Not many people in the marketing world understand the importance of two vital, yet different digital marketing techniques: SEO and content marketing. 

People get confused because these techniques appear as separate entities in many articles and blogs. However, SEO and content marketing naturally complement each other. In any successful digital marketing campaign, SEO and content marketing encourage each other. 

To put things into perspective, let’s break each technique down.

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SEO

By now the definition of SEO should probably be embedded in your brain, however a quick recap: SEO involves increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic and leads a business gets through organic search results. 

Think about the businesses on the first page of Google, SEO got those businesses on the first page and let’s face it, no one moves past the first page. 

SEO has a few main components, predominantly:

• Keywords 
  • These are the keywords and phrases that are featured in your web content that allows people to find your website via Google. 

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• Pagespeed 
  • This term often gets confused with “site speed”. However, page speed can be described in either loading time (the time it takes for the content on the page to fully load), or first-byte time (the time it takes for the browser to receive the first byte of information)

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• Response design 
  • This means the website is able to adapt to whatever size screen it is being displayed on, be it mobile, tablet or desktop. 

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Content Marketing

Content marketing may be easy to some, however, it is a process involving planning, creating, sharing, and publishing content on your website to reach your desired audience. By using content marketing, it can boost brand awareness, increase sales and brand interactions. 

Similar to SEO, content marketing has many different forms including: 

• Websites 
• Blog posts 
• Social media posts 

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How do these two digital marketing strategies differ from each other?

It is pretty obvious to see the difference between SEO and Content Marketing. SEO is more technical and involves website design and  structure, whereas content marketing involves gaining more exposure online with the use of relevant content. 

SEO ensures that your website has the proper titles, URLs and descriptions, while simultaneously loading fast, has a responsive design, and many more. 

Content marketing allows marketers to decide on the kind of content they want to publish, how it is presented, and where it is promoted in order to appear in front of the desired target audience. 

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How to use these two digital marketing strategies together?

As previously mentioned, SEO and Content marketing are two vital techniques of digital marketing and by incorporating both these techniques ensures an overall successful digital marketing strategy. 

As with every Google algorithm update, the tech giant has started to favour good content marketing such as content of a certain length containing strong keywords. 

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Keywords

SEO is about finding relevant keywords and using them in content in order to rank higher in the SERPs. Creating content while being mindful of how a search engine works is vital for the success of SEO and content marketing working together. Breaking content into individual topic areas with a narrow focus allows the search engine to find the page or blog with specific keywords to be shown to the users. 

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High quality content 

Consistency is key which is why fresh and creative content consistently gets ranked higher than low-value and repetitive content. 

The aim of the content is to lure in clients in addition to solving a particular problem. Being able to write influential content which consists of important keywords is an important factor that Google determines the relevancy of a page thus being able to rank the piece of content. 

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Final thoughts

While many marketers believe these two digital marketing techniques are different, they are not disparate departments. However, both these techniques rely on each other. Content marketing is only successful if it has appropriate SEO and vice versa. 

If you have ever wondered about SEO and PPC, check out this article to find out more. 

Tags: content marketing, google, SEO