In the world of unpaid marketing, content and search engine optimization (SEO) reign supreme. Both make sense; getting your site to rank on page one of the search results can’t be done without good content. It also stands to reason that the content most likely to be found is optimized properly to rank for a specific word or topic. However, if given the choice between the two, which should marketers pursue so they get the most return for their effort? Every time the battle arises, the answer is the same: Content makes SEO possible, but without properly optimized content, SEO efforts won’t be found.
1. Introduction
How does this debate impact you? The answer is not straightforward. It depends on many factors associated with your website. If you have just launched a site, your content is likely very slim and will not be much good to you in terms of SEO. Instead, you need to pump out strategic content and then work on building that content’s strength through aggressively-driven SEO efforts. If you are a site that has already invested in a great deal of content, your top priority is for your content to appeal to readers who will download, share, and reward you with backlinks. Only after this occurs should you start thinking about doing some site housework to maximize the SEO potential of each piece. Lastly, some just want to maximize the search traffic coming to their select pieces. These folks just need to know about the mechanics of SEO best practices, including titles, tags, and key phrase choice. Some do need to draw more traffic directly from search results. However, just slipping the keyphrase in the title and tag should increase search result traffic for most pages by at least 25 percent with effectively minimal time investment.
1.1. Overview of SEO and Content Marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing are two essential components of every business’s marketing strategy. However, the debate on which of the two is more important is ongoing. In the following sections, we provide an explanation of both SEO and content marketing and the differences between the two.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing process of improving your search engine ranking to attract more website traffic and customers. The process increases the quantity and quality of website visits by enhancing your website’s visibility and searchability. As a result, the organic (free) search engine results get higher traffic.
The backbone of SEO is high-quality content. search engine algorithms are designed to prioritize the most valuable website content. Therefore, an essential aspect of SEO involves optimizing your content for specific keywords to ensure that your website shows up among the first results on search engine results. As people find what they are looking for on your website, they are more likely to engage with your brand. The more your audience engages with your brand, the more credibility and authority you develop in your industry. This credibility is valued by search engines and will ultimately translate to better search engine rankings. Consequently, when you provide what real humans are looking for, you can turn visitors into regular customers.
2. The Importance of SEO
SEO provides you several benefits that help you grow your business. The most important thing a business needs today is to have a website with an active web presence. You can leverage the search engine to greatly increase your business capabilities. If you are not visible online, then you’re missing out on a large pool of potential customers. What’s the most important step to increase online visibility? It’s SEO. It’s through SEO alone that you can get to the top of the search engine ranking and increase the visibility of your business online. The most vital part is to optimize your web content and make it search engine friendly.
For a majority of businesses, their online presence is an essential part of their business with research showing that an average of 70-80% of purchasing decisions is researched online. Being at the top of search engine ranking is a big advantage in terms of reaching out to the millions of internet users and increasing your business reach. So, you can say that SEO holds the capacity of increasing sales in your business. This becomes more evident if you are an e-commerce company or an organization that has a sole online presence. It’s through effective SEO that you can increase your sales and decrease the competition over a certain period of time. So, in the present scenario, SEO acts as a lifeline that helps in maintaining your business’ relevance.
2.1. Definition and Purpose of SEO
SEO is “a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO helps you get traffic from search engines”. To rank higher in the SERP and attract more visitors to your website, you must optimize your website for valuable keywords, attract links to your site, and create a better user experience on the website. To receive organic traffic from search engines, you must plan good content and ensure customers find your website content as ‘useful’ and ‘valuable’. In a nutshell, SEO is the trust of searching for useful and valuable information.
Throughout, we have been emphasizing the importance of keywords. The simplified idea of SEO is to design good content (such as a blog, picture, video) on your website that “strings together” commonly requested content terms. This way, when customers look up these terms, they will notice that your website provides the needed content and consequently click through to your website. However, if the proposed content is far from what the customer originally desired or if other sites are “closer”, Google will quickly notice that customers are immediately leaving your website. And Google will position the website at a lower ranking, effectively adjusting the ranking according to customers’ feedback (or lack of).
2.2. Key Components of SEO
SEO is a lot of different things. Trying to boil it down simply and quickly reveals this, because there are dozens of important components of SEO, and these are just the things we know. Whereas content marketing can be a lot of different things too, and can be deployed in a variety of specialized ways, this tends to be less true in practice because there are people who specialize in components of content marketing, even though it sometimes encompasses SEO too. It is sometimes said that twenty percent of SEO is the technical components, and 80 percent is everything else (“establishing trust”, for example) but that is actually very misleading.
Here are all the key components of SEO (in approximate order of importance). This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good orientation to what SEO is: Choose the right keyword. The keyword that you choose is the most important factor in your SEO at the beginning. Keywords need to be relevant to your content, commercial, and attainable. If someone searches for your chosen keyword, your website should rank competitively within the search engine. Keyword optimization needs to be a regular part of website maintenance because popular keyword phrases change by the season, so effectively make a shift to trending keyword phrases.
