
Pay attention to all things content:
- social media Posts
- Promotions
- Advertisements
- Headlines
- Topics
Final Thoughts
content marketing shouldn’t be considered just a tactic of SEO – It’s really a stand-alone strategy. Some may call it the New SEO, but in reality it does deserve its own headline.
Too many brands put too much pressure on SEO and do not focus enough on content creation and location. Instead, providing content that the consumer wants and is searching for. Make it easier on them by posting quality content so your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.