Content vs SEO What’s More Important?

If you’ve done any kind of marketing online, then you’ve probably heard of two of the main online marketing strategies: SEO and content marketing. Some businesses prefer using one to the other, but there are a number of advantages to using either strategy – as long as you use them correctly. And that’s the major issue: many companies aren’t using either strategy well due to general misconceptions that exist for both. However, if you use SEO or content marketing correctly, they can provide your business with a huge advantage in terms of increasing brand awareness and generating new leads. When it comes to choosing, you should really consider implementing both. This is because content marketing and SEO can actually complement one another in order to strengthen your online marketing campaign even more. The following is a breakdown of both strategies as well as how to use them together successfully:

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the strategy of using well-researched keywords throughout your webpages in order to increase the ranking of your company’s website on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Keywords are often chosen based on the company’s products and services as well as their physical location – making it easier for their target consumer base to find them when doing searches online. Companies that don’t understand that research should be done to figure out what keywords will work best will often use vague or overly broad keywords and overuse it throughout their website. While this may still increase their search ranking, thereby increasing their web traffic – it doesn’t actually benefit them since the majority of that new web traffic won’t be part of their target audience, which means they aren’t generating new leads through this method. Advocates of SEO use believe that using SEO correctly is the best online marketing strategy, since the whole point should be to increase web traffic in order to generate leads.

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Content marketing

Content marketing is all about creating high quality content that readers will find interesting or helpful. Creating content can help to establish your company as an expert in your field, thereby helping to create brand loyalty. It can also help to generate brand awareness in addition to leads if your followers share the content or it goes viral. Advocates of content marketing believe that this is the best way to increase brand awareness as well as increase your customer base. In fact, many people believe that content marketing is superior to SEO due to the fact that many search engines are constantly updating their algorithms in order to cut down on businesses that are overly concerned with the use of keywords, causing the rest of their website – including their website’s content – to suffer. There are plenty of ways to use content incorrectly as well, however. For example, not posting content regularly will hurt its chances at being seen. Posting too much content that isn’t high quality will hurt as well, since you’ll be oversaturating your audience.

Using both SEO and content marketing

Instead of choosing one over the other, you should strongly consider using both SEO and content marketing in order to complement each other. You can create high quality content in order to create brand loyalty, then use carefully chosen SEO keywords throughout the content to help it be seen. Basically, your SEO will help bring more web traffic in to read your content, while your content will help to turn new visitors into potential customers. If you have a poor SEO strategy, then your content won’t have as much of an effect, if you have poor content, then your SEO strategy won’t have much of an effect. They rely one each other for success.

Both SEO and content marketing have their pros and cons, but if you utilize both of them, you can take advantage of their combined strengths.

Article reviewed by SEO expert Cyrus Shepard

Cyrus is an SEO practitioner, writer, speaker and educator who has worked for Moz and now runs Zyppy, an SEO consultation, content, and software company.
 

Joseph Alkenson

Marketing Blog