3. The Importance of Content Marketing
Content marketing is highly important. It is important for search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and website visibility. It is a building block of many online marketing strategies. One of the ways to boost the visibility of a new piece of content is through social sharing, by getting key influencers to share the content. Over the years, Google has increased the scope of information displayed on the search engine results page (SERP). Nowadays, the SERPs might include rich snippets, reviews, and video carousels, to name a few. Google has evolved from a search engine to an answer engine. To get the value out of your content marketing strategies, sign up for Google Analytics to measure your marketing KPIs. How do you measure the results of your content marketing efforts?
Content marketing is a very popular approach because it creates a game around your brand. The gaming industry put this concept on the map. When reaching high levels of success in a game, they find that the core game mechanics keep them engaged. Community content, fan fiction, and other media are created to help the game spread. The game has formed a community around the core product. Marketers use the principles of content marketing to embrace a similar ideal. If people feel inspired by a brand via the content, they are more likely to become a part of the community surrounding the brand. This community inspires customers.
3.1. Definition and Purpose of Content Marketing
Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing in which websites create and distribute valuable, relevant, and consistent content. The desired effect is to attract, retain, and motivate an audience with the purpose of increasing web traffic. This, in turn, drives customer action. Content can be words, pictures, videos, or other formats, which can educate and inform viewers, and consequently nurture potential customers, building stronger relationships with them. Content marketing serves as a front-end function to search engine optimization. Given that the ultimate goal is to drive organic traffic, marketers need to make sure that the content that a website produces is SEO optimized to achieve the best possible results.
Given what content marketing is, the main question is: how can marketers generate great content? There are four possible functions for the publication of content for organizations: – Message Distribution involves the creation of content to generate corporate visibility, facilitating product and service promotions. – Information Dissemination can involve the production of newsletters, user manuals, white papers, reports, and case studies. – Audience Development involves the training of potential customers through the provision of content that is relevant to the customer’s business, such as tutorials on how to use particular keywords. – Objective Educational can often be best facilitated with frequently updated content, allowing objectives to be achieved.
3.2. Key Components of Content Marketing
There are four key components to an effective B2B content marketing strategy:
1. Buyer personas. More than just picking the decision makers in targeted businesses, clear buyer personas define the wants, needs, and desires of your audience. Questions that personas should answer include: What value does this company seek? What are the customer’s primary concerns? A clear understanding of what matters the most to them makes it easier for a business to generate content that appeals to these preferences.
2. Editorial calendar. Consistency is a major part of what makes a content marketing strategy work. By creating an editorial calendar to show when particular pieces of content need to be published, a B2B company makes creating and publishing content at regular intervals a priority. As an extended benefit, companies will also work out dates when tailored content for specific audiences will land in their in their inboxes.
3. A team of dedicated B2B content creators will ensure not only that deadlines are met but also that content is posted as planned. Without this, the alternative is most likely disjointed content no-shows. And having dedicated people to not only write content but also share and syndicate it presents an opportunity to own the tone of their company.
4. Multiple channels for content distribution. Most content pieces created as part of a marketing strategy are wasted. Relying on only one marketing channel, such as just posting article links on a company blog or hosting webinars, only leaves a small chance of being seen.
5. Monitoring results. As various pieces of content are distributed through multiple channels, monitoring each result reveals the reach of the marketing campaigns. Not only can the business learn which types of content generate the most interest, but as they appeal to different audiences, companies can see which portions of the audience they have missed.
4. Synergy Between SEO and Content Marketing
SEO and content marketing intersect in the focus on consumer relationships, in the keyword function as the first building block of SEO, and the connecting link between SEO and content marketing. However, at its core, the domain of Search Engine Optimization is still centered on the consumer and how the business can reach him or her with the right search terms and thus connect the consumer to the business.
SEO encompasses a lot of different techniques like keyword analysis, link building, page optimization, etc. In earlier days, SEO was a separate discipline having its own management. This situation created so-called “SEO experts” who promised “outstanding results”. In fact, the power of SEO was overestimated and experts widely used stuffing and spam methods to achieve higher search engine rankings. It led to a situation in which these dishonest methods were incorporated into CMS systems, enhancing SEO achievements.
For search engines that crawl the vast metropolis of the web, links are the streets between pages. Using sophisticated link analysis, the engines can discover how pages are related to each other and in what ways. The search engines cannot read JavaScript links and have problems finding embedded links, which are not necessarily used as a navigation tool. Web building practices indicate that if you want a crawler to crawl a node, a link must point to that node. This is a classic directive not only for search engines but also for search bot crawler programs used by online catalogs. By making use of this observation, web designers can increase the visibility of a node.
