Every business that wants a fighting chance of survival needs a web presence, but simply being online is not enough if you want the Google gods to look favorably upon you.
You need a content strategy - and one that will effectively drive traffic to your website. To do this, you must apply both SEO and content marketing principles. But what is the difference between the two, and how do they work together to help your website achieve greatness?
SEO Explained
Search Engine Optimization, a.k.a. SEO, is a buzzword we’ve been hearing for years, but many of us still don't fully grasp its meaning or importance.
In short, SEO is the technical process of applying specific keywords, tags, links, and the optimization of other elements to improve your website rank on search engine results.
While much of an SEO strategy manifests itself through actual words on your web pages (i.e., content), some of it is also done on the back-end by enhancing metadata, optimizing URLs, and using tags effectively.
Content Marketing Explained
Content marketing, as we’ve previously defined, is a more holistic (and humanistic) approach to improving your website’s presence online.
Content marketing is not about keyword-stuffing or manic page-linking, it’s about truly solving problems, being helpful, and offering fresh content for users to engage with.
If and when that involves using keywords and links, all the better, but this practice is never approached in a robotic way.
SEO + Content Marketing = A Force to Be Reckoned With
To bring your website closer to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), you need to apply both SEO and content marketing tactics. One without the other is simply not enough. In fact, SEO alone has been described as analogous to a body without a soul.
When your content marketing strategy addresses both the human and technical elements of a web search, that’s when the magic happens.
Not only are you delivering insightful content (and doing so with regularity), you are creating more keyword tags and web pages to be indexed by search engines, who then reward you by bringing your site closer and closer to the top. There are a host of other benefits as well, which you can read about here.
If have questions about SEO, content marketing, or how to get started boosting your website’s presence online, get in touch with me for help.