The terms Content Marketing and SEO gets thrown around a lot in the online world, and a lot of people get confused by the two because they are unsure of watch each means.

If you have a website for your online business or brand, you definitely need to have a good understanding of SEO and content marketing in order to utilise them in your online strategy.

Let’s dive in and take a look.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a type of digital marketing that focuses on creating and publishing online content such as text (blog posts or articles), images, videos, infographics, to provide valuable information to an online audience. This in turn helps them solve a problem, learn something new or make a buying decision.

When you use content marketing in your online strategy, you create trust with your audience as they see you as an expert in your field. Your brand or business would benefit by getting more leads and sales as a result of this.

Content marketing is mostly an organic strategy as you can publish content on your own website as well as on YouTube and other platforms for free. You may however choose to use paid ads as a strategy to get your content scene by more people.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of making it easier for search engines such as Google to find and index the pages on your website. This is important as it is a way to bring in organic traffic to your website based on what people are searching for online.

There are many aspects to SEO which you would need to understand in order to carry out SEO on your website. Google is the dominant search engine and they have rules around how they index and rank websites. If you want to increase your website’s chances of your website showing up higher in Google’s search results, you have to identify the rules around this and apply them as much as possible to your website.

Website SEO has two main areas:

• Technical SEO – This refers to a number of things that need to be implemented on your website or settings that need to be configured in order to make it perform well for search search engines
• On-page SEO – This focuses on the content on the website pages and ensures that they are presented in a way that helps users get the results they need.

Is Content Marketing better than SEO?

One is not necessarily “better” than the other. In fact you need both to work together in order to operate an effective online marketing strategy.

You have to have good content published on your website in the first place for you to properly utilise SEO. On the other hand if you focus purely on technical SEO and neglect the content, you are unlikely to get found by the search engines.

If I had to pick one to focus on it would be content marketing. This is because even if your website is not not the best in terms of being technically optimised, if you have the best content that is being searched and can still show up in the search results.

Conclusion

Whether you decide to do SEO or Content Marketing, They are still connected and you will find yourself doing both to some extent. The key is to strike a healthy balance between the two, based on the situation and the type of results you are looking for.