At the aggregation level, expanding HTML components cannot be misjudged by search engines. Consequently, the HTML-associated page presentation demands technique to anticipate possible navigation paths as early as possible. The company’s content and structure fulfill characteristics that push it into the best positioned nodes of interest.
5. Measuring Success: Metrics and KPIs
In the good old days, SEO success was largely determined through direct metrics such as rankings, organic search traffic, and CPCs, excluding for the most part only the outliers from the success metric. SEO was simple. Unfortunately, success from content marketing is more complex and requires nuanced revisions to how we measure it in order to do so in a way that becomes valuable by getting to the heart of the activity. For that reason, successful content marketing requires different KPIs, as shown in Table 5.1.
The range and nature of KPIs used will be very important for every business. Is the business driving success through search, referral, or general brand marketing KPIs? Only context can tell you if your selected KPIs are significant or not, but there is a potential benefit in visitors from fresh sources or interaction or of different kinds from the target of the rest of the marketing activity. Whether this matters is unique to the business and to the specific situation, and there is no easy answer to that.
6. Case Studies and Examples
In the last part of this post, I’ve decided to round up some of the content marketing case studies and examples from around the web. I’ve handpicked a few quality ones and listed them by category. So, if you need some inspiration and ideas to write more effective content, the topics listed in each category will help you.
These case studies can provide you with a better understanding of how to attract a greater audience to your website with effective content that is properly optimized. Whether you’re a major corporation or a small business, we’re pretty sure that at least one of these would fall into your field or niche.
Case Studies
An educational and marketing company named Mashable managed to attract 15 million unique viewers. The content on Mashable offers news, information, and articles for any and all things related to the digital world and social media. The company is even being called “The site that doesn’t suck.” In 2008, they attracted 2.5 million page views in one week just by writing one article on Twitter. Since then, Mashable’s media content has become larger and broader, reaching a lot of followers who are interested in both digital media and social media as well. The most extraordinary feature of it is the number of comments and the search traffic it receives.
Ranked number 251 in the Fortune 500, Grupo Ferrovial is one of the leading infrastructure and services operators managing four business lines: environmental services, airports, toll roads, and the construction of major elements of infrastructure. The company also encompasses Amey, their support services business.
7. Challenges and Common Misconceptions
Hiring a professional writer to build your content marketing strategy will help get your message in front of people searching for what you offer. Although top ranking pages typically have more backlinks, link building is still only one of more than 200 signals that determine the ranking position. However, if you have a good content marketing strategy, you should get good, natural backlinks, possibly in a higher quantity and quality than from unnatural link building practices. The main appeal of link building seems to be in its ability to produce fast results. Small businesses often want fast results, and are more willing to spend money on an action that guarantees a visible result in a few weeks, rather than put some money in writing content that will take time to raise their resources.
Creating effective content marketing can be time-consuming. You’ll need to have high-level writers, which generally isn’t cheap. Good writers are hard to find and keep; they’re in demand. Most businesses create raw content themselves and depend on the raw output they create to form the basis for the message. However, the way a message is written has an effect on the extent to which it’s likely to achieve its initially desired goals. The thought process behind a message is just as important as the message itself. If facts can be elaborated or written in a more comprehensible manner, or if some facts are erroneous, the message won’t be as effective. There may be issues with raw content, and you won’t obtain any positive results, or initially intended results in any case. If there’s any focus on link building and website optimization, the emphasis appears to be shifted away from other, different practices that can be equally as effective for your business.
8. Future Trends and Innovations
Mobile and the cloud. 2013 saw the Pew Research Centre report that 55% of adult mobile phone users go online while on the go. This usually means they use smartphones and tablets as they are more convenient. This was supported by comScore who stated that 55% of time spent with online retail occurred on a mobile device. That is surfing, not buying goods.
Almost 90% of leisure time spent on dedicated media devices happens while using apps. As time spent has increased by 36%, internet consumption in 2014 has gone up significantly too. Smartphone apps have gone from 39% to 52% of the time with internet incorporated increasing to 26%. The mobile web has only increased to 8%. Smartphones and tablets require apps to work so internet usage has become more about the apps the device uses and as both apps and is on the cloud, the cloud is always there to use.
9. Conclusion
In conclusion, the role of content marketing and search engine optimization has evolved significantly since it was first conceived. It is true that each entity neither can nor should run independently from the other. SEO is less effective without the right type of content, and the effort of creating content is often wasted if it does not reach the intended audience. Businesses have realized this as well, even if they took a while to recognize the need for good content in favor of having a website that can be optimized for search engines.
Successful businesses are offering both a seamless user experience and killer content in order to get all the eyeballs they need. Astute marketers are creating a content strategy by providing rich content which is unique, infographics, videos, and blog posts, to improve product visibility and create rich user experiences. Videos and infographics are continually ranking high in spite of the fact that many proclaim that unique content is the king. These two are essential components for businesses in order to rank on the first page, although all the typical ranking factors such as links will still be ranking signals.
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