There seems to be a mindset prevailing throughout many marketing forums that SEO and content marketing are separate entities, and the key to crafting an excellent marketing campaign is finding a balance between the two.
There is a movement, however, in establishing that SEO and content marketing are inexorably related, and as such must be fine tuned and integrated for marketing success.
I tend to agree. Here are a few ways to grow your digital presence in a way that creates a harmony between SEO and content marketing:
Understand the Ways Keywords and Backlinks Interact
Keywords and backlinks are two major common threads between SEO and content marketing, and unsurprisingly, they hold an important key to integration of the two.
Increase Your Rankings for Keywords Using Content
Grasp of technical SEO can lead to capitalization on keywords and the ability to dominate your niche.
Using analytics, you can see the keywords that drive your traffic, effectively communicating to you what sort of content will be valuable to your audience. You can use this information as a jumping off point; when you know what your audience wants to read, your blog can target content directly to them.
Harness Backlinks From Authoritative Sites
Most marketers already know that backlinks from other reputable blogs raise your SEO ranking. This is a key example of a way in which SEO and content marketing are related: we value backlinks for their contribution to our SEO rankings, but backlinks aren’t possible without great content that provides value to the site using at a resource.
A method of achieving this at a higher rate is looking at the SEO rankings for sites for various keywords, and seeking opportunities for guest blogging, where you can link back to relevant pages on your own blog.
Build On Your SEO With Content Marketing
Integrating SEO and content is a matter of knowing how to develop them. As this Kissmetrics article suggests, once you master technical SEO, there is no room to change or grow. With content marketing, on the other hand, there are never a shortage of ways to innovate and gain leverage on your competition.
If you think of your digital marketing budget as a house, you have to build the foundation first. This is your SEO; you can’t have an effective digital presence without an effective SEO campaign.
The rest of the house, however, is your content marketing. You can develop and add on the more creative features of your house with content that targets your relevant keywords and retains your audience through providing consistent, valuable content.
